Organizing for Citizenship and Democracy

Is there more to be said about the militant women’s suffrage movement in Britain? Some readers might feel dubious. After all, there has recently been a slew of Pankhurst biographies – notably Martin Pugh’s The Pankhursts (2001), plus two in 2002 both entitled Emmeline Pankhurst, one by June Purvis and the other by Paula Bartley.¹ Delving a generation further back, Antonia Raeburn’s Militant Suffragettes (1973) included interviews with many surviving elderly suffragettes shortly before they died, while Andrew Rosen’s Rise Up, Women! (1974) offered useful tabulations including age of women on arrest (so often under thirty) and arson targets (date, location, object, estimated value). Meanwhile, Virago Press republished Sylvia Pankhurst’s 1931 The Suffragette Movement (1977), upon which the BBC had drawn heavily for its television drama series, Shoulder to Shoulder (1974).² Alongside ran more articles on militancy than you could shake a stick at – including most recently a heated debate on ‘The Suffragettes: Heroes or Terrorists?’ (2007).³

HWJ readers restive at the prospect of yet further accounts might prick up their ears at the track record of the two authors reviewed here, experienced suffrage historians both. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, an American academic, is already familiar to UK suffrage historians, initially through her influential article on ‘Creating the “Suffragette Spirit” ’ (1995), which examined how from the 1920s onwards the Suffragette Fellowship’s ‘inclusion in the community of militant suffragettes rested upon the defining act of imprisonment’ and slanted the suffrage narrative by privileging one ‘sequence of events . . . arrest and incarceration’.⁴ More recently Mayhall discussed how, for the generation of women coming to political consciousness during the Boer War, two competing understandings of women’s citizenship emerged: one a gendered model of service, the other insisting on the imperative that every democratic government obtain the consent of the governed.⁵ Likewise, Krista Cowman is well known to suffrage historians, not only through her ‘Mrs Brown is a Man and a Brother!’ history of women in Merseyside political organizations (2004), but also through her more recent suffrage articles.⁶

So: two notable suffrage scholars with strong research records. And since both books focus on the militant suffrage movement in Britain they inevitably cover some common ground. Yet the feel of the two books is noticeably distinct and the conclusions often divergent.

Mayhall, building upon her earlier citizenship themes, takes a broader chronological frame: seventy years (1860–1930) as opposed to Cowman’s fourteen (1904–18). And Mayhall’s organizational focus includes not just the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU, formed 1903), but also the dissident Women’s Freedom League (WFL, formed as a breakaway from the WSPU in 1907, mainly over internal democracy); and it also includes some reference to constitutional suffragist campaigns, notably the large National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS, formed 1897, led by Mrs Fawcett). Cowman’s focus, on the other hand, is narrower: one group of women (paid organizers) in one society (WSPU). So, from the outset the purposes and scope of the two books differ, as do the disciplinary bases from which each author writes.

Mayhall, a historian fascinated by broad political cultural traditions, sets out to ‘reintegrate women’s suffrage into broader treatments of British political culture’, by looking at political links between citizenship and resistance, notably ‘radicalism’s vocabulary of protest and its emphasis on British liberty, the rule of law, and notions of fair play’.⁷ For instance, chapter four explores ‘Resistance on Trial, 1906–12’ from the crucial Chorlton v. Lings (1868) judicial decision to exclude women from parliamentary elections, to the deft challenge to gender as the grounds for constitutional incapacity brought by Scottish Women Graduates in 1906, and on to the suffragettes’ broader and more...