Suffragettes and the North West, talk by Anne Crilly
Date: 30 April 2024
Venue: Tower Museum, Union Hall Place, Derry, Derry, BT48 6LU
Anne will explore the links with the Suffragette movement and the North West region including the links to the shirt factories.
Access: free event but booking via [email protected] or 028 7137 2411
Background: Who were the Suffragettes?
By the mid-nineteenth century, feminists had started to protest the exclusion of women from the current voting laws. This was part of the wider women’s movement, which featured numerous campaigns for changes in the law to give women equal rights. As a result, by the turn of the twentieth century, women could own property, vote in local elections, and attend university—all things they had not been able to do fifty years earlier. But they still could not vote in parliamentary elections.
In 1897, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was founded, led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. In the years leading up to the First World War, the NUWSS campaigned for women to be given the right to vote through peaceful, legal means, for example organising petitions and leading marches across the country to raise awareness of their cause. It became the largest women’s suffrage organisation, with around 100,000 members nationwide by 1914.
Mrs Fawcett’s insistence that the NUWSS was for ‘law-abiding’ suffragists grew as a result of the actions of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel in 1903. The WSPU became increasingly militant in its tactics as the decade progressed. While at first, they simply interrupted political meetings, heckling politicians to support women’s enfranchisement, by the 1910s they became famous for chaining themselves to railings, smashing windows and setting fire to letterboxes.
The Pankhursts were always insistent that the ‘suffragettes’, would never endanger life through their actions. But their treatment at the hands of the authorities was harsh. Imprisoned for their actions, many went on hunger strike demanding to be classified as political prisoners, so they were brutally force-fed. And, in 1913, WSPU member Emily Wilding Davison died after being trampled by the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Her actions are still not fully understood today, but historians believe that she was attempting to pin a rosette in the suffragette colours—purple, white and green—on the horse.
Although various Reform Acts had increased the male electorate, Britain still had a property-based voting system and only those who owned or rented property above a certain value could vote. No agreement could be reached, and there was something of a stalemate among suffrage campaigners when the First World War broke out in 1914. War highlighted that many men who were serving in the forces, fighting and possibly dying for their country, still did not have the right to vote.
After intense parliamentary negotiations, a compromise was reached. Men would be allowed to vote at 21 (reduced to 19 if they had served in the forces, although conscientious objectors could not vote for ten years). Women, meanwhile, would have to wait until they were 30, and even then meet a property qualification. About eight million women were able to vote when the Representation of the People Act passed on 6 February 1918, about seven million women remained voteless. They would have to wait until 1928, when women were allowed to vote on equal terms with men.
The links to the city?
Since its opening in 1888 St Columb's Hall has played a major role in the lives of over three generations of the people of this city. It was the venue of choice for some of the world's most iconic performers and notaries over the last 130 years, including Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx who spoke at the Hall in 1889 to recruit the local workers to join their local union and Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst who campaigned for women's right to vote in a keynote speech at St Columb's Hall in October 1910.
Friday October 7th 1910, The Derry Journal printed a sizeable article (from ‘Dublin Independent’) on ‘Mrs Pankhurst’s Chosen Mission’.
Margaret Cousins organised Emmeline’s visit, who with Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, founded the Irish Women’s Franchise League on November 11th 1908. The aim of the Irish Women’s Franchise League was to obtain the parliamentary vote for the women of Ireland on the same terms as men then had it, or as it might be given to them.
It’s policy was to educate by all forms of propaganda the men, women and children of Ireland to understand and support the members of the League in their demands for votes for women, and to obtain pledges from every Irish Member of Parliament to vote for Women Suffrage Bills introduced in the British House of Parliament, and to include Woman Suffrage in any Irish Home Rule Bill.