On This Day: the working-class origins of suffragette militancy

Suffragette militancy was said to have begun in Manchester on 13 October 1905. On that day two campaigners - the law student Christabel Pankhurst and the mill worker Annie Kenney - went to a large Liberal Party rally held to galvanise support for the party widely anticipated to form the next government. The rally was in the great Free Trade Hall, on the site of the Peterloo Massacre where Christabel's own great-grandfather had demonstrated for democratic rights in 1819.

Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst with their banner. Sylvia Pankhurst remembered painting hundreds of these banners during Christmas 1905.

After the Liberal Party speaker Sir Edward Grey proclaimed himself one of the 'new men with fresh minds', Annie Kenney raised her hand and asked if a Liberal government would support votes for women. Asked to write her question down, it was promptly ignored by the platform. But the two women refused to be ignored; they stood on their chairs, shouted their question, unveiled a home-made 'Votes for Women' banner, and tried to fight off the stewards who rushed to eject them and the audience members who attacked them. Forcibly ejected from the hall, Christabel committed a 'technical assault' by spitting at the policeman, and, when they tried to hold a meeting on the pavement outside the two women were arrested.

In court, they were offered the option of a fine but chose instead to serve a term of imprisonment. A new, dramatic and combative campaign had been launched.  

Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at the welcome breakfast upon their release from prison, 1905.

13 October 1905 is one of the most famous dates in suffragette history and the suffragettes themselves regarded the day as hugely important. On tour in America in 1911, Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel's younger sister, vividly described to audiences the details of that day. The two women, standing on their chairs to ask the politicians on the platform if they would support votes for women, were attacked by the stewards; fending them off Christabel's hand 'was torn so and the blood ran down from it on Annie Kenney's white hat and we found it quite stained the next morning.' (New York Times, 7 January 1911, p.3) 

Sylvia told the story in Los Angeles but there a reporter had evidently taken rather inaccurate notes. There the press reported a rather sensational version in which the women were sat in the House of Lords only to be beaten up by the peers.

As the suffragette campaign became both more tactically militant and socially elitist over time, the first militant act came to symbolise a new path of individual self-sacrifice undertaken by a 'classless' organisation.  But the background to this action instead reveals the radical origins of suffragette militancy in collective working-class street movements. This tradition, forgotten in many suffrage histories, was the one that continued to inspire Sylvia Pankhurst's vision of the struggle for democracy.

By 1905 it was becoming clear that the ruling Tory Party (or Unionists as they were more regularly known at the time) were in trouble. The party of imperialism had been woefully exposed in the Boer War - abroad, the war in which the government arrogantly anticipated a swift victory, dragged on for nearly 3 years; at home, around 40% of recruits were judged unfit to fight. The party was also bitterly divided internally over economic policy, the dominant supporters of protectionism alienated those who favoured free trade - among them Winston Churchill who 'crossed the floor' to join the Liberals in 1904. 

With the Tories so weak, it was an opportune moment to try to force progressive change. As an art student in London, the young Sylvia Pankhurst was swept up in one of the most pressing issues of the day: unemployment. 

The cause was championed by the Labour MP Keir Hardie. Inside Parliament he fought for the Unemployed Bill. But he also joined the marches of the unemployed from impoverished East London to Parliament. 

Keir Hardie speaking at Trafalgar Square.

Whether or not Sylvia was in a relationship with Hardie at this point, they worked closely together on the campaign. Hardie planned to placard Westminster in the support of the Unemployed Bill and asked Sylvia to design the poster. The poster she designed showed working people on the march, the front two figures were, significantly, a man and woman side by side holding together the pole of a banner reading "Workless and Hungry Vote For the Bill".

Sylvia Pankhurst was a political artist. Here she is painting for a huge WSPU event.

Unemployment was a key issue for the original members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) - the first 'suffragette' organisation. Formed in 1903 in Manchester by Sylvia's mother Emmeline Pankhurst, this organisation emerged from the growing contemporary socialist movement. The Pankhurst family were all involved in the Independent Labour Party and they sought to attract other socialist women like themselves as well as women trade unionists (in Lancashire particularly concentrated in the cotton mills) like Annie Kenney to campaign for women's suffrage. 

Ten days before she was arrested for the first time, the Manchester Guardian published a letter by Annie Kenney on the question of unemployment. Describing herself as a member of the 'Oldham Social and Political Union', Kenney argued for the Unemployed Bill and for women's representation on relief committees on the basis that working women also experienced unemployment - something she knew first-hand:

'There are women among the unemployed as well as men. I have been one of the army willing to work, but owing to our competitive system there was no work to be got. I have stood with about forty other women at the door of a mill for an hour or more waiting for work. Fancy - forty women to one job.' (Manchester Guardian, 3 October 1905, p.5)

It was not only the cause of the unemployed, but the tactics of that movement, that helped to inspire the early WSPU. In the summer of 1905, when the Unemployed Bill was being sabotaged in Parliament, unemployment campaigners in the Pankhursts' home city, Manchester, held a public meeting in front of the town hall and then got arrested after blocking Market Street. The press was aflame, Keir Hardie raised the issue in Parliament - and the Unemployed Bill was passed.

This provided an important lesson for the newly-formed WSPU about the power of direct action and civil disobedience. When the Liberals announced their rally in the Free Trade Hall a few months later, they seized their chance to make votes for women an election issue. 

The first militant act on 13 October 1905 was not conceived as an individualistic action. After the Free Trade Hall rally, the WSPU sent numbers of other members to Liberal rallies around the country to publicly demand answers from leading politicians. Sylvia Pankhurst remembered that her Christmas holiday was dominated by making the banners - 

'Votes for Women had to be written out hundreds of times on white calico in order that several examples might be held up at each meeting. They would certainly be snatched away as soon as they were displayed. As a matter of course, the job was mine - a tedious business, in which I continued early and late, with scarcely a pause, throughout the festive days!' (E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, [London: Virago, 1977], p.193).

But the choice of the first two women had been carefully thought through. When Annie Kenney had been asked to write her question to send to the speakers on the platform she put under her name 'member of the Oldham Committee of the Card and Blowing Room Operatives' and added that she was 'one of the 96,000 organised women cotton workers, and for their sake, she earnestly desired an answer.' (E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette [New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1911], p.27). 

Annie Kenney in the clogs and shawl worn by Lancashire mill workers.

Annie Kenney had been chosen, therefore, because she represented more than just herself - she was asking the question as a representative of thousands of working-class women. To underline the point, the question she wrote on the paper was 'Will the Liberal Government give votes to working women?' (my emphasis). 

The unemployment agitation would continue to influence the early suffragette movement, especially the London campaign which was first organised by Sylvia Pankhurst. She would later recall that her inspiration had been the street-based politics of the unemployment movement: 'It was easy for me to decide that we should follow all the other popular movements by holding a meeting in Trafalgar Square, and a procession of the East London women in the unemployment movement at the opening of Parliament.' (E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p.197).

The first London branch of the WSPU was based in East London and the group's original name had been the Unemployed Women of South West Ham. 

When Sylvia Pankhurst broke with the increasingly elitist and individualistic WSPU leadership in 1914, she was, once again, organising a militant, street-based campaign amongst working-class women in East London. In doing so, she harked back to the militant suffragettes' radical origins.