Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ to voice his opinion that granting the vote to women would be a ‘political mistake of a very disastrous kind’. He simply didn’t understand why women would want to vote. After all, neither his wife nor his daughter did. He believed militancy – which he experienced personally when militants tried to tear off his clothes on the golf links at Lossiemouth in Scotland – was off-putting to the public and would kill popular support for the cause.

      After the 1912 Reform Bill failed to give women the vote, Fawcett allied herself with the Labour Party, who agreed to vote against any future franchise bill that did not include women. The Pankhursts’ response was to go into furious overdrive – more window-smashing, more imprisonment, more force-feeding. Tiring of the melée, Christabel bailed out and moved to Paris, leaving Annie Kenney in charge. ‘Where is Christabel?’ asked the headlines. In fact, she had booked herself into a hotel under the name ‘Amy Richards’ and for a while continued to exert control remotely, for example issuing the order for the MP Lewis Harcourt’s house to be burned down. In practice, though, this was the beginning of her detachment from British politics. With Christabel out of the picture, Sylvia Pankhurst set up her own socialist-inclined suffrage campaign in the East End.

      In January 1913 it looked as if women might win the vote at last, as the Franchise Bill was debated. But at the last minute the Speaker – Sir James Lowther, himself opposed to female suffrage – declared that any adoption of an amendment would so alter the bill that it would no longer be the same measure, so it would have to be cancelled and reintroduced in new form. The suffragettes took their anger out on Lloyd George, sending him sulphuric acid in the post and trying to burn down his country house.

      The most notorious event in suffragette history was to follow: Emily Davison was trampled by the King’s horse at the Derby on 4 June 1913 and died four days later. The thinking now is that she was trying to attach a scarf to its bridle, not throw herself under it. Then again, as a devoutly Christian radical, she had on previous occasions been willing to damage her body for the cause. Over the course of seven hunger strikes, she was force-fed forty-nine times. At one stage her cell was deliberately flooded with ice-cold water.

      On YouTube you can watch flickering footage of her funeral procession: a solemn, stately affair, though judging by the number of caps and straw boaters – removed out of respect as the cortège goes past – the crowds lining the streets contained far more men than we might expect.

      But of course, many men supported female suffrage, not just as theorists (John Stuart Mill) and proud domestic cheerleaders (Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s blind husband, Henry) but as activists too. Frederick Pethick-Lawrence was imprisoned and force-fed alongside his wife, Emmeline, while George Lansbury MP, having resigned his seat to fight a by-election on the female suffrage issue, also found himself in a cell for defending the suffragettes’ arson campaign in a speech at a WSPU rally.

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      It’s somehow fitting that the best photos of the suffragettes were taken by a resourceful, enterprising woman. Christina Broom was a self-taught photographer who emerged as one of the key image-makers of the early twentieth century and is now celebrated as the first female press photographer. With her daughter Winnie helping, she would carry her heavy glass-plate camera onto the streets and photograph what she found – straightforward views of Tower Bridge or Oxford Street; royal events and sporting tournaments; Lyons tea boys brewing up at Victoria Station; the 1905 Earl’s Court Exhibition, with its makeshift Red Indian village – turning the resulting images into postcards which she, her disabled husband and Winnie printed up at home in Fulham and sold in their thousands. She also submitted her photographs to agencies for publication in newspapers and magazines.

      Broom’s photos of the WSPU on parade take you beyond the Pankhurst family psychodrama, beyond the arid accounts of who did what to whom, and show you these extraordinary figures as they flit across the drab Edwardian landscape like exotic birds. Some of her finest ‘suffragette’ photos were taken on 23 July 1910 at a Hyde Park rally to celebrate the Conciliation Bill being debated, where over 150 campaigners were due to give speeches. Walking at the head of the ‘Prisoners’ Pageant’ are three formerly imprisoned suffragettes: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst and, wearing her academic robes and looking stern, Emily Davison.

      Christina stopped photographing the women’s suffrage movement in the summer of 1913. The following year, her health failing and increasingly confined to a wheelchair, she found a new subject: the military, especially soldiers before they left London for the Western Front.

      Her photos of young men relaxing and on parade at their barracks are exceptionally moving – we know, as they do not, what fate has in store for them. But other more random pictures tell another parallel story. Among her First World War photos is a portrait taken in May 1916 that shows the direction of travel for women – a group of women police officers at a Women’s War Work exhibition in Knightsbridge. In their long black skirts, barely mustering a smile, they look austere and forbidding. At the centre, holding her gloves, staring down the camera as if she is about to arrest it, is a former suffragette called Mary Allen, now a police inspector …

      An ambiguous, disturbing figure, Allen is the shape of things to come; a tidy emblem of the confusion many felt and would continue to feel as the twentieth century unwound; an example of what happens when a damaged personality grows convinced that the only meaningful solutions are extreme ones. But that is all in the future. For now, let us read the image as a celebration of female strength, solidarity and progress – a glorious summation of over thirty years of vigorous campaigning.

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       Of Soldiers and Suffrage

      1914–18

      The First World War might have been a ‘total war’ – a conflict in which opposing sides are ready to sacrifice anything and everyone to achieve victory – but in Britain this didn’t extend to women being allowed to fight.

      Not that this stopped them from trying.

      In 1915, eighteen-year-old Dorothy Lawrence fulfilled her ambition to see action on the Western Front by selecting the only option open to her – pretending to be a man. Frustrated by the refusal of any Fleet Street editors to employ her as a war correspondent, Lawrence travelled to Paris where two English soldiers she met in a café helped her by smuggling out items of uniform with their washing.

      ‘I’ll see what an ordinary English girl, without credentials or money can accomplish,’ she wrote several years later in a memoir, Sapper Dorothy Lawrence.1 After darkening her skin with furniture polish, bulking out her shoulders with sacking and – a surreal touch, this – making tiny slashes in her cheeks with a razor to create the illusion of a shaving rash, Lawrence headed for the front with faked papers identifying her as Denis Smith, 1st Battalion Leicestershire Regiment.

      The plan worked well, at first. Lawrence took a train to Amiens, then cycled to the small town of Albert, the Allies’ centre of operations. There she befriended a soldier, a former coalminer called Tom Dunn, who risked court martial by smuggling her into the trenches.

      ‘Now I see thoroughly the sort of girl yer are, I’ll help yer,’ Lawrence has Dunn say in her book. ‘Yer no bad ’un. You’re a lady.’2 Lawrence would claim to have worked alongside Dunn laying mines in no-man’s-land some four hundred yards from the German trenches, though the extent of her involvement has been disputed – it was, after all, highly skilled work for which she had not been trained. More probably she СКАЧАТЬ