Votes For Women: International Cooperation and Internal Conflict
Carrie Chapman Catt, Millicent Fawcett, and other Board Members of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Budapest, 1913. Credit: Library of Congress.
As we celebrate 100 years of national suffrage, it’s easy to underplay the complexities of how it was obtained.
In October 1909, Carrie Chapman Catt of New York wrote a desperate letter to Millicent Garrett Fawcett of London. Their plan to use only peaceful tactics for gaining women the right to vote in America was under threat.
Both Catt and Fawcett were suffragists, law-abiding citizens who held meetings and petitioned governments to establish voting rights for women. But trouble was brewing.
Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of the esteemed feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was headed in another direction. She had invited Emmeline Pankhurst, a radical British suffragette, to come to New York and speak to members of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Surely, Catt wrote, this meant the potential for violence.
“The coming of Mrs. Pankhurst has aroused a tremenduous [sic] discussion of the question of militant methods, and many prominent people have declined to sit upon the platform the night of her lecture, thus arousing not a little feeling. I declined to give a welcome speech, upon the ground that as International President, I must be non-partisan toward English methods.”
Catt pleaded with her colleague to sail to America as soon as possible, to help the movement return to legal and peaceful means of gaining the vote. That year alone there had been numerous reports from London of suffragettes breaking windows, accosting the prime minister, and trying to force their way into Parliament. Many had been arrested and some were on hunger strike, being force-fed in prison. This was militancy. Carrie Chapman Catt did not want that particular British import.
Catt's letter gives us clues about more than international collaboration in the suffrage movement, however. It tells us about intense divisions and conflicts within the suffrage movement. As we celebrate 100 years of national suffrage, it’s easy to underplay the complexities of how it was obtained. At a time when statues are torn down for the immorality of the men they represent, it is tempting to elevate the suffragists to sainthood, because their cause was so obviously just. We shouldn’t forget the internal conflicts of motive and method.
Which Women’s Rights?
Earning the right for women to vote in the United States and United Kingdom was a terrifically long haul. There are many reasons it took almost 80 years.
In the first place, "women’s issues" were not all focused on suffrage. For some, the paramount concern was the right to own property, or to get custody of children in a divorce, or to sign contracts.
And not all women even wanted the vote. As a recent New York Times article details, the positions of anti-suffrage groups in the U.S., many of whom believed that the vote would pull women away from more important societal obligations. That women would have to neglect family duties, engage in political arguments over politics at home (in front of the children), and take responsibility for new laws had been arguments against woman suffrage since the 1870s.
(Ironically, in rejecting a public role for women, anti-feminists were unable to stage effective resistance to change.)
There were also divisions about the scope of the movement. Some suffragists were nationalists in their mentality and in their focus. During the 1840s, massive political changes had taken place in Europe. Revolutions in Italy and Germany had united disparate territories into nation-states. In France during 1830 and 1848 the freedom and equality promised by the French Revolution fifty years before were fought over again. These freedoms had, back in the 18th century, included equal rights for women. But Robespierre, and then Napoleon, had found it necessary to suppress women's rights achieved earlier in the revolution. Women with political rights, they found, tended to exercise them.
As national unification was solidified throughout Europe over the next several decades, suffragists had to decide: was a national or an international model more appropriate?
Some feminists considered that taking part in their own country’s politics was most important. They wanted votes to determine the destiny of France, or Sweden, or the U.S. respectively.
Other feminists saw something different. Marxism had also been born in the 1840s, emphasizing the connections of workers across national lines. What if nationalist goals were actually at odds with female suffrage? Certainly national unification had done little to advance women’s rights. More far-sighted reformers realized what the communists already knew: Like workers of the world, suffragists had more in common with each other across national boundaries than within them.
Focusing on commonalities across borders was advantageous. Connections, approaches, and tactics could be shared. International Woman Suffrage Alliance members traveled for meetings in Washington, Copenhagen, London, and Stockholm. Their publication, Jus Suffragii, took reports from throughout Europe, and from India, Turkey, South Africa, Egypt, China, and Russia.
Then the First World War broke out. Suffrage movements diverged. The chasm between nationalist and internationalist suffragists became wider. Among the Pankhursts in England, it literally split the family apart. Those working within the framework of nationalism, including Emmeline and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst, supported the war. They wanted their country to win, and saw peace efforts as treasonous.
More internationally-minded activists, including Emmeline Pankhurst's other daughter Sylvia, favored peace. In April 1915 over 1,500 female peace delegates met at The Hague. They took extraordinary risks, traveling during wartime and including members from the “belligerent” states of Germany and Austria. In her report, delegate Emily Balch talked about the inevitable combination of peace work and suffrage. The Dutch delegation, for example, came to discuss peace but were against female suffrage. As talks went on, they came to realize that the vote was the only way to create change in their country, and started promoting suffrage.
Can violence ever be the answer?
It's also an uncomfortable fact that the great bonds between English and American feminists were born of jealousy and bitterness at the expanding male franchise. The voting franchise expanded in both countries at the end of the 19thcentury, while continuing to exclude women. In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832 had begun as a series of measures allowing more and more unpropertied men to vote, while ignoring the petitions for woman suffrage. In America, the 15thamendment that followed the Civil War gave adult male freed slaves the right to vote, but not women.
Both countries were adding more male voters at a fast clip. The enfranchisement of more men was seen as a distraction, or worse, to the arguments for female suffrage. If poor or uneducated men could vote for President or Parliament, they asked, why not educated women?
Galvanized by their competition with men, British and American suffragist movements agreed about the urgency of their goals.
Where they still differed was on tactics, the clear worry in Catt’s letter to Millicent Fawcett. Suffragists organized and spoke and obeyed the law, but suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst justified violence. It was the only way, Pankhurst said, that men’s rights had ever advanced. It could be no different for women. Extreme actions, like hunger strikes and bombings, were necessary.
The fight thus differed in Britain and America. As noted in this article by the League of Women Voters, in Britain peaceful suffrage activities were rarely covered in the government-sanctioned press. It was difficult to get attention. In America, the free press reported suffrage activity, and women had some property rights, so publicity stunts, such as suffrage baseball games, might be more effective than violence. Thus the suffragettes, who endangered themselves and others for the cause, were more common in England. Carrie Chapman Catt did not want that particular British import, what she called in her letter "English methods."
It was in England where Emily Davison was caught throwing stones at cabinet ministers (she would famously die being trampled by a horse protesting on the racetrack at Derby in the summer of 1913), England where American suffragette Alice Paul was leading groups disrupting public meetings, England where Mrs. Pankhurst herself had been arrested multiple times for participating in obstruction, assaulting police, and destruction of property. Millicent Fawcett had said publicly that such activities hurt the efforts for female suffrage.
Lauding Mrs. Pankhurst as a suffrage leader, Catt feared, sent the wrong message, and it was a symptom of what was going wrong in the American movement. She wrote to Fawcett that she imagined that
“New York is going through about the same symptoms which London must have experienced during the birth of the militant movement there. No one knows what will happen next. My own position is to make every effort to maintain union. I have always believed a movement on behalf of human rights could endure almost anything except division.”
Despite their differences, by the beginning of the 20th century, both British and American suffragists made the same shift in their activities. They took to the streets. In Britain, such visible actions could help bring down a government, and push change. In America, suffragists could reach people in person rather than just through the newspapers. Where before speeches had been made in meeting halls, now they were made in open squares and parks. The suffrage movement, even when non-violent, became impossible to ignore.
By persisting with political petitions and refusing to let the public forget about the movement, both countries would achieve milestones in female suffrage at almost the same time. The Representation of the People Act passed the British Parliament in 1918, allowing propertied women over 30 to vote (complete equal suffrage would take until 1928). The 19th amendment to the Constitution was ratified in the United States in June 1919. With the goal achieved, the divisions between moderates and extremists could be put aside.
Unfortunately for Carrie Chapman Catt, her colleague Millicent Fawcett was unable to come to America in response to her plea. Similar conflicts with local militant suffragettes kept Fawcett in England. In November, one suffragette would attack Winston Churchill with a whip, Pankhurst would blame students for causing a suffrage meeting riot in Bristol, and a Mrs. Chapin would pour liquid (incorrectly reported in the press as a corrosive acid) on a ballot box in Bermondsey. Harriot Stanton Blatch chose to sponsor Emmeline Pankhurst’s visit herself through the League for Self-Supporting Women. Hundreds would crowd Carnegie Hall to hear her speak.
“I know you have not all come here to-night because you are interested in suffrage. You have come to see what a militant suffragette looks like and to see what a Hooligan woman is like. . . . I am not going to tell you why we need the vote in England, but how we are going to get it.”
She noted the sacrifice of the suffragettes for all women:
“We are willing to be prisoners for life, to lose citizenship for life, if they will give the franchise to the peaceful women. They had better do it now, before worse things come. We have pleaded and got nothing. Now we are fighting, and we are going to win.”
The papers reported a generally polite crowd, but the speech is acknowledged to have caused a surge of militancy among American suffragists. Like their British counterparts, they climbed fences into private property or chained themselves to buildings. Alice Paul returned from England to form the National Woman’s Party, which in 1917 led the first march on Washington, picketing the White House and causing arrests. National Guard members from three states were needed to protect the marchers. Some credit the march and the vigil which followed with changing President Woodrow Wilson’s mind about suffrage.
2018 Statue of Millicent Fawcett in London’s Parliament Square. Photo Credit: Dee Gee
Travelers today may visit the new statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square in London, Catts’s childhood home in Iowa, the Feminist Library in London, and the National Women’s History Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. The streets of London, New York, and Boston are also the places where transatlantic suffrage was won, where women marched and bombed and protested. It’s important to walk them remembering that the vote, like any lasting political change, was not easily won.
Lisa M. Lane is a historian and community college professor specializing in English history. Her short story “The Online Death of Gerald Thorne” was recently published in Secret Attic, but she is best known for her work in distance education and her research on the young H.G. Wells. She blogs about history, online teaching, and fiction writing at lisahistory.net.