Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather by Tessa Boase

Author:Tessa Boase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2018-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

30

The Antis

1908

What woman of genius will be our leader?’ asked the journalist Miss Frances Low.

A woman was wanted who would lead the fight against women’s suffrage. A strong and articulate, organised and efficient woman – but not so strong or articulate, organised or efficient that she thought she should have the vote. ‘There are thousands of good, quiet women who feel as I do,’ continued Frances Low in February’s Spectator, 1908, ‘but who are inarticulate.’ If the momentum of last year’s petition was to be sustained, an anti-suffrage organisation needed to be formed. But who would grasp the nettle?

You might think that this would be a toxic invitation, something so counter-zeitgeist that no woman would be willing to touch it. And if you read the suffragists’ literature – both the contemporary magazines such as Votes for Women and the rose-tinted histories produced after the First World War – you’d be forgiven for thinking that their movement was inexorable, irrepressible and irresistible. But in truth, it had minority appeal. The vast majority of British women had no interest in politics, the franchise and Westminster. Their interest lay firmly at home. And those women who resisted the vote (the anti-suffragists or ‘Antis’, as they became known) were, on the whole, intelligent, resourceful – and feminist. Strange as that sounds to us today, it was not an incompatible position.

When I started researching Margaretta Lemon, I’d assumed that she would be in favour of women’s suffrage. Of course she would. This ‘redoubtable’ personality, a woman not afraid to swim against the current, renowned for her public speaking and ‘masculine’ dominance of the field – how could she not get behind the ultimate battle for equality? But then I discovered an urgent clarion call in the Surrey Mirror.

27 June 1908

Sir – May I be allowed to make known through the columns of your newspaper that I am prepared to furnish information concerning the National Anti-Women’s Suffrage Association to any one desirous of combatting the Women’s Suffrage movement. I have joined the Central Organising Committee of this Association, and shall be glad if ‘anti-suffrages’ women in the neighbourhood who wish to add the weight of their opinion to the protest against the demand for the extension of the Parliamentary franchise to women will communicate with me.

Reluctant as one is to turn aside from the legitimate and useful work of all kinds that is needing the energy, time, and thought of women, it is now becoming absolutely necessary for all women who are of opinion that to extend the franchise to their sex will work irrevocable mischief to human progress, to the British Empire, and to women themselves, to voice that opinion, and to clearly and definitely state the reasons upon which the opinion is based. – Yours, etc., MARGARETTA L. LEMON (Mrs F. E. Lemon). Hillcrest, Redhill Common.

The language is pure Lemon – the same withering and indignant tone that she uses against the plumage trade, or when attacking ‘feather-bedecked’ women and those slippery shop girls.

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