The Women's Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1866-1928 by Ryland Wallace

Author:Ryland Wallace [Wallace, Ryland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Political Science, History & Theory, Civil Rights, Political Process, Campaigns & Elections
ISBN: 9781786833297
Google: Mh9mDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2018-05-15T04:13:34+00:00

VI

THE IMPACT OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

‘Armageddon in Europe!’ excitedly wrote the young Vera Brittain in her diary entry for Monday, 3 August 1914. ‘On Saturday evening Germany declared war upon Russia & also started advancing towards the French frontier . . . The great fear now is that our bungling Government will declare England’s neutrality.’1 She worried unduly, for Britain entered the conflict the very next day, following the German invasion of Belgium.

The reaction of many suffragists, both militant and constitutional, was instinctive and predictable: war was a calamity, the inevitable result of a man-made world founded on physical force. ‘Would that we had won our scrap of paper [the ballot] before the War’, bemoaned the Forward Cymric Suffrage Union (FCSU) leader, Edith Mansell Moullin.2 WSPU representatives around the country elaborated on this theme. Thus, the south Wales organizer, Annie Williams, told Pontypool branch members that

The war ought never to have been . . . If five years ago the men had enfranchised the women and given them a share in the government of the country it is possible that there would have been no war to-day . . . emancipating woman would have resulted in the attainment of a higher state of civilisation.3

On 10 August, the home secretary, Reginald McKenna, announced the unconditional release of all suffragette prisoners (as well as those gaoled for offences connected with labour unrest). Three days later, in a circular letter to her members, Mrs Pankhurst declared the suspension of all agitation.4 In early September, Christabel Pankhurst returned from her exile in Paris to signal the Women’s Social and Political Union’s (WSPU) fervent anti-German campaign and the subordination of women’s interests to war propaganda. Not all activists were prepared to accept the jingoistic line of Mrs Pankhurst and her eldest daughter, but a number of prominent figures certainly did, most notably ‘General’ Flora Drummond and Annie Kenney. With remarkable swiftness, suffragette leaders were transformed from public enemies to fierce nationalists. As the Conservative Party leader and three times prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, recalled years later when unveiling a statue to Mrs Pankhurst at Victoria Tower Gardens in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament: ‘The World War came. In the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the trumpet, the revolutionary died, and the patriot was born, and the militant suffragettes laid aside their banners.’5 Patriotism was all, women’s suffrage was sidelined. The WSPU, in the words of Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘now entirely departed from the Suffrage movement. Giving its energies wholly to the prosecution of the War, it rushed to a furious extreme, its Chauvinism unexampled amongst all other women’s societies.’6 In October 1915, The Suffragette became Britannia and, in November 1917, the WSPU was rechristened the Women’s Party.

The unwavering path chosen by the WSPU leadership during the war was emphatically not that trodden by all suffrage activists, even within the WSPU itself. Wartime responses were complex but broadly fell into three categories: those who supported the war effort through voluntary welfare

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