Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History
The suffragette militant campaign
Helen Crawfurd was a Scottish Suffragette whose name is not as well-known as it ought to be. Born in 1877 in Glasgow, Helen lived through one of the most turbulent times in world history and was right in the thick of much of it, from the struggle for women’s right to vote through two world wars which she vehemently disagreed with and the question of Home Rule for Ireland which provoked strong feelings and violent action on both sides. One of the main reasons that I feel a connection with Helen is because I was also born in Glasgow, though a few years later. One of the main reasons Helen’s name has been passed by in the social history of the suffragette movement is likely to be her unswerving adherence to and campaigning on a socialist and then communist ticket. Her unpublished memoirs are held by the Marxist Library in London, and even a cursory read shows that she was passionate about these beliefs.
The Suffragette campaign was a pretty brutal one, with women facing retaliation both by official and unofficial means. The writer Elspeth King (Hidden History of Glasgow’s Women, 1993) calls it a civil war, with reactions ‘comparable to a repressive regime towards a minority’.
In the two years of full militant action, 1912 – 1914, there were many activities by women, some of these saw men reacting forcefully. Other events happened where no-one was ever prosecuted or indeed discovered.
Window smashing is one action which the suffragettes are fairly well known for, this action began in 1912 and saw many arrests as a result, including Helen Crawfurd who records her time in jail with a note of pride. She writes that it was the experiences of the suffragettes imprisoned which resulted in many of the later prison reforms. There were seven Glaswegian women who were jailed at the same time as Helen, for window smashing: Helen herself, Janet Barrowman, Margaret McPhun, Mrs AA Wilson, Frances McPhun, Nancy A. John, and Annie Swan. The actions escalated, so that in the end, window smashing seemed fairly innocuous.
Another of the actions taken by suffragette was to put acid, and sometimes kerosene, in pillar boxes. One woman, Jessie Stephen, who was the organiser of the Domestic Workers Union of Glasgow, spoke about her involvement in an interview in 1975. She describes how her working clothing helped her disguise her actions, saying that no one suspected her because she was wearing her cap, muslin apron and black frock. Records show that in the year of targeting post boxes, over 4,000 letters were damaged and 114 destroyed. Three postmen were injured as they emptied a vandalised pillar box.
Ethel Moorhead was one prolific offender, and often used a false name. As ‘Miss Morrison’ she and Dr Dorothea Chalmers Smith were arrested and charged with setting fire to an empty property in the West End of Glasgow in July 1913. They were caught red-handed by multiple witnesses and neither woman denied the charge, their sentence was eight months, as the judge pronounced this, several women in the court started a chant of “Pitt Street, Pitt Street”. Just two weeks before there had been a raid on a house of ill repute in Pitt Street, the raid had caught a number of prominent Glasgow leaders and in order to hush this up, the owners of the house had been sentenced to two weeks. Helen Crawfurd records this with disgust at the disparity between the sentences, not least because she felt that the arson had been a crime against property, whereas the brothel had involved crimes against human lives. Dr Chalmers Smith and ‘Miss Morrison’ both went on hunger strike and were released under the Cat and Mouse Act of 1913, Dorothea Chalmers Smith was placed under house arrest. Helen Crawfurd takes great pleasure in recording that she managed to escape by dressing in her younger sister’s school uniform, and walking out of her house right past the guard at the door!
In December 1913, the suffragette’s held a protest at Glasgow University as politician and Reverand Augustine Birrell was invested as the Rector at the university. The protest itself was relatively peaceful, though there were reports of women heckling his speech (a tactic used to great effect by many suffragette activists) and being forcibly ejected. However, in response to this, around 200 of the students who had been present (all male at the time, no women were allowed to study at the university) went on the rampage, completely destroying the shop owned by the Women’s Social and Political Union in Sauchiehall Street. No arrests were made, despite the damage being extensive and there being reports of the students out on the street waving broken bits of furniture and throwing literature like confetti. It made the news in Dundee, right over on the east coast!
There were various unoccupied properties targeted for fire setting, sometimes more successful than others. One of the more notable was the burning of ship-builder Alexander Stephen’s mansion in Wemyss Bay. The house was described as a ‘fine Gothic style mansion, with tall chimneys, turrets and extensive landscaping’. The blaze could be seen along the length of the Firth of Clyde, no-one was ever arrested for it, and it was only 65 years later that journalist Julia Davidson said that she knew the woman who had done it.
There is no question that the Suffragette campaign was violent and headline catching. The press stoked high emotions and provoked much disgust around the women whose request to be given the vote seems to us, one hundred years later, a reasonable one. It is worth noting that there were pro-suffrage campaigns all over the world, but it seems that the militancy was strongest in the UK. Wikipedia gives us the following detail:
“There was an average of 21 bombing and arson incidents per month in 1913, and 15 per month in 1914, with there being an arson or bombing attack in every month between February 1913 and August 1914….. there was a total of at least 337 arson and bombing attacks between 1913 and 1914, but states that the true number could be well over 500. By the end of the campaign, more than 1,300 people had been arrested and imprisoned for suffragette violence across the United Kingdom.”
The quote “Well behaved women seldom make history”, often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt among others, actually comes from Laura Thatcher Ulrich, an American author who herself is seldom remembered. The story of the campaign for equal voting rights for women seems to be epitomised by this quote – and so it continues.