Abstract
‘The last lap of the Suffrage struggle was rather too much for me. (...) Now the question is what the women will do with their vote’, Mary Ward wrote to her formerly anti-suffragist, by then staunch suffragist, friend Mrs Creighton a few months after the enfranchisement of women. In January 1918, Lord Curzon, both leader of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage (NLOWS) and of the House of Lords, had indeed failed to sway the votes of his fellow Peers in January 1918, much to Ward’s dismay. The weariness one notices in Mary Ward’s remarks must have been shared by many of her female associates in the anti-suffragist cause. In spite of their last-ditch attempts to call for a referendum on the question, female anti-suffragists had not only lost, but they could also feel betrayed by their leader and many of their male associates both in the Commons and the Lords. Ward’s words also suggest a readiness to look forward and to view enfranchisement with an attitude of ‘benevolent neutrality on the merits of the question’, as Ward’s daughter contends in the biography she dedicated to her mother.2
The title of the paper is a quotation from The Times obituary of a prominent Anti, Lady Wantage (The Times, 10 August 1920, p. 20).
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Notes
Mary Ward to Louise Creighton, 14 March 1918, quoted in Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, London: Constable, 1923, pp. 244–5.
Adrian Bingham shows that the anti-flapper-vote stance of the Daily Mail was unrepresentative of wider Conservative opinion. To judge from the attitude of other Conservative newspapers like the Daily Express, the enfranchisement of women over 21 was viewed with equanimity, while anti-feminist discourse became in fact more muted, including in the Mail, the hostility of which towards equalization had more to do with anti-socialism, as Bingham convincingly contends. Adrian Bingham, “‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly”: Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise 1927–28’, Twentieth Century British History, 13, 1 (2002), pp. 17–37.
David Low, ‘History repeats itself — with a difference’, Evening Standard, 29 March 1928, British Cartoon Archive reference number LSE 0376. The cartoon is accessible on the British Cartoon Archive website, http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/.
Julia Bush, WomenAgainst theVote:FemaleAnti-Suffragism inBritain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, London: Croom Helm, 1978.
The whole sample is accessible in .pdf format at the following address : http://cecille.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/auteur/philippe-vervaecke.
The Times, ‘Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Enthusiastic Meeting’, 22 July 1908, p. 14; ‘Women’s Anti-Suffrage League. Meeting at Queen’s Hall’, 27 March 1909, p. 10; ‘Anti Woman-Suffrage Appeal’, 21 July 1910; p. 9; ‘Anti-Suffrage Meeting. Speeches by Lord Curzon and Mr. Hobhouse’, 21 January 1913, p. 6.
Only five local activists (Bertha May Broadwood, Edith and Margaret Corry, Georgina King Lewis, Beatrice Jefferis, all active in the Croydon branch of the NLOWS) not present in London-based gatherings have been included in the sample. More research on anti-suffragist grass-roots would be welcome. I am indebted to Ruth Davison for having helped me identify these local activists of the NLOWS. See her doctoral thesis, ‘Citizens at Last: Women’s Political Culture and Civil Society, Croydon and East Surrey, 1914–39’, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2010.
Lady Louisa Knightley, The Queen; 29 August 1908, p. 383, quoted in Mitzi Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists: The Women’s Vote and the Tory Party, London/New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007, p. 95.
On the Primrose League and the suffrage controversy, see my chapter, ‘The Primrose League and Women’s Suffrage, 1883–1918’, in Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (ed.), Suffrage Outside Suffragism. Women’s Vote in Britain, 1890–1914, Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007, pp. 180–201.
On the emphasis placed upon citizenship in the women’s movement in the interwar years, see Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Citizens not Feminists: The Boundary Negotiated Between Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women’s Organisations in England, 1928–1939’, Women’s History Review, 9, 2 (2000), pp. 411–29; Helen McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, Historical Journal, 50, 4 (2007), pp. 891–912.
Violet Powell, Margaret Countess ofJersey. A Biography, London: Heinemann, 1978, p. 184.
On tensions between WUOs and male-dominated Conservative associations, see John Brennan, ‘The Conservative Party in the Constituencies, 1918–1939’, PhD, Oxford, 1994, pp. 85–95.
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© 2013 Philippe Vervaecke
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Vervaecke, P. (2013). ‘Doing Great Public Work Privately’: Female Antis in the Interwar Years. In: Gottlieb, J.V., Toye, R. (eds) The Aftermath of Suffrage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333001_7
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