Suffragette and Anti-Suffragette Posters

The Suffragettes were followers of an organization founded in the UK in 1903 by a Manchester widow, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia. They members were mostly middle class women determined to use radical measures if necessary to secure the right to vote, the "suffrage." They called it the Women's Social and Political Union, or WSPU for short. 

Women had been petitioning peacefully for voting rights for decades. John Stuart Mill had proposed a bill in Parliament to enfranchise women as early as 1867, but it and later attempts failed. The women of the WSPU decided that it was necessary to get militant. 

At first they resorted to mass demonstrations and heckling anti-suffrage politicians at meetings. They went on to chain themselves to the railings around Parliament. They employed vandalism, such as pouring jam and honey into mail boxes. 

Using hammers concealed in their handbags, they smashed the large display windows in the new department stores. They burned "Votes for Women" in acid on those bastions of male privilege, golf courses. More dangerously, they turned to arson, carefully directed at empty buildings. 

When jailed, they went on hunger strikes, a protest tactic they invented. Mahatma Gandhi, a young lawyer in England at the time, took notice. He later used the technique in his campaign to free India from British rule.  

The first suffragette poster here -- perhaps the most striking and famous of them -- refers to an act Parliament passed in 1913. It allowed the authorities to release jailed suffragettes who went on hunger strikes when they became dangerously thin, then rearrest them after they fattened up to complete their sentence. The Suffragettes dubbed it "The Cat and Mouse Act." 

The Liberal Party was in power in Britain when the act was passed, and the suffragettes of the WSPU (The UK Women's Social and Political Union) made the most of the law's conflict with proclaimed Liberal values of justice, freedom, and tolerance. 

The failure of the Cat and Mouse Act act made the concession of women's suffrage in the UK almost inevitable. The measure was postponed by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but women over 30 gained the vote in 1918. In 1928 the vote was extended equally to all women and all men over the age of 21. Only men who were heads of households had the vote before then. 

The poster "Convicts and Lunatics have no vote" emphasizes the fact that women, even the most well educated women, were classed with convicts and the mentally incompetent in being denied the right to vote for Parliament.

The next poster stresses the handicap women labored under in the race of life without access to the vote, represented by the sail on the man's boat. The houses of Parliament hover symbolically in the distance.

Prior to the Cat and Mouse Act, the authorities had dealt with hunger strikers by force feeding them. The Suffragettes and their supporters denounced the method as a form of torture. It was not only unpleasant but potentially dangerous if resisted. If food was forced into the lungs it could lead to pneumonia. The adverse publicity this strategy produced is what led the government to adopt the Cat and Mouse Act. 

In the same year, 1913, the Suffragettes got their first martyr. Emily Davison ran out in in front of the king's horse at the Derby. She died several days later. Prior to her martyrdom, she had been force fed 49 times in prison. Some of the women were force-fed hundreds of times.

The Suffragettes were active propagandists who spread their message through newsletters edited by one of the daughters of leader Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel. Below are posters advertising these works.

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The opponents of women suffrage countered with propaganda and posters of their own. They denounced the Suffragettes as unfeminine or "unwomanly." In the poster below "Clementine" is portrayed as a unlikeable, destructive little terror, a future Suffragette, putting trousers on.

Another anti-suffragette strategy was to portray the agitators as unattractive, man-hating, "old maids." 

"A Suffragette's Home" warns that politically involved women will neglect their "natural" domestic duties and imperil family life. The "breadwinner" and the children will be the ones to suffer. 

"Everybody Works but Mother" envisions a future role reversal in which women take over politics and deny men the right to vote.

"No Votes, Thank You" presents the "normal" and "natural" woman  as the majority of "womanhood" opposed to having the vote. Behind her a wild, mannish, hammer-wielding Suffragette runs at Parliament. The hammer is a reminder that some Suffragettes had used that tool to smash windows in posh West End shops.

"What I would do with the Suffragists" is a much less subtle approach to dealing with these "problem" women. 

Ending on a more positive note, we have a poster celebrating the coming of Woman Suffrage.

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The Peterloo Massacre, 1819: British Soldiers Attack Peaceful Protesters

On 16 August 1819, a huge crowd of men, women, and children, estimated at between 60,000 and 80,000, assembled at St. Peter’s Fields near the rapidly growing industrial city of Manchester.

According to historian Joyce Marlow, the meeting is believed to have been the largest to date in British history. The purpose was peaceful, to hear speakers promoting a much-needed reform of Parliamentary representation.

At the time, most men and all women were denied the right to vote or run for Parliament. The legislature and the government were controlled by a tiny fraction of the population, mostly aristocrats and their clients. Since the defeat of Napoleon, the masses had suffered from high unemployment. Food prices had skyrocketed, in part a result of the recently enacted Corn Laws. These acts placed high tariffs on imported grain, in a bid to keep domestic prices up. 

Radicals blamed the dire conditions in the country on a government that represented narrow landed (aristocratic) interests, hence their call for a reform that would make parliamentary representation more democratic. 

A pro-reform organization, the Manchester Patriotic Union, organized the mass demonstration at St. Peter’s Fields. For their headline speaker, they chose a popular radical, Henry Hunt. He had been an outspoken advocate of parliamentary reforms for years, but he favored tactics of mass persuasion rather than violence. His Tory enemies mocked his reputation as a speaker, calling him “Orator” Hunt.  The name stuck.

The clamour for reform, added to the unrest in the country, had long alarmed the authorities. They feared (or claimed to fear) that Britain was headed for a revolution similar to that in France in 1789. Hunt's popularity added to their concern.

On the day of the Manchester meeting, the local militia and regular soldiers were out in force. Hundreds of heavily armed cavalry and infantrymen surrounded the meeting place. Contemporary accounts claim that the crowd was well behaved, and included families dressed in their Sunday clothes.

As Hunt got up on the platform to speak, the crowd erupted with a huge roar of approval. The head of the local magistrates issued a warrant for Hunt’s arrest. 

The man charged with serving the warrant requested military assistance. The upshot was that cavalry charged into the crowd, wielding sabers to clear the way and disperse the crowd. As they became entangled among the mass, more cavalry rode into their rescue. Before the melee finished, they had killed about a dozen people and injured about 700. One of the dead was a two year old boy, Joseph Fildes.

The actions of the soldiers sparked immense outrage throughout the country, especially in the popular press. In pointed, shameful contrast to the victory at Waterloo, it soon became known as Massacre of Peterloo. Among other things, it led to the foundation of the radical Manchester Guardian and inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley to write his oft-quoted poem, The Masque of Anarchy.

Peterloo was the subject of many contemporary prints. The one below was published only a few days after the event and depicts the moment of Hunt's arrest. 

Perhaps the most famous image of Peterloo was that produced by George Cruikshank, who later illustrated some of Dickens' writings.

Peterloo did not have any immediate effect on reform. In fact, the terrified Tory government quickly passed a series of acts designed to repress the radical movement, the infamous Six Acts.

The acts were not rigorously enforced, however, and the reform movement continued to attract popular support in the wake of Peterloo. Fears of popular revolt grew again after another French Revolution deposed King Charles X in 1830, but on this occasion the British government conceded some of the popular demands. 

In 1832 a Whig dominated Parliament passed the Great Reform Act. Ironically, the ministry that drew it up it was the most aristocratic in British history. (The Prime Minister, Earl Grey, later had a bergamot flavored tea named after him.)

Far from democratic, the Great Reform Bill did extend representation to many new voters, mostly from the middle class. It also eliminated many corrupt electoral practices. It was followed by other reform bills in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that gradually extended political rights to all men and then women. In that sense, Peterloo was stage on Britain's evolution into a democracy.

Further reading: Joyce Marlow, The Peterloo Massacre, 1969.