The English Working-Woman and the Franchise

A NEGLECTED feature of England’s spectacular suffrage movement, of interest from the point of view of industrial as well as social progress, is the campaign conducted by the working-women of the northern textile districts. Differentiated alike from the militant band of “ Suffragettes ” and the conservative “ National Union of Suffrage Societies,” they have formed an independent organization representing the Manchester and Salford Trades and Labor Council, the Lancashire and Cheshire Women’s Textile and Other Workers’ Representation Committee, and the Lancashire and Cheshire Society for Women’s Suffrage, — together representing thousands of organized and unorganized working-women.

The importance of their movement does not lie alone in the new strength that has been brought to the cause, but in the larger significance of its bearing upon the industrial position of women. We have here the “ woman in industry ” emerging into extra-industrial activities as a surer means to her own uplifting. It is the working-woman’s conscious attempt to improve her own condition through her own efforts, and shows a clear understanding of the exact difficulties of her situation, a grasp of the means of solving them, and a power of initiative in her own behalf which holds a new promise for the future.

These women of the north of England long ago worked out the difficult problem of industrial organization. The history of the great trade unions of the cotton district has been a standing answer to the charge that working-women cannot organize or maintain an organization on business principles. It is not strange, therefore, that they should have the foresight to perceive the growing closeness of the relation between the industrial and political worlds; nor that they should be broad-minded enough to see that there are factors that will go further than tradeunionism to give them a more equal footing in the industrial struggle. These skilled women-workers of England are not only industrially competent but politically sagacious. This is shown, for example, in an extract from their appeal to the industrially incompetent and more helpless working-women of the southern districts : —

“ In the old days men suffered as women do now, but since they got political power they have altered all that; they have been able to enforce a much fairer rate of wages. It is the women who are sweated . . . we who have no labor representation to protect us . . . without political power in England, it is impossible to get industrial justice or a fair return for your labor. . . . The cheap labor of women is not a local difficulty that can be remedied by local means; it is a national difficulty, and nothing less than a national reform, giving women the protection of political power, can make any really effective change in their position. So we are agitating for votes for women, and we appeal to you to join our ranks.”

The history of their earnest and dignified campaign gives further evidence of their business ability and their organizing power. In December, 1905, they began what was then the highly original policy of trying to elect women’s suffrage candidates to Parliament. Labor representation had been successful for labor interests, and it was logical to argue that the women’s claims would be properly considered only when they too had representatives of their own. Accordingly, at the General Election, they announced their intention of contesting the Borough of Wigan, an important industrial centre near Manchester, and of appealing directly to the working-men in behalf of the enfranchisement of working-women. They met many difficulties, — even their friends in Wigan told them that they could not hope to poll a hundred votes, — but they were accustomed to difficulties.

They succeeded in raising the money (and it was no small sum) for the necessary expenses of a parliamentary campaign; they succeeded in finding a man of courage and ability who was willing to stand as a “ women’s candidate.” They were obliged, being of no party, to prepare their own leaflets and posters, and because of their poverty, they were compelled to hold all of their meetings out of doors. But nothing discouraged them, and they worked with the enthusiasm that goes hand in hand with faith in a great cause. They went straight to the working-man. They went to the mills, the iron-works, the collieries. They held meetings at the dinner-hour, and in the evenings at street-corners all over town. They made but one appeal, “ the political freedom of the poorest of the workers,” and to that appeal the working-man could not refuse to listen. It was a new campaign — not in behalf of a party, but of an idea — of a great hope born of a great need. The result of the campaign was a poll of 2205 votes for the women’s candidate out of a total of 7605. They lost the election only by the appearance at the last moment of a third candidate who stood in the interests of denominational education. But the result was a moral victory, and in their report they said they “ were touched and delighted at the hearty sympathy and understanding and good fellowship that they met with. They appealed to the poor to stand together and to fight for the political power and industrial freedom of their fellow workers, and they received that generous help that the poor never refuse to real enthusiasm and sincerity.”

But the activity of the working-women’s committee did not end with the defeat at Wigan, They knew that they had seen only the beginning of a long struggle, in which they must appeal to the working-women of the south to join them, and to the working-men of the south to support them. A long series of meetings has been held in London. In May, in October, and again in February of the past year, great demonstrations were organized in Trafalgar Square, where thousands of men and women from Whitechapel, Poplar, Bethnal Green, and other poor districts of London, listened to the message that had been sent to them from nearly three hundred thousand workingwomen in Lancashire and Cheshire. It has been very interesting, this preaching of the gospel of women’s freedom to the unskilled workers of East London by the skilled workers of the industrial north — distinguished so easily by their accent, their manner, their dress, but more perhaps by their earnestness, — alike, however, in that they have the same need and the same hope.

Their printed address was a very simple one. “ Fellow workers,” it began, “ we think it is time that the women joined together to help one another and themselves. We are all workers. We come from weaving-mills, spinning-mills, iron foundries, linotype works. There are amongst us winders, gassers, doublers, reelers, shirtmakers, tailoresses, cigarmakers, clay-pipe finishers, chainmakers, pit-brow workers. We are all Lancashire and Cheshire women; our trades are different, but we have learned this fact, that our interests are the same. Now we ask you to join with us, that we may all work together to better our position.”

Meetings were held, too, in other parts of London, — in Hyde Park and in Battersea Park, in Whitechapel and in Bermondsey, at Pimlico Pier and at Woolwich Arsenal, at Hammersmith, Clapham, and Canningtown, as well as at many other places in England and Scotland. In addition to holding meetings, they have organized petitions and deputations, and done effective work in the bye-elections. “ If the Government will not listen to the appeal of the workingwomen,” they say, “ the women must make their appeal to the sense of justice in the nation itself.”

An interesting point with regard to these working-women and their campaign is their relation to the other two organizations that have been active in the suffrage movement. For, to the surprise of some observers, it is the old and conservative National Union of Suffrage Societies, rather than the radical band of “ Suffragettes,” with whom they have worked in closest sympathy. Although individual factory girls have from time to time gone to prison with the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the great body of working-women follow their leaders in preferring the more decorous methods of the older society. Perhaps it is because they have learned through inherited experience that it is patient striving rather than open defiance in the face of an injustice that profits them more. But it is also because the woman from the Lancashire mills cannot understand that going to prison is one way of serving the cause, — for prison to her does not mean martyrdom, but disgrace. There is, too, the further reason that she is likely to care very much for appearances. She judges, as she is so often judged, by the “ outward sign ; ” and it is she much more than her upper or middle-class sister who insists that “ ladies should always be real ladies! ”

So far as the progress of the suffrage movement is concerned, this campaign of the Lancashire and Cheshire Committees has brought a remarkable accession of strength. It is not to the point to say to these women who have been obliged to work since the day they were fourteen, that women’s proper place is at home, or to talk to them about losing their womanliness, or forfeiting the protection and chivalry of men. If the influence of the mills where they are sent to work, where their mothers, their grandmothers, and their great-grandmothers were sent to work before them, has not made them unwomanly, they will not be risking much when they become subject also to the influences of the polls.

Again, their position is peculiarly strong because their need for the franchise is so pressing. It is not alone a matter of abstract justice in their case, nor a longing for the larger privileges of citizenship which shall make them alike self-respecting and respected. With them the question becomes a part of their own hard problem of existence. While they have no votes, their demands are given scant consideration at the hands of their employers. They look therefore to the franchise as one immediate and practicable measure which will tend to establish greater equality between their earnings and those of the men with whom they work. For the voteless working-woman’s position, as one of their Textile Tracts points out, is a forlorn and difficult one. “ She has no social or political influence to back her. Her Trade Union stands or falls by its power of negotiating; it cannot hope to have the weight with employers that the men’s unions have, for instead of being a strong association of voters . . . it is merely a band of workers carrying on an almost hopeless struggle to improve conditions of work and wages. . . . A vote in itself is a small thing, but the aggregate vote of a great union is a very different matter.”

The position of these women is unique too, in that they are obliged to pay out of their own hard earnings for labor representation in the House; for trade-union women as well as trade-union men are assessed for the salaries of labor members, — indeed the larger proportion of the members of the great textile union paying the parliamentary levy are women. But they still remain unrepresented, for they have no voice either in choosing the candidates or in dictating their policy. There is a special injustice in this, because the Labor M. P. devotes himself particularly to industrial legislation, which is often of supreme importance to these women, dealing frequently with the conditions of their own and their children’s work.

It is unquestionably true that one of the greatest obstacles in the woman’s path of industrial progress has been her own apathy. She is reproached by the men in her trade for her lack of interest in trade-unionism; she is reproached by the philanthropist for her lack of ambition — her seeming willingness to remain unskilled and underpaid. But in this new movement for the franchise, we have the women who are already in the ranks of the skilled workers, and who have long since proved their capacity for organization taking another great step forward. They have at last learned that their industrial regeneration can come only through their own efforts and the importance of this new spirit of independence, this enlarging of the working-woman’s sphere of activity to demand a “ voice in the laws that regulate her toil,” would be difficult to overestimate.

One feels more strongly perhaps the magnificent promise of this movement when one has seen in the great textile districts of England the long processions of women with their shawls pinned tightly about their heads, passing to or from the mills in the early morning and the late twilight. These shawled women have for generations been passing everywhere in the Lancashire district; for generations they have inherited the burdens of life with few of its opportunities. As they have worked patiently there for more than a hundred years, so they are still working patiently, but they are awake as they have never been before to the injustice of their position; and this movement for the franchise is symptomatic of a new solidarity among them which has grown out of a new consciousness of their own needs, and which brings with it a new sense of their own power. When one knows something of the history of these “ women in industry,” of their share in the development of the textile industries, their generations of work under the discipline of Lancashire cold and fog, the slow but steady growth of their great trade unions, one can understand the earnestness, the moderation, and intelligence that they have shown in this campaign. And almost inevitably one believes that, when this political justice has been meted out to them, industrial justice must be swift to follow.