As the women’s suffrage movement in Britain entered its fifth decade, ongoing discussions about tactical efficacy gained momentum. During the final ten years of their protracted campaigns, suffrage organizations significantly altered and augmented their existing efforts, resulting in the advent of several notable acts of protest which have shaped the legacy and memory of the movement. To cite just a few examples, in 1908, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) engaged in window-breaking for the first time; in July 1909, Marion Wallace Dunlop became the first imprisoned suffragette to undertake a hunger strike; in October 1909, the Women’s Tax Resistance League was formed; in April 1911, many women conducted a census boycott and, in June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison disrupted the Epsom Derby, resulting in her death.¹ As part of this wider context of rapidly expanding and evolving political practices, a passionate minority of women’s suffrage campaigners looked to a set of tactics during these years which have, by contrast, almost entirely avoided both scholarly and popular attention. These tactics were sex, marriage and birth strikes.² As the campaign for women’s enfranchisement continued, particularly radical members of the WSPU and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) asked whether they could win political rights by leveraging men’s desires that women perform sexual acts, domestic chores and, most significantly, maternal duties.

This chapter identifies three instances in which these tactics were explored extensively: a pair of books written by WSPU member Lucy Re-Bartlett in 1911 and 1912 respectively; a letter published in The Freewoman journal by WSPU supporter Coralie Boord in January 1912; and the WFL’s annual conference of March 1914.³ Combinations of sex-striking, marriage-striking and birth-striking were discussed interchangeably on all three occasions. This chapter disentangles the three kinds of strikes being considered, analyses how suffrage campaigners thought these varying tactics might prove effective, why they might have been favoured in place of more traditional acts of protest and which interpretations suffrage activists placed on winning citizenship on these terms.⁴

The flurry of proposed birth strikes, as distinct from sex or marriage strikes, among socialist-feminist campaigners in continental Europe in the years leading up to, and during, the First World War provides important context here.⁵ Birth-strike debates enjoyed a particular moment of engagement in Germany in this period which exceeded the levels of public discussion these tactics received within the British suffrage movement. The socialist German doctor Alfred Bernstein wrote a pamphlet on birth-striking in 1913 which sold over 30,000 copies in less than a year.⁶ In the pamphlet, Bernstein suggested that working-class women ‘organize a birth strike’ in ‘demand’ of their ‘human rights’.⁷ He believed that women could leverage power by refusing to supply the German Empire with workers or cannon fodder.⁸ Although still not widely studied, the debates between Bernstein and his contemporaries have received historiographical attention which equivalent discussions held by British suffrage campaigners have not.⁹ While less prominent, the British debates require discrete analysis as they were distinct from the broader European birth-strike movement in two key ways. First, the German debates largely isolated the tactic of birth-striking, whereas the British debates closely entangled birth-striking with the related tactics of sex- and marriage-striking. British suffrage campaigners considered whether to support a birth strike via contraception, which was predicted to prove the most popular (therefore posing the biggest threat to the economy and national security), or advocate politicized celibacy, which was expected to induce more suffering in individual men. Second, in the German context, birth-striking was favoured in place of more established socialist protest methods because it was envisaged as a peaceful, ‘bloodless’ tactic which could be performed by ‘quiet, decent’ women, exhibiting ‘passivity’.¹⁰ By contrast, in the British context, sex-, marriage- and birth-striking were explicitly conceptualized as a form of militancy.

As far as surviving sources indicate, none of these strikes was enacted on a mass scale in either country, partially explaining why they have escaped extensive academic analysis in Anglophone scholarship. However, the discourse around these potential tactics is revealing in terms of furthering our understanding of how the issues of sexuality and motherhood were expressed within the militant suffrage movement in Britain. As pioneering scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminists articulated women’s enfranchisement as a means of ending the sexual double standard and its many manifestations such as legalized rape in marriage, expectations of unlimited maternity and prostitution.¹¹ In a trend this chapter bucks, previous historians have prioritized the writings of suffrage campaigners who predicted that political representation would need to precipitate cultural sexual equality. The most striking example of this approach was posited by Susan Kingsley Kent. She claimed that suffrage activists believed that ‘a sexual identity that rendered women sexual objects could be altered only by a political identity that gave them citizenship’, deeming ‘civic equality’ the ‘requisite precondition’ to dismantling sexual double standards.¹² Sandra Holton concurred that from the 1890s onwards, suffrage campaigners increasingly saw the vote as ‘the key’ for ushering in political and sexual liberation via ‘a single measure’.¹³ Outlining the arguments from Christabel Pankhurst’s famous treatise on sexuality, The Great Scourge and How to End It, Margaret Jackson similarly emphasized the significance that Pankhurst accorded enfranchisement in her campaign to end prostitution.¹⁴ In The Great Scourge, Pankhurst expressed her famous mantra ‘Votes for Women, Chastity for Men’, which bears some resemblance to the suggestions made by the women explored in this paper. What set Pankhurst apart from the sex-, marriage- and birth-strike advocates, however, was her implication that ‘Votes for Women, Chastity for Men’ was a two-part process in which enfranchisement legislation would have to precede attempts to bring about widespread male chastity.¹⁵

In two key ways, sex-, marriage- and birth-strike debates allow us to build on this historiography by demonstrating the range of perspectives that existed among suffrage campaigners on the relationship between the vote and sexual double standards. First, rather than subscribing to the idea that enfranchisement was an essential precondition to widespread sexual and marital liberation, strike advocates asserted that women, inversely, already had some (militant) power in the private realm that could be exploited to win the vote.¹⁶ Key figures in this chapter focused on the means of striking as much as the ends of enfranchisement. They theorized that enduring the sacrifice of sex-, marriage- and, in particular, birth-strikes would strengthen women spiritually and psychologically, thus also rendering them more capable of fighting for additional social and cultural reforms once enfranchised.¹⁷ Second, the strike advocates gendered these proposed protests in surprising ways. While the most famous examples of suffrage militancy subverted gender norms by challenging women’s exclusions from public spaces, sex-, marriage- and birth-strike advocates contrastingly claimed that women could demonstrate traditionally masculine attributes of strength, force and even violence in the ways they negotiated their roles within the home.¹⁸

These proposed strikes highlight less prominent suffrage campaigners as tactical pioneers and indicate new ways of thinking about how and why women wanted to achieve political rights. Holton described her history of lesser-known suffragists as ‘a shake of the kaleidoscope’ causing ‘different aspects of the historical pattern’ to ‘move to the fore’, and an analysis of sex, marriage and birth strikes performs this same function.¹⁹ This chapter first introduces sex-, marriage- and birth-striking as three distinct yet connected tactics; second, it explores how these strikes were intended to demonstrate a gendering of militancy; finally, it examines the effects undergoing a sex, marriage or birth strike were believed to have on suffrage campaigners themselves.

The three tactics: sex-, marriage- and birth-striking

Surviving records indicated that sex-, marriage- and birth-strike propositions within the British suffrage movement were pioneered by the campaign’s foot-soldiers between the years 1910 and 1914.²⁰ There were different opinions on how the distinctive elements of these strikes should be prioritized. Some suffrage campaigners focused their discussions on depriving the nation of children, potentially by any means necessary (birth-striking); others advocated that a refusal to have children be achieved via abstention from sexual relations specifically, rather than through the adoption of contraceptive practices (sex-striking); and still others suggested that women abstain from sex, motherhood and any other domestic duties by rejecting the entire institution of marriage (marriage-striking). As a refusal to have sex necessarily resulted in a refusal to bear children, and as a refusal to marry often (although, of course, not always) involved the rejection of sex and motherhood, these strikes were, to a significant extent, discussed interchangeably. Reflecting a common feminist view, the strike advocates implied that marriage and motherhood, in their current forms, were part of one coherent system that accorded men liberties denied to women.²¹ Unlike the most dominant feminist discourse, however, sex-, marriage- and birth-strike propositions were predicated on a belief that women could exploit men’s reliance on this system to engender female enfranchisement.

In her 1911 book The Coming Order, WSPU member Lucy Re-Bartlett began formulating her ideas on using celibacy to bring about political equality.²² Although she never held a leadership position within the British suffrage movement, Re-Bartlett enjoyed an illustrious international career as a writer and philosopher.²³ Born in Scotland, then moving to Italy after graduating from university, Re-Bartlett was the first woman to serve on the Italian Royal Commission, influencing policy on juvenile offenders.²⁴ She married Emilio Re in Rome in 1910, demonstrating her feminist credentials by adopting a double-barrelled surname.²⁵ Re-Bartlett also represented the Theosophical Society at a sex education conference in 1908 and travelled to India to study theosophy with renowned English feminist Annie Besant.²⁶ Re-Bartlett’s subscription to this belief system influenced her interest in sex-, marriage- and birth-striking as a spiritually and politically transformative process.²⁷ Laying the foundations for her later more detailed meditation on sex-striking, Re-Bartlett suggested in The Coming Order that women cultivate ‘purity’ from ‘sensuality’ and ‘vanity’, predicting that ‘in this spirit the woman of to-day will gain her Vote’.²⁸ She substantially expanded upon these ideas in her 1912 sequel, Sex and Sanctity, which was translated into French and Italian.²⁹ Re-Bartlett maintained that women were boycotting marriage and motherhood in response to their lack of political rights, the sexual exploitation of women and children and the majority of men’s indifference regarding these issues: ‘In the hearts of many women to-day is a rising cry, somewhat like this … “I will know no man, and bear no child, until this apathy be broken through – these wrongs be righted!” … It is the “silent strike” and it is going on all over the world.’³⁰

The same year as Sex and Sanctity was published, ‘housewife’ and suffrage supporter Coralie Boord attempted to influence the uptake of sex-, marriage- and birth-striking within the WSPU.³¹ Although very little information about Boord has survived, we know that she was a regular contributor to the feminist periodical The Freewoman, a donor to the WSPU and that she claimed to ‘slightly know’ leading WSPU member Annie Kenney.³² She was 39 in 1912, managing an upper-middle-class household as the wife of the younger brother of a baronet, and was the mother of their three small children.³³ In her letters to The Freewoman in 1911 and 1912, she depicted a complicated but largely positive relationship with her domestic life and demonstrated a penchant for sexual humour.³⁴ In one notable example, arguing against claims that the paper had generated entirely new opportunities for sexual exploration, Boord joked of the ‘sex-love’ she had ‘wrung from life, in spite of obstacles (and, craving your pardon, before the advent of THE FREEWOMAN!)’.³⁵ She added ‘I think very highly of THE FREEWOMAN, but my sense of proportion (i.e., humour) forbids my admitting that the first opportunity for men and women in the whole wide world to study these questions properly and openly arose about three months ago!’³⁶

In January 1912, Boord wrote a letter to The Freewoman on sex-, marriage- and birth-striking. She was responding to an article by the Neo-Malthusian Charles Vickery Drysdale, on ‘The Freewoman and the Birth rate’, in which he had proposed a birth strike in aid of women’s enfranchisement.³⁷ This article had been commissioned by the journal’s editor, ‘disillusioned’ suffragette Dora Marsden.³⁸ Boord announced that she had made a similar but more elaborate suggestion than Drysdale’s to the leading militant suffrage organization.

These tactics were, of course, not adopted as WSPU policy. As Boord wrote indignantly, her ‘money was gratefully acknowledged’ and yet her ‘suggestion was not even referred to’ and the existing tactic of ‘window-breaking methods began again’.⁴⁰

Calls for birth strikes and, to a lesser extent, sex and marriage strikes were taken more seriously within the WFL. At its 1914 annual conference, Nina Boyle, the head of the organization’s Political and Militant Department, proposed that:

WFL delegate Margaret Huntsman, described as being actively involved with the organization to a ‘Herculean’ degree, claimed that her unnamed local WFL branch had ‘at least twenty’ members ‘ready’ to start disseminating birth control information with the purpose of encouraging a politicized birth strike.⁴² The motion was met with some fatigue by less enthusiastic attendees. One member commented that propositions to encourage women to limit the birth rate were an annual occurrence at WFL meetings. The WFL’s representative for Hampstead complained that such proposals happened even more frequently than this, stating ‘this is hardly annual. It is always coming up, and it has always been rejected.’⁴³ An article in The Malthusian reports that Charles Vickery Drysdale had given a talk to the WFL on birth-striking in aid of enfranchisement just a few weeks before this conference.⁴⁴ Although the birth-strike motion was, once again, rebuffed after a vote at the 1914 annual conference, the Hampstead delegate’s comment is an indicator that birth-strike discussions happened more frequently among British suffrage supporters than is recognized within surviving sources.

One significant motivation for advocating a combination of sex, marriage and birth strikes was to render calls to politicize the domestic sphere accessible to women with different martial statuses. Lucy Re-Bartlett claimed that her ‘silent strike’, which involved a refusal to ‘know’ men or ‘bear’ children, was being enacted by ‘women both married and single’.⁴⁵ Although she did not elaborate further, with this description she was presumably suggesting that single women reject marriage and married women attempt to boycott the marital bed or even home. Coralie Boord explicitly distinguished between married and unmarried women, advocating that ‘feminists who were engaged to be married’ should ‘refuse to marry’, while married feminists should ‘refuse to “live with”’ or ‘bear children’ for their husbands.⁴⁶ The idea that these tactics might be more widely accessible than established political practices, or appeal to previously alienated women, seems to have been part of the strikes’ general appeal. Re-Bartlett repeatedly claimed that sex-, marriage- and birth-striking was taking place ‘all over the world’, including among women in countries without an organized suffrage movement.⁴⁷ Huntsman, from the WFL, was similarly interested in the strikes as a form of protest which could be organized with ‘ease’, predicting that, once initiated, a birth strike would ‘spread itself’.⁴⁸

Re-Bartlett, Boord and the WFL representatives did not, however, consider sex-, marriage- and birth-striking a homogeneous strategy; they ascribed varying value to the three different incarnations of these tactics. In Britain, as in Europe, interest in birth-striking was often predicated on perceived government fears around the economic and military consequences of depleted populations.⁴⁹ This was especially the case among the WFL members and Coralie Boord, which can partly be explained by them both responding to influences from Drysdale, the well-known Neo-Malthusian, who was himself informed about the German birth-strike movement.⁵⁰ Huntsman implied interest in the large-scale military and economic implications of birth-striking when she claimed, ‘the real force here rests with women; if you refuse to have children, the country is powerless’.⁵¹ Boord similarly devoted more attention to restricting the birth rate than to the implications of other forms of domestic striking. While still heavily championing the tactic, she anticipated that refusing to have children could, in fact, prove too effective. Boord posited that an unintended consequence of the birth strike could be that it delivered women’s enfranchisement only for the nation to be ‘swallowed by a bigger, coarser, less civilized Power, as France will probably be swallowed by Germany’.⁵²

Other campaigners evaluated the different types of strike through a moral or religious lens and birth-striking fared less well on these terms. At the 1914 conference, the delegates of the WFL expanded their birth-strike discussion, debating whether a limited birth rate should be achieved via contraception or via abstinence and, therefore, a sex strike.⁵³ At least three members articulated an objection to birth-striking via contraception due to concerns about the moral implications of these practices.⁵⁴ WFL National Executive member Alice Schofield Coates advocated a sex strike based on her objection to sanctioning ‘unlimited sexual license’.⁵⁵ She concluded that ‘the only right way to’ restrict the birth rate ‘is to limit all sexual relations with men’.⁵⁶ The group’s president, Charlotte Despard, was also among those worried about the effects of promoting contraception. Despard proposed that suffrage supporters ‘stop marriages as much as possible … Get women to give us a pledge that they will not marry’ until ‘the rights of citizenship are conceded to us’.⁵⁷ As a Catholic-turned-theosophist, it is highly likely that Despard held a theological objection to contraception and envisaged sex and marriage strikes as both a vehicle to enfranchisement and a means of ushering in her desired reformed sexual moral codes.⁵⁸

A final consideration which suffrage campaigners used to compare sex-, marriage- and birth-striking was individual women’s likely preferences and capacity for agency. When considering this theme, the strike advocates upheld the premise that the domestic realm was a sphere in which women possessed at least some existing power. Re-Bartlett suggested that abstention from the legal marriage contract was the optimum form of strike because it placed women in the best bargaining position. She claimed that ‘the girl still free’ had more power over potential suitors than a wife had over her husband, as the wife would have ‘forfeited her title in a certain way’.⁵⁹ Schofield Coates, although a champion of the sex strike, expressed apprehension that celibacy would prove less popular with most women than the uptake of birth control. However, she did not elaborate on whether she thought women’s reluctance to commit to abstinence would be due to simple preference or more substantial barriers.⁶⁰ Despard was relatively forthcoming when she assessed women’s agency to carry out the different types of strike. Citing the fear that using birth control to achieve the strike would make it harder for women to find ‘excuses’ for avoiding unwanted sexual activity with their husbands, Despard worried that birth-striking left women more vulnerable to abuse than marriage-striking, which she saw as a viable option.⁶¹ Despard warned her comrades, ‘we must not use a threat which we are not able to carry out’.⁶² As Despard’s concerns remind us, not all women had the agency to enact each form of strike. Many would not have had the economic independence needed to reject marriage and no Edwardian women had the legal right to refuse sexual relations once married.⁶³ These hurdles generally form a surprising and conspicuous absence in these sources. An unnamed WFL representative for Middlesbrough came closest to raising issues of inhibited agency when she demanded that the group put ‘all questions of mock modesty on one side’ so they could discuss the fact that ‘there are two persons to be consulted and who have to agree in this matter’.⁶⁴ The other WFL members did not, however, choose to extensively discuss the Middlesbrough representative’s concerns.

Even if the strikes were always an elusive dream in practice, the process of imagining sex, marriage and birth strikes as a source of untapped power seems to have inspired WFL members, who turned to the theme repeatedly during the final decade of the suffrage campaign.⁶⁵ Re-Bartlett perhaps obfuscated themes of women’s legal and economic barriers due to her belief that sex and marriage strikes were already in existence. The word ‘silent’ in Re-Bartlett’s phrase the ‘silent strike’ referred to her conviction that many of the increasing numbers of unmarried or childless women in Edwardian England were choosing to distance themselves from men as part of a feminist impetus, even if they were not fully conscious of these motives themselves.⁶⁶ Re-Bartlett seems to have seen herself less as prescribing a new tactic, and more as giving a name to an existing power which women were yet to fully realize they possessed.

Striking, militancy and gender

Part of the imagined power behind sex, marriage and birth strikes lay in their being perceived as militant tactics. Acts of suffrage militancy were often intended to blur gender distinctions and Re-Bartlett, Boord and members of the WFL’s 1914 conference rhetorically engaged in this endeavour. The most extensively studied form of gendering suffrage militancy involved suffragettes embodying masculinity by carrying out protests in the public sphere traditionally enacted by men, such as marching on Parliament or newspaper-selling. Suffragettes would simultaneously feminize these acts by performing them to a moderated degree or by wearing overtly feminine dress.⁶⁷ For example, in her 1914 memoir, Emmeline Pankhurst drew parallels between the WSPU and disenfranchised nineteenth-century farm labourers, implying that suffragettes carried out similar tactics to these previous generations of (predominantly male) rights campaigners with relatively less violence or more patience.⁶⁸ She intended these analogies to uphold a claim that women were deserving of citizenship. Suffragettes were carrying out protests which had previously resulted in men being rewarded with extended voting rights and were doing so with relative political maturity.⁶⁹ Sex, marriage and birth strikes reveal a corresponding, and previously overlooked, attempt to equip traditionally feminine spaces with ‘masculine’ force, power and even violence. By contrast, these proposed strikes were intended to demonstrate that women had means of cultivating power which had not previously been employed by male activists.

The sex-, marriage- and birth-strike advocates described their proposed tactics as a form of suffrage militancy and, in the case of Boord and Huntsman, explicitly attributed this militancy to their conviction that these practices had been freshly devised by women and would take place within a private setting. Conceiving of these strikes as militant adds to the arguments of historians of suffrage militancy, most notably Sandra Holton, Laura Mayhall and Krista Cowman, who have encouraged consideration of militant suffragism as an evolving and complex continuum of approaches to politics rather than as a discrete set of tactics.⁷⁰ Invoking militant language, Boord referred to sex, marriage and birth strikes as ‘women’s weapons’.⁷¹ She suggested that the militant potential of the strikes arose from them taking place within a traditionally feminine sphere. Boord ascribed power to sex, marriage and birth strikes precisely because they would implicate ‘quiet home lives’, a space which was not usually politicized.⁷² When prescribing these strikes, she used explicitly gendered language, asking, ‘one wonders when Feminists will learn to be feminine’ and use ‘women’s forces?’⁷³ Boord’s rationale for describing these tactics as simultaneously forceful and feminine was that, in refusing to become wives or mothers, women would be causing a kind of social disruption not previously imagined by male activists. She critiqued existing militant tactics, most specifically window-breaking, as a mere replica of ‘men’s ideas and methods’ and therefore, conversely, as an example of women behaving ‘weakly’ and ‘meekly’.⁷⁴

The WFL delegate Margaret Huntsman ascribed militant power to birth-striking on similar terms. Huntsman believed that this tactic would be so powerful that the mere ‘threat’ of it could usher in political equality for women.⁷⁵ She suggested this threat was partly predicated on a ‘fear of the unknown’ as birth-striking had not been enacted before.⁷⁶ Huntsman predicted that Members of Parliament would be alarmed by the sense that they ‘would never be able to tell how far it spreads’ as the intrinsically private nature of the strike would mean it was ‘a difficult thing to check’.⁷⁷ In making this proposal, Huntsman joined a wider tradition of women’s suffrage campaigners who constructed arguments for enfranchisement based on the distinct ‘national service’ that women demonstrated as mothers.⁷⁸ Desires for enfranchisement on these terms were often articulated as a plea that women be rewarded with political rights in recognition of their social contributions within the home.⁷⁹ By formulating her proposition for a strike, Huntsman expressed similar ideas but in the traditionally militant rhetorical style of a threat, warning that if women were not given the vote they would take this ‘national service’ away.

Instead of devoting attention to the men in Parliament directly, when considering the militant potential of sex and marriage strikes, Re-Bartlett emphasized the impact these tactics might have on the jilted fiancés and abandoned husbands who made up the electorate.⁸⁰ Making her understanding of these tactics as a form of militancy explicitly clear, Re-Bartlett dubbed the ‘silent strikers’ a ‘body of private militants’.⁸¹ She gendered this militancy by suggesting that these strikes would be a representation of ‘womanhood’ and ‘motherhood’.⁸² Like Boord, Re-Bartlett politicized ‘feminine’ decisions concerning marriage and motherhood by assigning them traditionally masculine attributes of strength and ‘forcefulness’.⁸³ Re-Bartlett’s endeavour to gender militancy in this way was likely informed by her theosophical connections. One strand of feminist-theosophical literature emphasized associations between masculinity and force and femininity and passivity, while encouraging male and female followers to embody both sets of attributes.⁸⁴ Re-Bartlett’s development of a political tactic which combined a rescinding of action (and therefore, arguably, inherent passivity) with imagery of destruction would have served these ends.

Taking these ideas to their extreme, Re-Bartlett made the surprising claim that sex and marriage strikes would constitute a form of ‘violence’.⁸⁵ She considered sex and marriage strikes to be comparable to the destruction of property, writing that ‘“window-breaking” is only as one wave breaking from a great sea’.⁸⁶ The sex and marriage strikes, in her analogy, were another wave forming from this same body of water.⁸⁷ Anticipating opposition from critics outside the women’s rights movement who might deem her calls for celibacy excessively harsh, Re-Bartlett acknowledged that her proposed tactics would not be easy for any party to endure.⁸⁸ She nevertheless justified her interest in sex-striking by commenting that ‘we are told that the kingdom of heaven must be taken with “violence” and in no field is that more true than in the love of man and woman’.⁸⁹ Re-Bartlett continued, ‘there must always be a period of violence’ when existing norms dictating relationships between men and women are ‘cut suffering and bleeding away’ as ‘woman fights desperately with herself and with man’.⁹⁰ Developing her military metaphor, she dubbed celibate women ‘warrior maids’.⁹¹ Re-Bartlett’s use of inverted commas when she first employed the word ‘violence’ in relation to domestic strikes confirms that she almost certainly viewed these strikes as an instance of allegorical or, possibly, what we might now term ‘structural violence’ rather than literal violence. However, she nevertheless believed that this violence would have a material effect on victims. She implied that denying men the emotional and physical joys of love, sex and marriage would cause them the ‘pain of denial’.⁹² For Re-Bartlett, this pain had important spiritual significance. She elaborated by invoking the Divine Comedy, maintaining that just as Beatrice inspired Dante to face hell-fire and ultimately reach salvation, women embarking on sex and marriage strikes would force non-feminist men to face ‘depths of pain, and long-drawn penitence’ and ultimately develop deeper empathy.⁹³ As Christabel Pankhurst noted in The Great Scourge, feminist calls to end prostitution were often met with cries that denying men sexual outlets would constitute ‘injury’ to their health.⁹⁴ Re-Bartlett’s writing capitalized on these fears.

The idea that a sex and marriage strike would provoke more individual male suffering than a birth strike involving contraception seems to be an additional key reason why Re-Bartlett advocated the former tactics.⁹⁵ With her definition of the sex and marriage strikes as violent, Re-Bartlett reimagined power relations within the sexual sphere. Feminists commonly pointed to men’s acts of sexual violence as evidence of their aggression within the perceived ‘sex war’.⁹⁶ Typically, suffragettes proposed that women fight male oppression with acts of militant protest such as public demonstrations or the destruction of property, which would secure their most powerful weapon, the vote.⁹⁷ Re-Bartlett alternatively asserted women’s control over male sexual temperance as a militant weapon within this war, as well as a desired outcome. However, blurring boundaries between passivity and forcefulness and masculinity and femininity once again, she was keen to assert that this weapon would be employed out of love, prompting men to undertake a spiritual journey and enabling them to become respectful husbands.⁹⁸

Deciding on whether all men, or just the most egregious offenders, should be the targets of militancy was a hot topic within suffrage discourse.⁹⁹ Feminists engaging with these debates sometimes operated at opposite ends of this spectrum, either seeing all bystanders as fair game or only wishing to target the handful of politicians most forcefully standing in the way of women’s enfranchisement.¹⁰⁰ Re-Bartlett, and in particular Boord, occupied a middle ground, wanting to target a significant proportion of the male population, but noting that men who already supported feminist demands should be exempted.¹⁰¹ Presumably, one of the benefits of sex, marriage and birth strikes, in contrast to other militant tactics, was the precision with which the male targets could be chosen. In Boord’s case, the decision to explicitly exempt the wives of feminist-sympathizing men was perhaps driven by a personal motivation as, fortunately for her, Boord’s own husband, Alexander Boord, was an ally to the cause.¹⁰² He wrote his own letter to The Freewoman a few editions after hers, demonstrating his feminist sympathies and signing the letter from only ‘the happy husband of Coralie M. Boord’.¹⁰³ Re-Bartlett, however, believed that, for most women, separatism was a significant component of the journey to both female enfranchisement and much wider social reform. Emphasizing the extent to which she envisaged an emotional and spiritual connection between sex-strikers and other militant suffrage activists, Re-Bartlett claimed that a sense of not being able to tolerate men until they shared women’s outrage at female subjugation was ‘the essence of women’s militancy today’.¹⁰⁴

Sex and birth strikes as women’s sacrifice

Those suffragettes conceptualizing sex, marriage and birth strikes as militant did not only do so because of the effect they thought this tactic would have on men, but also due to the impact they thought it would have on themselves. Arguably, sex and marriage strikes undermined feminist endeavours to dismantle sexual double standards as the tactics could be seen to suggest that men would ‘suffer’ from a lack of sexual companionship in a way women would not. However, Boord and Re-Bartlett countered this implication by asserting that the strikes would, indeed, involve an emotional, and possibly physical, sacrifice for the women carrying them out.¹⁰⁵ Self-sacrifice was a central theme within militant suffragette rhetoric. The leadership of the WSPU was well-known for reappropriating traditional expectations that women subjugate their own desires to those of their husbands.¹⁰⁶ Many militant suffragettes believed that their comrades should alternatively make sacrifices for the women’s movement by devoting their lives to the cause, risking arrest, imprisonment and even torture.¹⁰⁷ Boord and Re-Bartlett engaged with this same enterprise, suggesting that self-sacrifice would bestow sex-, marriage- and birth-strikers with additional power.

Boord believed that enduring sex, marriage and, in particular, birth strikes would be an additional feminist avenue through which suffragettes could channel their willingness to make sacrifices. She was responding to Drysdale, who characterized a birth strike as non-sacrificial on the grounds that having fewer children would constitute a liberation for women.¹⁰⁸ He asserted that a hindrance to the implementation of birth-striking would be ‘the idea of self-sacrifice’, claiming that this expectation ‘has always been drilled into women’, making ‘it difficult to convince them’ to look after ‘their own self-interest’.¹⁰⁹ Drysdale’s stance reflected the editorial line of The Freewoman, which entirely rejected notions of female sacrifice, instead arguing that ‘freedom’ from such traditionally gendered expectations was superior feminist praxis.¹¹⁰ In her response to Drysdale, Boord called this thesis into question; ‘Alas!’, she wrote, ‘I fear’ Drysdale ‘flatters’ militant suffragettes.¹¹¹ She claimed that the reason why suffragettes had ‘not yet adopted’ a sex, marriage or birth strike ‘to obtain their liberty’ was ‘because they are not self-sacrificing enough, not big enough yet to face this very real ordeal’.¹¹² Implying that a sex, marriage and birth strike might constitute a more arduous act of martyrdom than conventional militant protests, she asserted that the former ‘would be no “sham fight”’.¹¹³ Referencing the well-publicized clashes between the WSPU and the police that took place in 1910 and 1911, Boord claimed that the archetypal suffragette was willing to ‘face martyrdom in the open – standing shoulder to shoulder’, but was not ‘yet ready silently to plunge the sword – no blare of trumpets to cheer her – into her own quiet home life’.¹¹⁴ Boord implied that militancy in the marital sphere would demonstrate greater bravery than more traditional protests because domestic harmony was, in her contemporary world, one of the few joys extended to many women. ‘To some life has been so little sweet’, Boord observed, ‘they have not yet the strength – for the sake of posterity – to make it all bitter’.¹¹⁵

Similarly to Boord, Re-Bartlett countered assumptions that sex, marriage and birth strikes might reinforce double standards when she confirmed that the strikes were not a symptom of lack of sexual desire.¹¹⁶ Re-Bartlett sought to engender a culture where male and female sexual enjoyment was predicated on a spiritual ‘passion’ for conceiving children and thereby creating new life.¹¹⁷ She nevertheless assured her readers that her calls for celibacy were intended as ‘a temporary protest – an appeal’, and did not represent ‘the weakening of sex attraction’ on the part of women.¹¹⁸ Emphasizing the difficulty this protest would pose for women, Re-Bartlett asserted that the strikers were so committed to their feminist refusal to marry and have children that they were prepared to endure ‘loneliness,’ social ‘opposition’ and ‘pain’.¹¹⁹ Re-Bartlett was aware that encouraging women to make sacrifices could nevertheless be seen as reinforcing patriarchal expectations among some members of her feminist readership. She addressed this concern by asserting a distinction between conventional gendered sacrifice and the sacrifice behind the sex and marriage strike. Re-Bartlett saw traditional feminine sacrifice as being motivated by a sense of ‘duty’ and therefore oppressive, while she contrastingly characterized politicized celibacy as driven by a ‘greater love’ for both other women and men, and therefore spiritually empowering.¹²⁰

For both Boord and Re-Bartlett the spiritual implications of this greater love were significant to the strikes’ imagined power.¹²¹ Using provocative language, Boord predicted that by sacrificing the joys to be found within the home, women could cause ‘motherhood’ to ‘slay itself only to rise purified from its ashes’.¹²² She focused on foregoing motherhood, rather than foregoing sex or companionship, as a site for sacrifice possibly for this very reason. Boord’s vision of sacrifice here rested on the notion that selflessness was inherent to the maternal role. She suggested that a birth strike would be purifying because it would usher in a greater motherhood through women prioritizing creating a more equal society for all future generations over becoming a mother to their own, biological, offspring.¹²³ By referring to motherhood as being ‘purified’ by this process, Boord suggested that birth-striking would enable women to develop on a spiritual level.¹²⁴

For Re-Bartlett, the cleansing potential of sacrifice was especially key to how sex and marriage strikes derived their power. Re-Bartlett maintained that enfranchisement unaccompanied by such spiritual growth would be significantly less meaningful.¹²⁵ The crux of Re-Bartlett’s argument was that the ‘spirit’ behind militant activism – shared by window-breakers and sex- and marriage-strikers alike – was more significant than any individual ‘manifestation’ of militancy.¹²⁶ She maintained that this spirit was partly demonstrated by ‘the enormous power of the woman militant to suffer and to sacrifice themselves for an impersonal cause’.¹²⁷ Re-Bartlett’s interest in this spiritual process was intimately linked to her theosophical beliefs. She championed these strikes because she believed that foregoing marriage and motherhood, in causing women to ‘suffer’, would develop their ‘souls’, ‘personalities’ and ‘psyches’.¹²⁸ This claim combined the theosophical-feminist tenets that political and spiritual progress needed to be brought about simultaneously and that sexual self-control could be conducive to spiritual development.¹²⁹ While the influence of theosophy on suffrage campaigners and Edwardian sexual commentators has been extensively mapped, Re-Bartlett’s writings provide an especially clear illustration of how the sexual, spiritual and political implications of theosophy could be coherently amalgamated. Her theory of striking lends support to historian Joy Dixon’s contention that it is ‘anachronistic’ to construct a dichotomy between spiritual and political motivations within a first-wave feminist context.¹³⁰ As men were cleansed of their privilege, Re-Bartlett theorized, women would be similarly cleansed of their subservience and become emotionally and spiritually robust enough to achieve all their political demands.¹³¹

Without this robustness, Re-Bartlett believed, enfranchisement would not be as empowering for women as some others hoped. While Christabel Pankhurst, arguably the dominant voice within the so-called ‘sex war’ debates, had claimed that enfranchisement would automatically enable women to ‘feel greater respect for themselves’, Re-Bartlett believed that the specific tactics that led to political rights would be essential in determining the impact of enfranchisement on women’s sense of self.¹³² In this belief, Re-Bartlett provides an illustration of the pervious relationship between suffragism and suffrage-scepticism for some campaigners. She suggested that only by enduring hardships through militant activism, including participating in the ‘silent strike’, would women develop the strength to carry on fighting for further reforms pertaining to marriage and sexuality once enfranchised. Underlining her belief in the importance of these additional reforms, Re-Bartlett wrote: ‘the suffragists have told us … that it is towards social purity and the protection of women and child life that their forces will be principally turned when the vote is gained’. She problematized this: ‘we all know what forces of resistance will oppose them when they attack only one of these questions’.¹³³ Winning the vote through arduous militant tactics, Re-Bartlett therefore concluded, would be ‘the only thing which can give real value to suffrage’.¹³⁴ She went on: ‘new laws will help, the vote will help but only with this force behind them. And where do we find this force today? Only in the militant’, by which she was including ‘that still larger body of private militants whom the world does not always know’.¹³⁵

Conclusion

Between 1911 and 1914, some affiliates of the WSPU and WFL considered the impact of politicizing women’s choices to marry, have sex and become mothers. As Re-Bartlett described, these women and their ideas did not receive wide publicity, either at the time or in subsequent scholarship, but their writings embellish our understanding of the complex relationship between sexuality, motherhood and suffrage. Reflecting on the different implications of women’s roles as spouses, sexual partners and parents, Re-Bartlett, Boord and members of the WFL’s 1914 conference considered whether they wanted to target the military and economy with a mass birth strike and/or make individual men pay a higher price by refusing all sexual and romantic contact, simultaneously requiring a significant sacrifice from women themselves. While all the strike advocates discussed here campaigned for votes for women, and expressed their hope that the vote would be accompanied by broader changes to sexual culture, they also shared a belief that women had existing power to provoke both cultural and political shifts through their choices within the private sphere. In the case of Boord, and in particular Re-Bartlett, these strikes were considered to be of utmost importance. They advanced that unless the vote were won via specific tactics, and unless women undertook an accompanying spiritual journey, political representation would not prove transformative. Boord, Re-Bartlett and the WFL delegates found new ways to subvert gender norms, suggesting that women could demonstrate force, threatening behaviour and even a form of structural violence by using contraceptive methods, moving out of the family home or rejecting a proposal. As such, they provide further evidence of the diverse and complicated ways suffrage campaigners demonstrated militancy. For most strike advocates, perhaps the most powerful aspect of their proposed tactics was that they believed that no man had thought of them before.