Introduction

In December 1916, The Irish Citizen (hereafter the Citizen), paper of the militant feminist organization the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), reported that it seemed that long-active British suffragists might finally be making some progress. British authorities, it said, had announced that they would be establishing an Electoral Reform Conference. An integral part of this process was scrutinizing the franchise systems of countries which had already granted the female franchise. These countries included the dominions of New Zealand and Australia, which had granted women the right to vote in 1893 and 1902 respectively.¹ In countering anti-suffrage arguments about the potentially devastating impact of the woman vote, many suffragists drew on examples of states which had granted the franchise and yet continued to operate successfully.² Irish suffragists were no exception.³

However, the Citizen also used these exemplary models with a more pointed purpose. In 1916, as the anti-colonial nationalist campaign heated up and more of the activists associated with the paper adopted a radical republican stance (promoting separatism over the attainment of an Irish Home Rule parliament), the Citizen deployed such examples to attack the imperial centre. It claimed that Australian and New Zealand suffrage developments demonstrated that the normal hierarchical workings of empire were disrupted because the British imperial centre was being compelled to learn from the experiences of those at the far reaches of its vast empire. In observing this reversal of what had, until relatively recently, been a longstanding protocol – one which dictated that the superior metropolitan centre would lead the inferior colonial peripheries in matters of political importance – the Citizen issued the mock-celebratory directive: ‘Bravo John Bull; Wake up and get a hustle on! Is the colony to be the father of the Homeland?’⁴ It was in Irish women’s interests that ‘John Bull’ would get a move on because, as British subjects, they were appealing for a vote in the British Parliament.

Not surprisingly, given the mix of political aspirations in evidence across the UK in the early twentieth century – from socialism to feminism to Unionism to radical republicanism – emotions were running high. Frustration, indignation and anger were often elicited as activists’ demands were denied or delayed. Yet, as prevalent as spontaneous outbursts of political emotions were, emotions were also strategically cultivated by those on all sides of politics. The IWFL’s mock directive to ‘John Bull’ to ‘get a move on’ was certainly evidence of the deliberate deployment of emotional tactics to achieve political ends. As a minority faction of the joint Irish and British suffrage movement – one which supported militant methods over more mainstream constitutional tactics and increasingly championed radical republican ideals over the more popular Home Rule nationalism – the IWFL set out to shame or embarrass the British imperial centre. It did so by drawing attention to an apparent juxtaposition: the progressive gender politics of a seemingly inferior colonial outpost in the face of the purportedly archaic gender attitudes of the supposedly superior imperial metropole.

This chapter asserts that suffragism was characterized by political emotions, spontaneous and cultivated. Local, national and transnational concerns and priorities intervened in the workings of suffrage politics across the Empire to create a highly volatile emotional milieu. Suffragists, whatever their region or national allegiance, were compelled to reference this complex interweaving of emotions. Not only that, but participants in suffrage debates – whether proponents or opponents – also learnt to develop emotional strategies which then capitalized on the emotional politics of nation and empire. Yet, historians have been slow to centre their investigations on this emotional dimension.⁵ Indeed, many have been reluctant to focus on the highly influential role that emotions have played in political machinations more generally. There are understandable reasons for this, including a traditional conviction that politics have been no place for emotions and historiographical concerns about appropriate methodology and source material.⁶ However, this chapter will argue that even in the face of these apprehensions, the realm of emotions provides lucrative ground for building on existing suffrage histories to produce new analyses of the relations between different groups of suffragists, between suffragists and their opponents and between political activists and the general public. It allows us to understand the degree to which different groups of women viewed emotions as integral, even pivotal, components of their activist toolkits.

The field of emotions history also opens up exciting new avenues for historians of empire relations. Exploring the emotional dimensions of suffragism as they connect and disconnect disparate sites along the British imperial spectrum promises new insights into the transnational and transcolonial nature of empire relations, and into the bonds existing and concerns shared across nation-states and between colonial sites. Discrete political communities’ attitudes towards democratic reform were not formed in isolation. Rather, they were formulated in response to developments taking place elsewhere. They were also constructed amid a backdrop of shifting international relations. This was certainly so for those nations that made up the British Empire. Suffrage debates – conducted in and across these sites of empire – are revealing of the making and remaking of empire relations at a crucial time in the development of that vast entity. This chapter will trace the circulating emotions of suffrage politics to uncover not only the pivotal role of emotions in the political life of early twentieth-century women, but also the changing relationship between subjects in the imperial centre and those in the peripheries of empire.

A history of emotions and politics

Historians may have been reluctant to engage with the topic, but scholars like Ute Frevert remind us that the relationship between emotions and politics is not new. From ancient times, practitioners and theoreticians of politics have clearly understood that the two are deeply connected. For example, Aristotle advised orators about how to most effectively use rhetorical devices to move audiences’ feelings. This advice, Frevert argues, has been taken up by future generations of influential leaders, from Pericles in ancient Greece to Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War.⁷ However, despite the obvious presence of emotions in politics, sociologists Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta argued that there has been some hesitation on the part of academic observers to admit to this presence. Instead, they have managed to ‘ignore the swirl of passions all around them in political life’.⁸ In accounting for this relative absence, political scientist Carol Johnson cited the perceived gendered nature of emotions generally. Traditionally, emotion was associated with the feminized private sphere of home and family, while emotion’s supposed antithesis, reason, was associated with the masculinized public world of business and politics.⁹ In many ways this gendered approach to emotion helps us to understand why only a small number of histories of women’s movements have focused on emotions.¹⁰ Through eliding the emotional dimensions of these movements, feminist historians have avoided the risk of further associating female politics with the taint of irrationality. This is especially true of the historiography of militant suffragism which, as June Purvis has argued, from as far back as the 1930s has been subject to a masculinist agenda which has seen leaders like Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst characterized as devious, ridiculous, hysterical and even deranged.¹¹ The historiography of the militant is a field ‘riven with debate and controversy’.¹² Emotions form but one of these.

Even when those writing political histories recognized the role of emotions in politics, their observations were still subject to this supposed dualism between emotion and reason. For instance, as emotions scholars Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns noted, those who began to write crowd histories in the 1960s, like George Rudé and Charles Tilly, made the careful decision to avoid labelling protestors as emotional or unreasonable. Rather, they worked to circumvent accusations that crowds were impulsive, irrational and therefore their goals and grievances irrelevant or illegitimate, by ignoring or relegating the role of emotions in their politics.¹³ Over the past two decades, sociologists have increasingly turned their attention to uncovering and extending our understanding of the powerful role that emotions play in politics – emotions as strategically deployed or as experienced and embodied feelings. They have investigated the role of emotions as means of motivating, sustaining or even bringing about the demise of political movements.¹⁴ Over the past few years, historians have begun to build on sociological research – including this rejection of the reason-versus-emotion dualism – to consider the influential and complex role of emotions in past political lives.¹⁵ Through examining emotional circulations between Britain, Ireland and Australia in the first decades of the twentieth century, this chapter will demonstrate how growing interest in the history of emotions can be capitalized on to deepen our understanding of the complex and shifting nexus between emotions, empire and suffrage politics.

Ireland and the complex dynamics of gender, shame and colonization

The Irish had long occupied an ambivalent position in relation to empire. At least since the 1800 Act of Union, those subscribing to Unionist politics considered Ireland an equal partner in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK) and therefore an integral part of the imperial centre. Those dedicated to nationalist politics operated along a continuum from Home Rule nationalism to anti-colonial republicanism. Early in the twentieth century, the majority of Irish nationalists, led by the Irish Parliamentary Party, supported the Home Rule campaign, which demanded that parliament be restored to the island which would stay within the UK and the Empire. Increasingly after 1916, a growing but still minority group of nationalists advocated republicanism. They looked on Ireland as England’s oldest imperial possession and championed secession from the Union and also from the Empire. The body of republicans swelled after failed British attempts to introduce conscription in 1918. These were led in the main by Sinn Féin, whose aspirations for complete autonomy were clearly present in its title, translated from the Gaelic as ‘We, Ourselves’. It was the republican spirit which was to direct the ensuing War of Independence (1919–21) which then led to the bitter Irish Civil War (1922–3). Not surprisingly, divisions within the Irish suffrage movement mirrored those in wider Irish society.¹⁶

Many in Ireland had been campaigning for the female franchise since the 1870s.¹⁷ The majority of suffragists on the island were devoted to constitutional tactics. However, after the initiation of militant tactics in England by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a small number of Irish suffragists travelled to England and took part in the militant movement there. Some were imprisoned for doing so.¹⁸ By 1912, a minority branch of the Irish suffrage movement, represented in the main by the IWFL, had deployed militant tactics like throwing stones through the windows of government offices in Ireland itself. They were arrested and imprisoned.¹⁹ In 1912, a handful of English militant suffragists also travelled to Ireland to deploy militancy there and were subsequently arrested.²⁰ That Ireland was home to coordinated acts of feminist militancy in 1912 was not accidental. Rather, it reflected the fact that in that year, negotiations over Irish Home Rule had led the Irish Parliamentary Party, which held the balance of power in the Westminster Parliament, to block the passing of the 1912 Conciliation Bill which would have enfranchised eligible women across the United Kingdom. Understandably, the obstructive role that Irish nationalist politics played in suffrage politics that year angered all of those adversely affected, whether British or Irish.

Across the long-running suffrage campaign, Irish and British suffragists were connected in many ways.²¹ Their desire to empower women through granting them a vote in the British Parliament made them part of the same network of suffrage activists. Consequently, British and Irish feminists referenced each other’s campaigns, exchanged funding, ideas and approaches and travelled across national spaces. British organizations on both sides of the suffrage debate also established branches in Ireland, with varying degrees of success, including the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the Church League for Women’s Suffrage (CLWS), the WSPU and the Anti-Suffrage League (later the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (NLOWS)).²² However, the transnational nature of the British suffrage movement – with campaigns in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales – grew increasingly complicated as Irish nationalist aspirations were seen to interfere in suffrage politics. Relations became even more fraught after 1916 when some Irish nationalists, members of the IFWL included, began to espouse republicanism over the goal of Home Rule, and as British resentment of demands for separatism became more manifest.²³ More and more, the emotional politics of imperialism and anti-colonial nationalism characterized how national feminist communities framed their demands and how they conducted their exchanges. For Irish women, the emotion of shame – tied to intersecting histories of gender and colonial oppression – held particular resonance.

Shame played a pivotal role in Irish feminist deliberations. The colonizing process, nationalists argued, had imposed shame on the once proud Irish nation through emasculating its manhood. British colonists had achieved this by constructing the Irish as a childlike Celtic ‘race’ that was erratic, irrational and emotional.²⁴ Robbed of his manliness, the Irish man had no rights to national autonomy. The ever-virulent British man dominated over him. Irish feminists cited the fact that Irish men were forced to travel to England to represent their constituents as evidence of their subjugated position. Worse than that, these same men were compounding their shame by ‘begging’ British men for political concessions, specifically the right to have a home-based parliament.²⁵ Influenced by a desire to avoid further shaming the Irish man, one group of politically active women – the Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland), a radical nationalist, pro-militant women’s group – made the decision to postpone agitating for the vote until the nation’s freedom was won. Members were devoted to the vision of women playing a leading role in a free Irish society but, in the meantime, they prioritized the goal of nationalist independence over suffrage. That way, Irish rather than British men could grant Irish women political power. This, these nationalist feminists said, was the only ethical course of action for any committed female nationalist.²⁶

As early as 1909, over a decade before the Irish achieved partial independence, the organization’s paper, Bean na hÉireann (hereafter the Bean and translating from the Gaelic as ‘Women of Ireland’) – which proclaimed itself ‘the first and only Nationalist Woman’s paper’ – accused Irish suffragists of compounding the shame of colonization by begging the British imperialist for political concessions.²⁷ It declared that Irish suffragists were entering ‘into the supreme folly of recognising the English Parliament and begging for concessions’.²⁸ In this framing of the debate, Irish suffragists were asking Ireland’s enemy – more embarrassingly, they were pleading with it – to grant them a say in the affairs of an enemy parliament: the British Parliament. By appealing to the imperialist for the rights of citizenship, Irish women were guilty of acknowledging the British man’s ascendancy over the Irish man. The Irish suffragist, the Bean asserted, was a woman who was ‘scrambling for her mess of pottage, and willing to join in with her country’s conquerors and worst enemies to gain her end, but from the point of view of an Irish Nationalist’.²⁹

The paper was adamant that Irish men would give their ‘sisters’ the vote once they had control of their own country.³⁰ If women were to receive the vote because they believed it was ‘the hall-mark of equality’, then it was ‘from Irishmen that this must be won’.³¹

The campaign for the vote was ‘humiliating’, the paper asserted, because it contributed to the emasculation of the Irish man.³³ Irish suffragists were cast in the role of collaborators in the shameful practice of modern-day colonization.

Those so-called collaborators – feminist nationalists – who refused to concede and who continued to demand to be able to vote in a British Parliament were likewise compelled to reference the shame of colonization in their campaign. They were obliged to deny accusations that they were complicit in the colonized Irish man’s shame. Instead, they constructed themselves as patriotic women devoted to using their considerable passion and energies to fight for the political power that would enable them to join with their brothers in the struggle for independence. Again, the goals were the same – national autonomy and women’s rights – but the order of priority was reversed. This time, the woman vote was the first goal and with that power Irish men and women could achieve national independence.

Despite their ultimate shared vision of Irish women taking a leading hand in directing the affairs of a free Irish nation, Irish feminist nationalists too resorted to the politics of shame. They countered the Bean’s accusations by claiming that it was not they who were acting shamefully. Rather, it was the women behind the Bean who were guilty of slavishly obeying Irish men’s directives to abandon their feminist aspirations in favour of those of the male-led nationalist campaign. As prominent feminist nationalist Meg Connery put it in 1914 in the pages of the militant suffrage IWFL paper the Citizen, women who called themselves suffragists – Unionist and nationalist – while attaching themselves to men’s political parties were ‘acting slavishly whether they realize it or not’.³⁴ They were, she said, guilty of displaying an ‘anxiety to efface themselves and their sex in the interests of men, which they falsely believe to be the interests of the Nation’. In doing so, they were complicit with men in the act of ‘forgetting that a Nation consists of men and women’.³⁵ It was not only men but also women who were tainted with shame under colonization and, as this case now proved, under anti-colonialism too.

The feminist nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington argued that this gender amnesia had allowed all Irish women – whether nationalist feminist or feminist nationalist or indeed Unionist – to be reduced to a shameful position in modern Irish society. ‘It is barren comfort for us Irishwomen’, she wrote, ‘to know that in ancient Ireland women occupied a prouder, freer position than they now hold even in the most advanced modern states, that all professions, including that of arms, were freely open to their ambitions’.³⁶ Memories of past equality did not provide a healing balm or proffer a workable solution for Ireland’s current state of gender inequality. What was needed were politically enfranchised women who could stand alongside Irish men and together present a formidable force which would demand Irish freedom. That way, the shame of colonization – for Irish men and Irish women – would be eradicated.

Suffragists like Connery and Sheehy Skeffington walked a thin line between upholding the exclusiveness of the nationalist context in which the Irish suffrage movement was unfolding and promoting a transnational argument that women should have the right to pursue the vote whatever the peculiar circumstances of their country. Their main argument was that all women, regardless of nationality, needed the vote to make real political change and to achieve equal citizenship with men. However, their arguments grew increasingly nationalistic when they perceived their autonomy – as Irish suffragists within an intersecting British and Irish suffrage movement – to be under threat. In 1914, at the outset of the First World War, the Citizen responded to directives from the pro-war WSPU leader Christabel Pankhurst that the war should be supported above all else by reasserting that Pankhurst had no authority in Ireland. ‘Ireland is not England’, the paper stated. ‘The Irish Citizen has always recognised the existence of the Irish Sea.’³⁷

Whatever their position on the national question, when articulating their aspirations and defending their strategies, Irish feminists were required to reference the emotional politics of that national question, especially the country’s understanding of the fraught relationship between gender, shame and colonization. As the nationalist movement gathered momentum, especially after the failed nationalist uprising of Easter 1916, other emotional politics came to the fore. In their changing relationship with British suffragists, for example, pride in national allegiance began to trump the wellbeing derived from transnational feminist solidarity. Emotional bonds were continually being made and remade in the face of shifting gendered and nationalist alliances.

Australian women voters, colonial anxiety and national pride

Across the far reaches of the Empire, in Australia, patriotic white women took a different view of nationalist Irish women’s increasingly belligerent attitude to the British. Their ardent response is revealing of the specific nature of the anxieties and indignations affecting a remote group of settler-colonists. In 1919, for example, women of the conservative Australian Women’s National League (AWNL) writing for their paper, Woman, reflected on how the Irish had rejected British attempts to introduce conscripted service for the First World War and had instead instigated a War of Independence. Adopting a tone of impatient indignation, Woman accused the Irish of being petulant children (reminding us here of the earlier-mentioned trope of the childlike Celt). The paper went on to claim: ‘all the world knows that Ireland is to-day the most prosperous corner of the Empire, and her people the most pampered children of that Empire’s great world-wide family’.³⁸ As for evidence of this, one only had to look at the fact that of all the ‘four nations’ claiming privileged membership of that cherished entity, the UK, only the Irish remained un-conscripted.

Doubtless, conservative Australian women’s indignation arose from the hurt they felt at accusations emanating from the British centre that they – as one of the Empire’s only group of women voters – were responsible for treachery towards the Empire because they were responsible for the defeat of two Australian conscription referenda during the First World War.³⁹ In 1916, Australia introduced a referendum for compulsory overseas military service. Australian women, as enfranchised citizens, would have the chance to vote directly on whether to force men to enlist for the war. This was an extraordinary responsibility. Accordingly, the eyes of the Empire were fixed on them. As the Melbourne newspaper the Argus pointed out at the time, women’s citizenship was on trial.⁴⁰

Australian women passionately subscribed to both sides of the conscription debate. A minority of pacifists in Australia, most famously represented by Victorian feminist Vida Goldstein and her Women’s Peace Army (formed in 1915), opposed conscription. A more significant number of pro-war women, like the loyal women of the AWNL, fervently supported it. The result of the referendum, however, was not good for those who were keen to demonstrate their loyalty to the Empire. Conducted amid a backdrop of passionate, heated debate and ‘raw emotional violence’, the 1916 pro-conscription campaign was defeated.⁴¹

As mentioned earlier, suffragists globally held up societies like Australia and New Zealand as examples of the successful integration of newly enfranchised women voters. Conversely, anti-suffragists scrutinized the actions of newly minted women voters to look for ways in which these women could be held up as warnings to those countries considering enfranchising their own female population. Therefore, whereas suffrage papers can be mined for their positive representation of the Australian woman voter, anti-suffrage papers, like the official organ of the British NLOWS, The Anti-Suffrage Review (the Review), are valuable for how they capitalized on emotional politics to problematize her. For example, British anti-suffragists seized on the opportunity to blame Australian women voters for the defeat of the conscription referendum. Quoting the Sydney correspondent for the Times, the Review maintained that the failure of the referendum was due to ‘the emotionalism of the women electors, who thought they would be condemning men to death if they voted “Yes”’.⁴² The paper continued:

A second referendum was organized for 1917. The campaign leading up to that event was more emotional and violent than the first, coloured as it was by even more grief, suspicion, bitterness, hysteria and paranoia. That referendum failed too.

Doubtless, British anti-suffragists found it opportunistic to point the finger at what they said was feminine emotionalism. Such sentimental weakness as that displayed by female pacifists had no place in wartime imperial politics when millions of men’s lives were at risk; therefore, women had no business having the vote. However, by laying the blame at the feet of all Australian women, they rendered invisible the fierce loyalty and patriotic wartime work of women like those in the AWNL. However they arrived at their conclusion that Australian women had performed a gross dereliction of duty, British anti-suffragists continued to use the example of the defeat of Australia’s referenda as evidence of the universal untrustworthiness of women voters.

Loyal Australian women – like the women of the AWNL who had devoted themselves to the task of achieving conscription and who were devastated by the referenda’s defeat – emphatically denied that they were guided by emotionalism or that they were responsible for this defeat. Instead, they argued that the stain of empire disloyalty should be attached to ‘SOCIALISM, PACIFISM, SINN FEINISM’.⁴⁴ The AWNL believed that the Irish represented a significant threat to the integrity of the Empire.⁴⁵ The substantial migrant Irish community in Australia, it said, was being led astray by the notorious Irish-born, anti-colonial nationalist, anti-conscriptionist Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix.⁴⁶ In Ireland itself, the AWNL accused, the Irish were supportive of a violent revolutionary separatist movement. Wherever they were, the Irish component of the Empire was proving treacherous. As such, it provoked feelings of anger, indignation and resentment among these ‘loyal’ British-Australian women.⁴⁷

Of course, in 1918, at the time that patriotic Australian women were making this claim, a growing number of Irish women were coveting what these antipodean women already had, namely, a parliament at home and voting rights in that parliament. Patriotic women in the far-away Antipodes cherished the sense of connection that the so-called mother country, Britain, and its empire provided.⁴⁸ Given this, they did not feel any compulsion to support the political aspirations of women in other colonial sites – including Irish women’s nationalist or feminist demands – if they threatened the continuity of the empire which provided this feeling of belonging.

As white settler-colonists in what was regarded as a remote and hostile Asia-Pacific region, many loyal Australian women considered themselves to be uniquely honoured – and burdened – among all of the Empire’s womanhood. They believed that they were endowed with a special racialized mission: to ensure the rejuvenation of the British or Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ in the supposedly healthier climes and open spaces of the Antipodes. As one of the first groups of Empire womanhood to be enfranchised, Australian women were aware that their vote was a white vote.⁴⁹ Believed to belong to a race doomed to extinction, Aboriginal women and men were disenfranchised whether through informal means or formal legislation. They were not to be granted the right to vote until 1962.⁵⁰ Not only that, but perceived threats from without (for example, from Japan as Japanese expansionary intentions with regard to places like China, Korea and Russia were imagined as a threat to Australia’s borders) as well as those from within (exemplified, for instance, by the presence of cheap Chinese labour in the colonies) combined to create a tense racialized environment. Laws and policies were enacted immediately after federation to ensure racial exclusion.⁵¹

It was this valued mission, and the seemingly intractable ties it provided to the family of empire, that shaped the emotional politics of ‘loyal’ Australian women voters. Knowing that the eyes of the world – and certainly those of the mother country – were on them as they performed in their new role of enfranchised citizens intensified Australian women’s anxieties. It made them zealous in their determination to prove themselves deserving beneficiaries of the Empire’s munificence. ‘Shall we not then’, the AWNL’s Woman asked in 1909, ‘call to our minds all the proud traditions of our race and stand shoulder to shoulder in the defence of our Empire, determined that not at our door shall lie “the ordering of her disgrace”’.⁵²

As the conscription debacles later demonstrated, supposedly undesirable elements within Australia’s borders, like the disruptive Irish, did not make it an easy task to prove the Australian woman’s worthiness to those in the metropole. However, it was also the politics of pride – specifically, exuberant displays of national confidence – which created further distrust of the modern Australian woman among some in the imperial centre. For example, in 1917, Woman declared of Australia:

Here humble ‘truths’ mixed with more audacious assertions to create a picture of a grateful ‘child’ who had outgrown or improved upon a ‘parent’, albeit it a munificent one.

This growing boldness was confirmed perhaps most famously in 1911 when Australian women marched in the Great Suffrage Procession in London carrying a banner which instructed the imperial centre to: ‘Trust the women Mother as I have done’.⁵⁴ The very words on this banner revealed a collective belief in the advanced state of Australia’s approach to the matter of gender and citizenship.⁵⁵ This was very much in line with Australian feminists’ imagining of a maternalist welfare state, one which used women’s political influence to create a kind of society which focused on the needs of mothers and children and which also drew on women’s nurturing capabilities to shape national life for the better.⁵⁶ Australian feminists, then, worked to challenge metropolitan assumptions about the superior positioning of women in the imperial centre compared with those in the Empire’s outposts, a fact gleefully highlighted by Irish feminist nationalists, as demonstrated by this chapter’s opening reference to the Citizen’s satirical ‘Bravo John Bull’ comments.

As historian Barbara Caine has argued, the international woman suffrage movement allowed Antipodean women their first opportunity ‘to turn the imperial tables as it were, and to offer their unfortunate British sisters help, guidance and advice’.⁵⁷ Such a turning of tables likely gratified political women of a more ‘progressive’ nature, like suffragist Vida Goldstein, who declared her ‘new world’ Australian vote to be infinitely more valuable than a restricted ‘old world’ vote, as reported in The Anti-Suffrage Review.⁵⁸ Reformers of a similarly progressive nature from countries like Britain and the US certainly looked on political developments emanating from Australia as inspirational.⁵⁹ However, more conservative women in Australia, although they took pride in using their privileged position to improve the great British ‘race’, were much less likely to feel as comfortable as their more progressive sisters in asserting supremacy over the old imperial centre. They were much more anxious to express loyalty and gratitude, and prove their worthiness.⁶⁰

British anti-suffragists and the embarrassment of colonial naivety

Directives that the British should follow the lead of Australians – whether mock or genuine, emanating from the Irish or the Australians – indicated a belief that political matters in the imperial centre and the colonial peripheries were of equal importance. Across the globe, many reformers reacted positively to Australian social and political reform ‘experiments’.⁶¹ As we will see below, British anti-suffragists, however, far from accepting this view, responded indignantly to claims emanating from the colonial peripheries that metropole and peripheries constituted equally important sites of empire. They were also utterly exasperated when they encountered proclamations not only of equality but of colonial superiority as indicated by attempts to get Britain to follow Australia’s lead on the matter of democratic reform. Such naïve assertions, coming from the inexperienced colonists, embarrassed those more knowing politicians in the centre of the vast imperial network because they demonstrated the colonists’ ignorance of what was certainly accepted wisdom in the metropole, namely that Britain was the essential heart of the Empire. It was the only responsible authority in the Empire. It was Britain’s parental beneficence that allowed for the creation of white settler spaces in the Antipodes in the first place and, as its leading and ultimately successful role in the First World War showed, it was Britain’s power that held the vast, bountiful but troublesome imperial network together.

Initially, British conservatives set about reminding the young Australian Commonwealth that it may have the freedom to perform social and political experiments, but that this could not be done in the much more serious imperial centre. Mindful not to offend their colonial ‘cousins’, they did so with emotional restraint.⁶² In 1910, for example, the Review stated that while not meaning to ‘disparage the experiments which have been made by our own Dominions and Colonies’, no knowledgeable person would argue that such experiments would ‘form any relevant guidance as to what is to take place here’.⁶³ It clarified that there was ‘no real analogy’ between granting women the right to vote in places like Utah or Colorado or Australia and New Zealand and thinking about granting women the right to do so in a country like England.⁶⁴ The paper reminded its readers that Australia and New Zealand ‘have, so far, been happily exempt from the graver problems of Empire’.⁶⁵

Early in 1911, the Review reasserted its position by arguing that the Australian woman vote was nothing more than ‘an idle compliment Australian men have paid their women’.⁶⁶ Not burdened with the onerous task of spreading civilization and modernity, as the British were, Australian men could choose to be so playfully chivalrous.⁶⁷ The paper urged readers to remember that Australia managed simply ‘its own internal affairs for a sparse population, considerably less than the population of the County of London’. It had ‘no questions of peace or war to decide, no India dependent upon it with a population of three hundred millions, entertaining Oriental ideas regarding women’.⁶⁸ Within a few months, the Review’s tone had become even more embittered: ‘Our colonies, with their minor problems, with their remoteness from the complication and danger of the Old World, with their safety under the English flag, and their simpler conditions of life, might try experiments that her children could not ask of England’.⁶⁹

The Review then relied on the words of prominent British imperialist and anti-suffragist Violet Markham to drive its point home.⁷⁰ Markham declared that granting women the right to vote in Britain – as in places like Australia and New Zealand – could never be in the nation’s and the Empire’s interests. It would only ‘be a weakening and a disturbing element in government and in the exercise of sovereign power’.⁷¹ As ‘a woman’, she stated, ‘I say that it is an intolerable situation for a great nation and a great empire’.⁷² The complex logistics of governing the Empire was the crucial factor. Women cannot ‘take part in any share of the government of the three hundred and forty millions of coloured people who form the major portion of the population of the empire’, she confirmed. All women were politically naïve. How then would they take on the responsibilities of the India Office and share in the government of ‘those three hundred millions which people the great Dependency?’⁷³ There is ‘no graver or more difficult problem which lies ahead for the British Empire than the development of the social and political relations of the coloured races under the flag’, Markham asserted.⁷⁴ The irony here was, of course, that ‘race’ was used to exemplify British exceptionalism, completely eliding the fact that those women in the Empire who had the power to vote were actually living in settler-colonial states and voting on matters of race and race relations. Still, Markham went on: ‘To give political power without full political experience is altogether too great and dangerous an experiment for such an empire as ours, just because we are an empire and not a laboratory for the experiments of cranks and of faddists.’⁷⁵ The implication was that cranks and faddists could, and did, experiment in less important sites of empire.

An emotional shift occurred in the pages of the Review in the face of repeated and sustained efforts to suggest that Britain follow Antipodean leads, that they mirror the ways of cranks and faddists. The relatively minor irritation of embarrassment evoked by such misguided comparisons gave way to the more pronounced feelings of anger and resentment, especially when it looked like a bill supporting the female franchise was going to be introduced. Similar to the way in which conservative Australian women had depicted the Irish, Australians and New Zealanders were portrayed as the pampered offspring of an overburdened parent. They should not, the Review asserted, foolishly ask that those in the mother country allow themselves the same liberties that they afforded themselves.

Through being compelled to reference the Australian woman voter – the very existence of whom was being used by rebellious subjects to undermine the supremacy of the metropolitan centre (as evidenced by Irish feminist nationalists) – British conservatives laid bare the emotional and hierarchical politics of empire suffragism. The embarrassing claims of naïve colonial ‘cousins’ could be tolerated but, once these claims were given enough weight to threaten the hierarchy of relationships which characterized the British Empire, embarrassment turned to anger.

Conclusion

Imperial ties connected women across Britain, Ireland and Australia whether these women wanted them to or not. Whether loyal or disloyal, each group of national womanhood operated within the same imperial framework. Apart from the matter of suffrage, they were affected by similar, if not the same, legislation. They had to frame their aspirations by referencing existing assumptions, for instance, about their country’s position on the hierarchical imperial spectrum or about the nature of British or non-British values. Knowledge was shared as ideas and values circulated around the Empire. Therefore, despite the many different circumstances shaping their individual national existences, these separate but linked communities of patriotic womanhood were often compelled to refer to each other when asserting their particular political aspirations.

Casting a discerning eye over the emotional dimensions of interactions between groups of politically active women of different nationalities at a crucial time in the development of the British Empire – as colonies variously morphed into loyal dominions or expressed dangerously revolutionary ideals – is a valuable way of not only understanding the leading role that emotions played in empire suffragism, but also of accessing the nature of shifting relations between sites of empire.

Looking through the lens of the emotions of suffragism, we can ascertain the inescapable impact that narratives about colonial shame had on feminist solidarity in Ireland. Whether they subscribed to the belief that the shamed Irish man’s pride could only be restored through abstaining from suffragism or not, Irish feminists were forced to defend themselves from accusations that their feminist actions made them complicit in the ongoing colonizing process. The emotional politics of gender rendered their nationalism uncertain, in others’ eyes if not their own, as they were compelled to explain why they were prioritizing their own rights over those of their disempowered nation. Australian women voters, many of whom had not wanted the vote, mediated an emotional terrain that included colonial anxiety and national pride. Their expressions of pride as enfranchised citizens of the Empire, considered by some to be dangerously close to assertions of colonial supremacy, forced British imperialists to reassert the hierarchy of empire. Through these reaffirmations, British anxieties about their place in a modernizing world are revealed. Through the waxing and waning of colonial shame and pride, as well as imperial embarrassment, indignation and anger, we can detect imperial-colonial relations in a state of transition. This heady mixture of emotions was not only instrumental in shaping the nature of empire politics; it also helped to reveal the localized nature of anxieties and aspirations which allows us to delve deeper into core-periphery flows and exchanges, and into the connections and disconnections formed between different groups of national womanhood across British imperial networks.