During the centenary year of some women getting the vote, a partial and frequently partisan narrative dominated the public celebrations and often the academic ones too. In the sea of purple, white and green, a more nuanced history of the women’s campaign for enfranchisement in Britain was lost. This chapter addresses a number of aspects of suffrage history that we still hear too little about: the contested nature of the demand for votes for women among suffragists; the campaign for adult suffrage; the importance of tensions around class within the struggle for women’s enfranchisement; and the ways in which suffrage politics were made across national boundaries, often deploying the experience of women in one campaign in the politics of another.

To tease out these issues, this chapter focuses on the first European country to give women the vote, exploring how the lessons drawn from Finnish women’s victory were put to work in suffrage campaigns elsewhere. It centres on the nature and impact of one British suffragist’s narration of the Finnish success. For Dora Montefiore the most important aspect of the Finns’ achievement was that they had won the vote for all women over twenty-four, irrespective of their social class. This was full adult suffrage; it contrasted with the demand of the main suffragist societies in Britain which, by seeking equality with men on the basis of a property franchise, were only asking for the vote for some women.¹

The implementation of female suffrage in Finland was exceptionally early, rapid and almost unnoticed by contemporaries, according to its principal historian Irma Sulkunen.² This was largely because of the particular circumstances of the Finns, where demands for democratic reforms sat at the heart of their nationalist struggle for liberation from the Russian Empire. In 1905, after its defeat in the war against Japan, a weakened Russia was faced by revolution at home and disturbances across its empire. Soon Finland was engulfed in revolutionary ferment with a general strike gripping the country from 1 November.³ Transport was halted and all factories and shops were closed while the streets were full of men and women from across the social classes, with even servants joining the strike.⁴ The crowds called for the abolition of the semi-feudal Finnish Diet based on four estates for which only about 7% of the population were qualified to vote, and for a new National Assembly elected by universal adult suffrage. The Times described the strike as ‘national, complete, pacific, orderly, and triumphant’; certainly by the fourth day of the strike Tsar Nicholas II agreed to the strikers’ demand for full adult suffrage and to drop his ‘Russification’ programme, thus giving the country greater autonomy.⁵ The Finns had taken their opportunity.

What was remarkable about the Finnish example was the virtual unanimity among all the popular movements that the call should be for universal and equal suffrage, which necessarily included women. Only the small bourgeois women’s movement continued to make the lesser demand for limited women’s suffrage based on a property franchise. The number of women involved in the separatist women’s associations was under 2,000, whereas those organized in the workers’ movement (the Social Democratic Party and trade unions) was greater by a factor of ten.⁶ Moreover, women were active participants in the various mixed-sex social movements such as the largely working-class temperance movement, which fed into the nationalist resistance, so that there was broad recognition of the commonality of interests between different unenfranchised groups. The significance of the women workers’ movement was recognized by the appointment of two of its representatives to the General Strike Committee, while their determination to achieve full civil rights was reflected in the large meetings and processions of women workers held in support of suffrage in sixty-three localities during December 1905.⁷ When Finland’s new parliament convened for the first time in March 1907, there was a remarkable number of working women among the nineteen female MPs, including a former servant, seamstresses and teachers.⁸ In Finland, class was not as divisive an issue as it was in many other suffrage struggles. There was also a tradition of men and women working together in Finland’s social movements with differences submerged in the more pressing nationalist cause.

One English woman was particularly keen to understand how Finnish women had achieved what decades of campaigning in Britain had failed to deliver. In 1906, Dora Montefiore travelled to Finland to discover the answers for herself. She was already a longstanding suffragist. International travel and networking were important features of her suffrage politics as she explored how best to frame the demand for full female suffrage and the most effective tactics to use.⁹ For her, Finland showed that adult suffrage was the only way to enfranchise working-class women and that collaboration between the increasingly polarized labour and women’s movements was essential to achieving this goal. In the polemical world of women’s suffrage, this was not what many suffragists or socialists wanted to hear. Each caricatured the other as only representing the interests of middle-class women or the working-class respectively; as the frequent debates on the Woman Question in the socialist press put it, it was ‘Sex versus Class’.¹⁰ The group that seemed to get squeezed out was working-class women, who were asked to choose between their loyalties to their class or their sex. The problem in Britain was the property franchise. As one working-class socialist woman argued in 1906:

If one’s priority was how to ensure a fully democratic franchise that included all working-class women, then Finland seemed to be an inspiring achievement. So, at least, it seemed to one English suffragist in the summer of 1906.

Dora Montefiore (1851–1933) was an English suffragist, socialist and later communist.¹² By the time she became politically active she, like a number of her generation of British suffragists, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard, was a widow from a middle-class background. And like both of them (albeit in different ways) her suffragism was bound up with her socialism. Montefiore’s participation in the struggle for economic and social justice was driven by her political commitment to working-class emancipation rather than by her own class position. She described socialism as the ‘demand for the social, economic and political freedom of every human being’ and criticized those who ‘try to stir up a sex-war instead of preaching class-war’.¹³ By 1912, a New Zealand socialist newspaper said of her, ‘We rank our comrade among the world’s leading useful women workers of the working-class movement.’¹⁴ Her organizational affiliations changed over time but give some sense of her location across the key issues of the day. Her suffragism had begun in the early 1890s in Australia as a founding member of the Womanhood League of New South Wales.¹⁵ On her return to England she channelled her energies through various women’s suffrage pressure groups, such as the Union of Practical Suffragists and the Hammersmith Suffrage Society, as well as becoming an early member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). In 1907, she transferred her loyalties to the Adult Suffrage Society (ASS). At the same time she developed her commitment to socialism as a leading member of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation/British Socialist Party from about 1900 to 1912, re-joining in 1916. Finally, she was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, elected as the only woman member of its first executive. In both strands of her politics, which she refused to see as separate, she was an energetic although often dissident activist in both national and international organizations. Though based in England, she spent key periods of her life travelling, networking and making her politics outside Britain. This chapter focuses on one example of her particular way of doing politics. It explores Montefiore’s narration of the victory of Finnish women and how she deployed her visit to Finland in her subsequent suffrage activism, nationally and internationally.

Dora Montefiore visits Finland

Dora Montefiore’s announcement in the summer of 1906 that she was going to visit Finland was news because she had just completed a dramatic act of militancy: Fort Montefiore. The six-week siege by bailiffs of her home in Hammersmith following her stand of ‘No Taxation without Representation’ had reverberated around the world.¹⁶ This was the latest episode in her increasingly militant suffrage activism which, later that year, would result in her imprisonment in Holloway.

In 1906, there were few countries where women had achieved enfranchisement (only New Zealand, Australia and now Finland) and, in the increasingly combative suffrage politics of Britain, these examples were deployed by all sides within the debate.¹⁷ However, unlike the examples from within the British Empire, Finland was not a country of which many in Britain had intimate knowledge and up to this point had rarely figured within the rhetoric of the suffrage debate. Yet Montefiore had already referred to Finland on one of the occasions when she addressed the crowd from Fort Montefiore. She taunted the government with the up-to-the-minute jibe that ‘[t]‌hey were even behind Finland where women had been enfranchised’.¹⁸

On 1 August 1906, Montefiore began her journey to Finland via Copenhagen, where she attended the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) congress.¹⁹ Here would be an opportunity to meet Finnish suffragists. This was not her first international conference. For some time she had been exploring whether the International Council of Women and/or the IWSA would provide an opportunity to publicize her particular reading of British women’s politics and allow her to connect with the experiences of women activists from other countries.²⁰ Initially she was optimistic that women’s transnational organizations would provide a promising additional political space where women would learn from one another.

In 1906, Montefiore was a fraternal delegate to the IWSA from the already-militant WSPU.²¹ She had also represented it at the 1904 congress in Berlin, but now her credentials were challenged by other British delegates.²² Montefiore was a ‘fraternal’ delegate because the congress only recognized the constitutionalist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) as the sole voice of British suffragists. From its formation, the IWSA had decided that only one organization could represent each country. Montefiore questioned how representative this so-called ‘National’ society was, as it ‘did not represent the thousands and tens of thousands of working women who sympathise with, and work actively in, the Women’s Social and Political Union, under the battle-cry of “Votes for Women”!’²³ At this point on her suffrage journey, Montefiore believed that the best way to achieve her democratic goal of the enfranchisement of all working-class women was to argue for women to qualify for the vote on the same terms as men (a limited franchise based on property) as a stepping stone to full adult suffrage.²⁴ Before she went to Finland, like many British suffragists, she believed that adult suffrage was not an achievable demand in itself. Finland was to change her mind.

Montefiore was finally allowed to speak to the IWSA after the intervention of its president, Carrie Chapman Catt. In her speech, Montefiore defended the new militancy in which she was playing a highly visible part. She described the WSPU as ‘a movement of working women led by Socialist women of intellect and culture, bringing to downtrodden women the gospel of their rights as human beings’.²⁵ This representation was already at variance with that of the WSPU leadership, whose antipathy towards a socialist analysis of suffrage became more explicit from the summer of 1906, when Christabel Pankhurst unilaterally introduced a policy of opposing Labour as well as Liberal candidates at by-elections.²⁶ Even before Montefiore reached Finland, it was becoming clear that her days in the WSPU were numbered. Her Finnish experiences would demonstrate to her that a stepping stone of limited suffrage was not required to achieve full adult suffrage.

After a brief visit to Stockholm, where she spoke at the Folkets Hus (headquarters of the Swedish labour movement) on ‘Women’s Suffrage’, Montefiore sailed to Helsingfors (Helsinki) in Finland, arriving on 2 September. Now, she said, ‘the real object of my journey began – to find out how the Finnish women had gained their political emancipation’.²⁷ This involved a close study of Finnish, Swedish and Russian history, as well as participation in the fast-moving events around her as the Finns moved to implement their new democratic constitution. She attended the final meeting of the Diet’s Chamber of Nobles before it was dissolved – as she noted, ‘closing in one country of Europe the feudal epoch’.²⁸ When she got to know fellow socialist Miina Sillanpää and some of the other working women’s leaders, they helped her to understand more fully the reasons for the success of the Finnish women. In particular, Montefiore was struck by the crucial role of the mobilization of domestic servants, of whom Sillanpää was the organizer, and who, at the eleventh hour, joined in the general strike. This, according to Montefiore, gave the signal to include women in the franchise reform, which was then won ‘by a stroke of the pen’ of the Tsar.²⁹ While in Finland, Montefiore also benefited from the help of feminists who had attended the IWSA congress in Copenhagen the month before, such as Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg and Annie Furuhjelm – ‘all of whom’, she later wrote, ‘helped to make my visit to Finland a very happy spot in my memory’.³⁰ Soon Montefiore’s busy visit to Finland was over. She sailed for England, arriving in Hull on 16 September.

While she was away, Montefiore’s trip to Finland had caused contention back in England. It had allowed some to poke fun. The West London Observer commented: ‘It is believed that Mr Asquith would gladly subscribe to a small fund to send the rest of the suffragettes with her, in the hope that their investigations would be prolonged out there – that, in fact, they would never Finnish.’³¹ Fort Montefiore had made Dora Montefiore a recognizable public figure as a suffrage activist. This in turn made some of her socialist comrades uncomfortable. When Montefiore announced she was going to Finland, Herbert Burrows (a fellow member of the SDF) publicly criticized her for using her foreign trips to misrepresent British suffrage politics to an international audience: ‘If Mrs Montefiore cannot really work for it she might at least leave off talking about “solidarity” of the workers. I hope the Finnish women will teach her what real suffrage means.’³² Here, from one of the SDF’s leading pamphleteers on the Woman Question, was a reminder of the Party’s view that the only acceptable socialist position on the franchise was adult suffrage and even that was not a political priority.³³ Dora Montefiore’s by now longstanding and increasingly notorious activism for women’s suffrage was what rankled with Burrows, particularly when it was her version of suffragism which reached international audiences.

Writing in the pages of Justice, Montefiore replied to Burrows from Helsingfors. She took the opportunity to give her reading of the state of international suffragism and her place within it. At the IWSA, she said, there were women from almost every European state, from America and ‘from our various colonies’.

She said it was these tactics which were discussed in public meetings of the congress and more privately among the socialist group of delegates. Montefiore then went on to explain how women had recently achieved adult suffrage in Finland. She structured her narration of the Finnish victory to make a point to her domestic audience.

At this point Montefiore underlined how widespread adult suffragism was outside Britain and that the issue was how to achieve it. It was debates about tactics within individual nations that had been central to her discussions with other suffragists at the IWSA and which she then reflected upon when she met a range of activists in Finland.

Telling the story of Finnish women’s enfranchisement

Having investigated the Finnish achievement for herself, Montefiore’s reflections about Finland were now to feature in her propaganda work. Speaking on her return to England with Mrs Pankhurst and Flora Drummond at a WSPU meeting in Bury, Montefiore used her Finnish experience to justify militancy and her belief that the ultimate goal of suffrage activism was adult suffrage. She argued that recent events in Finland showed that people who were outside the Constitution could not work by constitutional methods; that it was only by getting the sex disability removed that adult suffrage could be achieved; and that women’s enfranchisement had not resulted in the dominance of women in public life (an anxiety of anti-suffragists).³⁶

Montefiore now gave lectures on Finland to suffragist and to socialist audiences as well as writing a number of articles. One lesson she drew was ‘the very large and important share taken by women in the work of the country … and the way women have stood by men, and shown their solidarity with men in the various political causes through which Finland has recently passed’.³⁷ She told one audience that people had the wrong impression of Finland as a bleak and half-civilized country and people, with the Finns having obtained Home Rule from Russia and universal suffrage. In this talk for Hammersmith Independent Labour Party (ILP) on ‘Socialism in Scandinavia’, she argued that understanding how working people in other countries had made real advances could itself be the spur to domestic political action.³⁸ At the close of 1906, she reviewed the year’s suffrage politics in England for the progressive journal New Age. She saw the success of Finnish women as an inspiring example.

The most important lesson she drew at this point was that adult suffrage was an achievable demand within Britain.

Dora Montefiore was to continue to deploy her Finnish experiences and networks in her suffrage politics in Britain and beyond. Much of what she was now to argue was challenging for her audiences, but her message was seen to have more authority because she had actually travelled to Finland to see for herself how the Finns had made this breakthrough. As a middle-class woman of private means, she had the resources (money, time and personal networks) to do this. Crucially, she also had the curiosity and growing international reputation to make these journeys possible. Indeed, political travel was to become an increasingly important feature of her propaganda work from this Scandinavian journey onwards.⁴⁰ What is clear is that without meeting key actors and exploring for herself the nature of Finnish politics she would not have been able to make the case that she did on her return.⁴¹

New friendships with Finnish socialist women were forged during this visit, which influenced the way in which Montefiore narrated the achievement of women’s suffrage in Finland as well as how she put this example to work in her subsequent suffrage politics. This was apparent in 1910, when she told a New York audience how much she had learnt from meeting Miina Sillanpää in Finland. Sillanpää was clearly very different to the middle-class Montefiore. Having started her working life as a domestic servant when she was ten years old, she later became an organizer of other servants. She eventually became one of the first Social Democrat women to be elected to the Finnish parliament. Meeting Sillanpää gave Montefiore a personal connection with the successful Finnish suffragists and provided yet more evidence that suffragism did not have to have a middle-class face and could particularly benefit working-class women.⁴²

The fact that the full democratic demand had been won without the kind of compromises which featured in the mainstream demand for women’s enfranchisement in Britain was important to Montefiore’s representation of the Finnish victory. But so too was the crucial role of a labour movement in which, as she had learnt from Sillanpää, even women servants were organized (not an area of work which many in the British labour movement saw as fruitful).⁴³ Yet, she later recalled that what had seemed such a persuasive and hopeful achievement to her as a socialist woman who supported adult suffrage was not always heard in this way by her audiences at home and abroad.⁴⁴

Many did not understand the ways in which class impacted on British suffrage politics. All the main suffrage societies made the same demand; women should be enfranchised on the same terms as existed for men. In Britain, men only qualified for the vote on the basis of the value of the accommodation they occupied. As a result, in the Edwardian period about 40% of adult men did not qualify to vote. The property franchise meant that the British voting system was divided by class as well as gender. There was no consensus then (and misunderstandings continue to this day) on how far down the class structure the franchise would have reached if the demand for ‘Votes for Women’ had been won. What was clear was that merely extending the existing property qualification to women would necessarily include fewer women than the 60% of men who qualified because most tenancies (and few people owned their homes at this time) were held by men, unless a woman was widowed or single. During the suffrage campaign, there was fierce debate on the numbers and class of the women who would get the vote if ‘Votes for Women’ was conceded.⁴⁵ This was a significant detail of the British experience, of which many European and American audiences were unaware.

Competing narratives of Finnish women’s enfranchisement

Dora Montefiore was not the only person who brought the Finnish suffrage story to a British audience. Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg (Finnish novelist and long-time women’s rights advocate) published her account of ‘The great victory in Finland’ in The Englishwoman’s Review before Montefiore’s trip to Finland.⁴⁶ Gripenberg, whom Montefiore was to meet in Finland, stressed how important the strategy of demanding universal suffrage had been to the women’s success, both in terms of getting male support and of ensuring that women were included in any reform. However, she placed relatively little stress on the role of the labour movement in women’s victory.⁴⁷ This is unsurprising when one knows, as many British suffragists did not, that although Gripenberg was a feminist, she was also a conservative nationalist with a strong antipathy to the Left. There were competing stories to tell of Finnish women’s enfranchisement and Finns could be as partisan as anyone else in the lessons they drew from this historic episode.

Within Britain’s combative suffrage politics, Montefiore defended her analysis of Finnish women’s enfranchisement against those who she claimed ‘Misrepresented Finnish women’ (the title of a piece in Justice).⁴⁸ She took the Justice columnist ‘Jill’ to task for suggesting erroneously that Alexandra Gripenberg was the leader of the Finnish women MPs. Underlining her own claims to authority on this matter, Montefiore argued, ‘unless one has been in Finland, or in touch with Finnish thought, it is difficult to realize how acute are the differences between the various parties’.⁴⁹ She not only termed Gripenberg ‘the friend and defender of the odious Bobrikoff’ (governor general of Finland from 1898 to 1904), but also reported that from her own experience of the recent IWSA congress in Copenhagen, ‘the Radical women and Alexandra Gripenberg were not even on bowing terms, so much did the former resent the attitude of the Baroness towards the late oppressor of their country’.⁵⁰ In a recent study, Tiina Kinnunen has shown how Gripenberg was both a suffragist and an anti-socialist and nationalist.⁵¹ Her wider politics were therefore in tension with Montefiore’s, who became increasingly radical over the years. Although international networks were crucial to both women, the fact that their paths crossed through their participation in the same events and organizations did not mean that they agreed with one another. Indeed, Montefiore increasingly positioned herself in opposition to Gripenberg’s politics, particularly in terms of her suffragism.

Montefiore’s reading of the achievement of full women’s suffrage in Finland made clear whose political actions and friendship she valued among the Finnish women she had met in 1906. In criticizing how the Labour Leader had represented Miina Sillanpää (giving her a husband she did not have as well as misspelling her name), Montefiore not only described her as ‘my friend’ but went on to provide a warm and politically engaged portrait of the woman who was to become Finland’s first woman minister.⁵² She described how despite being sent into service as a child, Sillanpää had managed to educate herself and then to organize other domestic servants. She had started a newspaper for those in domestic service and eventually founded a modest laundry where unemployed servants could find work. It was at the laundry, Montefiore said, that ‘I first found her, a grave, thoughtful and sympathetic woman, between 35 and 40 years of age. We met as often as we could afterwards, for she had much to ask, and I had much to learn.’ The key for Montefiore was that the domestic servants’ organization ‘struck the final “coup” in the general strike that gave Finland her new constitution’.⁵³

Montefiore urged socialist women to listen to the voice of the ordinary enfranchised women of Finland rather than to Baroness Gripenberg. She was particularly critical of what she saw as Gripenberg’s patronising dismissal of Finland’s Social Democratic women MPs as ‘uneducated women, tailors, factory workers, and domestic servants, who are not qualified to carry out the higher tasks of a representative assembly’.⁵⁴ She challenged Gripenberg and those who shared the Baroness’s views: ‘The words “laundresses and factory workers,” which are used by middle class women as terms of contempt, do not frighten us; we recognize in them units of the great mass of the insurgent people, demanding the same access to the means of life as the privileged few now possess.’⁵⁵ In contrast, Montefiore’s version of Finnish enfranchisement brought to the fore working-class women such as Miina Sillanpää.

Dora Montefiore had a story she wanted to tell about the lessons to be drawn from Finnish women’s success, but she had to find audiences who wanted to hear it. In Britain, she was disappointed that her own party, the SDF, gave her little space to speak or write about her Finnish trip. This was probably because of her reputation as a suffragette. In the immediate aftermath of her Finnish trip this would have played better with parts of the ILP than with the SDF. Certainly, ILP branches seem to have been more eager to hear of her Finnish experiences.⁵⁶ In international meetings the situation was rather different. At the first International Socialist Women’s Congress held in Stuttgart in August 1907, Montefiore represented the Adult Suffrage Society (ASS). Part of the British delegation (mainly from the ILP) challenged her credentials as they claimed the ASS was not a socialist organization. Their agenda was clear, as these women were limited suffragists who were taking the opportunity to challenge a suffrage position with which they disagreed. According to the socialist newspaper Clarion, Clara Zetkin (the leader of German socialist women) made from the chair ‘a passionate declaration that the Adult Suffrage Society was in a perfect accord with the spirit of the Congress and that it was also engaged in a fierce fight against the reactionary bourgeois “feminists”’.⁵⁷ Within the Socialist International and in many of its affiliated socialist parties, Zetkin’s was a familiar distinction. This was between, on the one hand, middle-class suffragists, whose focus was principally on ending the sex disqualification of women from citizenship for the benefit of their own class, and, on the other, those campaigning for adult suffrage, who were said to be the only suffragists who were determined to include all working-class women in any franchise reforms.

Having had her credentials to attend the Congress confirmed, Montefiore was present to hear Hilja Pärssinen, one of Finland’s women MPs, get ‘the biggest clap of all from the Congress delegates’.⁵⁸ The Congress as a whole supported the kind of suffrage that had led to Pärssinen’s election: adult suffrage. As the Clarion reported, most speakers from across the globe ‘delivered their speeches with such dramatic force as to make the very floor tremble’. They argued, ‘We believe in Adult Suffrage, in the class war. We want no sentiment, but citizenship. The proletariat will never be satisfied with a limited measure. It isn’t Socialism.’ However, there was not complete unanimity. In an amendment to the Congress’s resolution advocating full adult suffrage, some of the English delegates made their case for limited women’s suffrage. Dora Montefiore was among those speaking against this amendment.⁵⁹ Within the international socialist women’s movement Montefiore’s espousal of adult suffrage and her particular reading of the Finnish case were not exceptional. However, the politics of suffrage within Britain was rather different.

In 1907, the Congress of the Second International came out firmly for adult suffrage, repudiating limited women’s suffrage ‘as an adulteration of, and caricature upon, the principle of political equality of the female sex’. Instead it called for ‘womanhood suffrage’ and sought to sever any links between socialists and what they termed bourgeois women suffragists.⁶⁰ At the end of that year the SDF, now renamed the Social Democratic Party, produced its Manifesto on the Question of Universal Adult Suffrage. It drew on the example of Finland in the same way that Montefiore had done. It was argued that when adult suffrage, ‘this democratic reform’, had been passed in Finland it had been the result of Social Democratic and Radical agitation. The Finnish experience was contrasted with the confusion within the English campaign caused by ‘a worn-out middle-class theory of a “property qualification”’ which had led to:

These were the themes that Montefiore would continue to emphasize as she deployed the example of Finland in the ever-more-divided suffrage politics of Britain.

Putting the Finnish example to work in the polarized suffrage politics of Britain

Montefiore chose particular moments to use the Finnish example to make her suffrage point over the next few years. By early 1907, she had broken with the WSPU and was an unequivocal adult suffragist. Increasingly the key issue for her was class. From 1908, she argued that socialist women must sever all connections with the leading women’s suffrage organizations on both sides of the militant divide because when they demanded ‘Votes for Women’ they actually only meant ‘Votes for Women Householders’.⁶² Exposing the limitations of what she and others termed the ‘Limited’ demand became increasingly important to her and more urgent as the women’s suffrage campaign polarized between a demand which would enfranchise all women, as in Finland, or a demand that would only give the vote to some women.

By the beginning of 1909, Finnish women – including that unique phenomenon, the woman MP – were being invited to speak to suffrage meetings in Britain. Each group seemed to favour a particular woman whose narrative of her countrywomen’s enfranchisement was in tune with its particular position on women’s suffrage. Aino Malmberg and Dr Thekla Hultin MP spoke for the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), while Annie Furuhjelm addressed NUWSS meetings when she was in London attending the IWSA congress.⁶³ The Finnish story told by the speakers chosen by the WFL tended to emphasize the importance of men and women working together, arguing against the notion of a sex war.⁶⁴ Malmberg was a Finnish writer living in London whom Montefiore claimed to be ‘an excellent comrade of ours’, as she had already spoken on behalf of the ASS in 1908.⁶⁵ On that occasion, Malmberg told the story of how socialist men and women standing together in a well-organized general strike had wrested adult suffrage from the Tsar. By 1909, Malmberg’s emphasis was more on Russia’s threat to Finland’s liberty and the determination of women to fight to defend their freedoms ‘because they are all full citizens, and have tasted the joy of freedom and of the power to make their own laws and administer their own affairs’.⁶⁶ On hearing Malmberg speak, Montefiore, now honorary secretary of the ASS, commented, ‘Let us take example by the Finns, and learn solidarity in the struggle for the political weapon for every adult man and woman.’⁶⁷

Later in 1909, Montefiore reported to her readers in Justice that Aino Malmberg was staying at her house, where she had been writing a pamphlet for the WFL, to be entitled How Finnish Women Gained Universal Adult Suffrage. Montefiore claimed the WFL had removed all references to the role of the Finnish Social Democrats in the successful agitation for votes for all women and men. This was without the permission of the author, who was deeply troubled by this ‘mangled pamphlet’, which was an ‘impeachment of her intellectual integrity’. Montefiore observed that ‘The history of gaining Universal Adult Suffrage in Finland cannot be faithfully written without referring to the fact that the agitation of the Socialists was one of the factors in obtaining this political reform.’⁶⁸ Montefiore went on to challenge the behaviour of the leading WFL members Charlotte Despard and Teresa Billington-Grieg, who she claimed had authorized this anti-socialist ‘bowdlerising’ of the pamphlet despite being members of socialist organizations. Underlining this dispute between limited and adult suffragists, when Malmberg’s pamphlet was eventually advertised in the WFL’s paper The Vote, its title was Women’s Suffrage in Finland.⁶⁹

At the same time Montefiore stressed that Finnish women MPs endorsed her own emphasis on the role of socialists in the achievement of adult suffrage. Some were more than willing to confirm Montefiore’s reading of Finnish women’s enfranchisement. Hilja Pärssinen MP sent a telegram of congratulation from the women of Finland to the Adult Suffrage demonstration held in London in April 1909. Moreover, Pärssinen emphasized that there were real tensions between women MPs in Finland; class rather than sex was the basis for solidarity. She reported that ‘the class struggle between the Social Democratic women and the reactionary women is being carried on as fiercely in the Finnish Diet as it is in the political organizations’.⁷⁰ Montefiore added, ‘One point in her letter seems almost incredible, that women who already possess full political rights should be working for restricted municipal rights for women, but Parsinen assures me in her letter that an attempt is being made to grant municipal rights to women on a property basis only.’⁷¹

Montefiore used this point not only as ammunition in the war of attrition between adult and limited suffragists in Britain, but also more particularly against a rival socialist organization, the ILP. She challenged a paragraph in a recent edition of its newspaper, Labour Leader, which had welcomed the election of ‘twenty-five lady members’ to the Finnish Diet. For Montefiore this language revealed the underlying politics: ‘The point for us Socialists to record is surely not how many “lady members” there were or are in a National Parliament, but how many Socialist women members have been elected, and to point out that the fight between the class interests of women Socialists and of all middle-class women is as keen inside Parliament as outside.’⁷²

The framing of what exactly Finnish women had achieved and what had assured their victory mattered. The WSPU echoed its own domestic demand by saying that what had been achieved in Finland was that women had ‘been granted the right to vote on the same terms as men’.⁷³ And of course they had, but in the form of adult suffrage rather than the limited property-based franchise. Now the Finnish example was as likely to be deployed in the suffrage press against anti-suffragists as in debates between different kinds of suffragists.⁷⁴ However, in 1910, the Russian Empire removed the legislative powers from the Finnish Diet as part of the re-imposition of its Russification programme on the Grand Duchy of Finland. Unsurprisingly, this coloured the debate on what the example of Finland could teach suffragists elsewhere.

New voices and new emphases

Increasingly, when it came to Finnish suffrage, the voice that was heard most loudly in the British suffrage press and beyond was not Dora Montefiore’s but that of Aino Malmberg.⁷⁵ She was a Finnish woman, exiled in London because of her opposition to Russian oppression, who had been speaking at WFL and ILP meetings across the country from 1909.⁷⁶ She was a lecturer and author before her work for progressive causes drove her from Finland, spending time in both Britain and the United States and unable to return home until the Russian Revolution in 1917 freed Finland from Tsarist control. Her role as the British voice of Finnish women was reinforced in 1911, when she was a founding member of the Anglo-Finnish Society.⁷⁷ She became joint honorary secretary with Rosalind Travers (who was soon to marry Montefiore’s former comrade, the leader of the BSP, H. M. Hyndman), whose book Letters from Finland (1910) was much advertised in the suffrage press. Now the issue for Malmberg was more about defending the rights won by Finnish women than using their achievement to bolster the claim that adult suffrage was an achievable demand.

The lessons drawn in the suffrage press and beyond were changing. In the years preceding the First World War, writers most often emphasized that admitting women to the Finnish parliament had not favoured any one political party, had not led to women voters acting as one, had not disrupted the home, had not unsexed Finnish women (whether as voters or MPs) or disturbed the business of the Diet itself.⁷⁸ These were all fears stoked by anti-suffragists in Britain and elsewhere. The Finnish example was now cited to make the case for the difference that women voters and legislators made to Finland.⁷⁹

This contrasted with the issue that Montefiore still felt was most important: how best to organize to achieve a fully democratic franchise. In 1911, she was addressing Australian audiences as an experienced international adult suffragist who denounced the limited suffrage demand of ‘Votes for Women’ as ‘disingenuous’: ‘Beneath the suffragette skirt peeps the cloven hoof of extension of political power to property and privilege.’⁸⁰ She now characterized the British women’s suffrage movement as ‘a desperate and spasmodic effort of entrenched capitalism to keep back the rising waves of democracy and of democratic demand’.⁸¹ It was her judgement that:

This, of course, was the kind of strategy which had led to the achievement of full adult suffrage in Finland.

However, the context for domestic suffrage politics was changing with the failure of the Conciliation bills, the formalizing of the Labour/suffrage alliance and the intensification of suffragette militancy. There was also the increasingly long shadow cast by Russia over Finland’s sovereignty and democracy. Although Britain’s progressive press (suffragist, socialist and labour) continued to cover Finland, it was much more often in terms of the country’s liberty rather than its particular franchise.⁸³

By 1913, The Vote, referring to recent discussion on women’s suffrage in Finland in various mainstream journals such as The Englishwoman and The Review of Reviews, concluded:

Generally, the language of class and of adult suffrage was much less apparent in discussions of Finland in progressive journals. Of all the suffrage organizations it was the WFL that, despite its continuing commitment to limited women’s suffrage within Britain, gave space to reports on Finland in which the achievement of adult suffrage was named and acknowledged. Personal connections with Finnish women, particularly MPs like Thekla Hultin and Annie Furuhjelm, were reinforced by the fact that both women spoke at WFL meetings when visiting Britain and their words were reported in The Vote. In contrast, Justice’s report of the success of women in the 1913 Finnish general election concluded with the words, ‘Class tells!’⁸⁵ Its focus was on the fact that the number of socialist women MPs outnumbered all those representing non-socialist parties. But they were not complacent; women were only 14% of the socialist MPs, despite constituting 20% of the party membership. It was also suggested that ‘a permanent feature even under adult suffrage’ was a ‘greater apathy of women to political questions’.⁸⁶ This was not the kind of comment that Montefiore was ever likely to make. She had been a dissident member of what was now the British Socialist Party (BSP) partly because of its ambivalence on the Woman Question. By the time of this report, Montefiore was still a socialist and suffragist, but was no longer a party member, having resigned from the BSP at the end of 1912.

Common Cause’s report on the same Finnish election results celebrated the numbers of women elected, but had nothing to say about class.⁸⁷ However, its report of the visit to England of the Finnish MP Hilja Pärssinen included her description of parliamentary work.

Pärssinen’s analysis was even more explicit in her journalism in Justice, where she pointed out the strict separation between her Finnish socialist women’s organization and ‘any bourgeois Women’s Society’. In parliament, ‘the Social-Democratic women are not satisfied with the mere vote, but attach special importance to the representation in Parliament by women, and especially working women, those being most fitted to stand for their interests’.⁸⁹ Montefiore would have concurred with this view.

Conclusion

Dora Montefiore was less involved in domestic politics in the years immediately before the First World War, as from 1910 to 1914 she made a series of extensive extra-European trips to the United States, Australia and South Africa. As she encountered new audiences it was as a propagandist who shared the lessons she drew from her political travels. In Australia, readers of The Socialist were told:

Her priorities changed in these years as she focused on what she saw as the more urgent intertwined challenges of militarism and imperialism, but she never eschewed adult suffragism. She founded a short-lived journal called Adult Suffrage, inauspiciously launched in July 1914.⁹¹ Nor did the war silence her. In November 1915, she again called on suffragists to reframe their demand.

Once more she used the Finnish example to support her case. She called for the dropping of the old formulas of property qualifications and instead, ‘like the women of Finland did when they won their enfranchisement, demand the vote for every woman and every man … If ever clear thinking, decided action and solidarity among organized women were needed, it is now.’⁹³

In the years after her visit to Finland in 1906, Dora Montefiore had deployed her experiences, analysis and personal networks within her political work: in lectures, journalism and within a range of British and transnational socialist and suffragist organizations. Travel and the resulting experience gave authority to the political arguments she wished to make. This was particularly the case when the position she took was outside the mainstream or challenged dominant thinking. It was certainly significant that Montefiore was one of the few foreign witnesses to this key moment in Finnish history and in the global struggle for women’s citizenship. It also mattered that she met, and then continued to network with, some of the key women who had helped to make Finland the first European country to enfranchise women. What she saw and heard in Finland reinforced her commitment to the goal of full adult suffrage. However, in the tempestuous debates on the franchise in Britain, which centred on determining the most effective strategy to achieve women’s enfranchisement, the demand for adult suffrage was often regarded as hopelessly utopian. The Finnish experience, as presented by Montefiore, seemed to show that it was an achievable demand. Her continuing mobilization of the Finnish story domestically and internationally had a power for each new audience precisely because it was based on her experiences. It was only by going to Finland, the sole British suffragist to do so at the time, and by persistently reinforcing the relationships established there with Finnish women like Sillanpää, that Montefiore was able to make her distinct contribution to suffrage politics in Britain and beyond.

Montefiore’s political practice continued to involve learning lessons from abroad, deploying these domestically and in subsequent travels to give the authority of experience to a set of arguments which some in her audiences would have found challenging. Few suffrage audiences wanted to hear a message which stressed class so emphatically by challenging a property-based franchise and lauding the power of the organized working class to achieve full adult suffrage. Similarly, the labour movement was not always keen to be reminded that organized women workers, including servants, could have a decisive role in achieving political goals. Dora Montefiore was determined that, as an internationalist, the politics she made and in which she took part should not be parochial. This was a political practice premised on making connections – and her trip to Finland was one example of how she made this work.