The girls’ secondary school was an important site for the women’s suffrage debate in late Victorian and Edwardian England. While it is well known that many women teachers were active in the campaign, previous studies have focused on their suffrage politics outside the classroom.¹ Teachers’ suffrage activism within the school itself has been largely neglected. Further, based on an assumption that political engagement is intrinsically adult, schoolgirls’ interactions with the suffrage question have been especially overlooked. In contrast, female university students’ involvement in the suffrage movement is relatively well understood, but it is unlikely that these young women entered higher education entirely disengaged from politics.² Indeed, the campaign for the parliamentary vote not only mobilized large numbers of adult women – on both sides of the debate – but also captivated a younger audience. By integrating the histories of childhood, education and politics, this chapter argues that schoolgirls, teachers and a growing alumnae community of ‘old girls’ engaged with the discourses and divisions of the women’s suffrage movement in their everyday lives at school.

All-female, residential institutions have long been recognized as spaces for women’s politicization and community.³ Bringing together educated, likeminded women, the middle-class girls’ day school played a similar role and nurtured women teachers’ suffragist politics. Teachers and old girls used the school building and magazine as a venue and organ for sharing their political opinions. Colleagues and pupils, past and present, provided a ready audience. However, schoolgirls were far from passive recipients of adult suffragism. Through debating, writing and even joking about aspects of the campaign for the parliamentary vote, schoolgirls themselves contributed to the suffrage debate.

Hilda Kean, Dina Copelman and Alison Oram have compellingly demonstrated the important connections between women teachers’ professional and feminist identities at the turn of the twentieth century. Their studies illuminate women teachers’ political activity beyond the classroom, in trade unions and feminist, socialist and suffrage organizations.⁴ However, this analytical focus overlooks how the school itself might provide a site for teachers’ political expression, reflecting a general trend in histories of girls’ education to marginalize political experiences at school.⁵ Where the politicizing potential of the educational setting has been considered, schoolgirls are largely conceptualized in passive terms. Julia Bush and Gillian Sutherland highlight contemporary fears about suffragist teachers corrupting supposedly impressionable schoolgirls, giving important insights into the perceived reach of the suffrage debate into everyday spaces like schools.⁶ Carol Dyhouse notes a couple of examples where teachers encouraged girls to show their support for women’s suffrage more openly.⁷ Nevertheless, the links between the participation of teachers, old girls and schoolgirls in the suffrage debate have yet to be considered fully. Building on a growing literature that positions children and young people as political actors, this chapter restores girls’ own contributions to the vibrant, intergenerational political culture of the girls’ school.⁸

Some historians have explored the interplay of youth and suffragism. Jill Liddington convincingly showed how criticism of ‘baby suffragette’ Dora Thewlis, who was arrested aged sixteen at a suffrage protest in 1907, centred on conflicting constructions of her age. Thewlis was criticized both for her childishness and precocious behaviour, refracted through gendered and sexualized terms.⁹ Indeed, age could be used to delegitimize suffragist commitment. As Kean observed, women teachers who supported the cause were often stereotyped as young and, therefore, immature, naïve and impulsive.¹⁰ Looking across the school community sheds new light on how age shaped suffrage activity; childhood and adolescence offered girls different routes to engage with the suffrage question, while adulthood brought its own opportunities and challenges for the participation of alumnae and teachers in the movement.

This chapter focuses primarily on the educational communities of feepaying girls’ day secondary schools in London, Nottingham, Manchester and Blackburn. In the capital, this includes the prestigious North London Collegiate School and City of London School for Girls, two Girls’ Public Day School Company (GPDSC) schools in Notting Hill and Wimbledon and Central Foundation Girls’ School in Spital Square which, with cheaper fees, attracted lower-middle-class families.¹¹ Manchester High School for Girls, Blackburn High School for Girls and Nottingham Girls’ High School (another GPDSC institution) offer insights into schoolgirl experiences in other urban contexts.¹² Alongside school magazines and old girls’ association newsletters from these institutions, the chapter also draws on periodicals aimed at elementary school teachers and autobiographical accounts of school life. This range of sources enables an exploration of how age and class influenced schoolgirls’ engagement with the suffrage question. The younger elementary school leaving age, which rose in this period from ten to thirteen, meant that working-class schoolgirls engaged with women’s suffrage on different terms to their middle-class adolescent peers. Using the different resources available to them, girls’ school teachers encouraged older, middle-class pupils to tackle the subject intellectually in debates or creative writing for the school magazine. Meanwhile, in elementary schools, attempts were made to guide younger, working-class girls’ interactions with suffrage more closely, through scripted dramatic performance.

There is an expansive literature on the importance of women’s periodicals to building and sustaining the women’s movement.¹³ This chapter reinstates the girls’ school magazine and wider educational press into this story. School magazines are especially rich sources for educational experience that have received renewed interest from historians in recent years. Catherine Sloan expertly demonstrated the value of the genre for studying scholars’ participation in and contributions to educational and literary cultures.¹⁴ Sara Delamont noted that women’s suffrage is rarely mentioned in official girls’ school histories and Stephanie Spencer’s study of the GPDSC Sutton High School magazines showed that some publications remained silent on the issue of women’s suffrage.¹⁵ However, in other institutions where headmistresses were more willing to engage openly with issues affecting women in public life, school magazines provide a fascinating window onto how teachers, old girls and pupils engaged with the suffrage debate.

The first half of this chapter demonstrates how teachers used subtle strategies – such as school magazines and old girls’ associations – to celebrate women’s suffrage activism at school while avoiding the reputational risks of participating more openly in suffrage work. It then considers how teachers encouraged schoolgirls’ engagement with the suffrage question through debating societies and suffrage plays. The final section shows how girls themselves took the initiative, approaching suffrage through subversive humour and expressing opinions at both extremes of the debate more easily than adults could in the school context. The chapter therefore offers a new perspective on the suffrage activism of teachers and alumnae, highlights schoolgirls’ active participation in the debate and argues that their shared experience of women’s suffrage is key to understanding the girls’ school as an intergenerational political community.

The girls’ school nurtured women teachers’ and old girls’ suffragist politics, both on site and through the textual spaces of school publications. By bringing together educated, professional women, girls’ schools provided opportunities for political discussion. As Oram argued, recruitment among teachers was an important way to bring more women into the suffrage movement.¹⁶ Women elementary teachers, especially, linked their suffrage activism to the inequalities they faced in the workplace, like the marriage bar and equal pay.¹⁷ With the latter, at least, less of an issue among the all-female workforce of middle-class girls’ schools, it is important to consider what alternative narratives these women constructed about their suffrage work. The disconnect between their professional standing as teachers and their unenfranchised status as women no doubt contributed.¹⁸ However, conceptualizing the girls’ school as a community where teachers, old girls and current pupils engaged with the suffrage question together suggests that teachers not only framed their suffragism against professional struggles but around the unique opportunities that the educational setting offered.

The all-female school environment could foster mutual encouragement and solidarity between colleagues, providing a route to collective action for a shared cause like women’s suffrage. In November 1884, for example, the headmistress and twenty assistant mistresses at the Girls’ Public Day School Company school in Dulwich delivered a petition to Parliament demanding the inclusion of women householders in the Reform Bill.¹⁹ As the leading signatory, the support of headmistress Mary Jemima Alger was decisive. Other headmistresses similarly encouraged their staff to engage with suffrage work. At North London Collegiate School, Sophie Bryant, who joined the teaching staff in 1875 and became headmistress twenty years later, went to considerable lengths to share her suffragist politics with her colleagues. As one example, in 1904, she invited Emily Davies, a leading figure in the women’s movement, to open a discussion on women’s suffrage at a staff meeting.²⁰ Bryant made the most of her political contacts to raise the profile of women’s suffrage among mistresses at North London Collegiate School.

Old girls also benefited politically from their school connections. In the late nineteenth century, numerous old girls’ associations were formed as the first generation of pupils left the newly established high schools. These provided an ongoing social focus for former pupils, a space for them to pursue shared – and suitably ‘feminine’ – interests and continue some of the extracurricular activities of their school days. However, young middle-class women were also keen to maintain links to their school for other reasons. Sarah Richardson has pointed to the ‘informal political networks’ that radical dissenting schools offered middle-class pupils in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.²¹ A similar phenomenon can be identified in girls’ schools a century later. As an all-female space, the school could legitimize activities that were deemed inappropriate for women in other contexts. This included opportunities to discuss political issues, including women’s suffrage. As early as 1888, for example, Old North Londoners addressed the question of women’s political rights formally for the first time. Miss Balgarnie – referring, perhaps, to the suffragist Florence Balgarnie – spoke on the matter. Following a short discussion, attendees voted almost unanimously for headmistress Frances Mary Buss to sign a women’s suffrage petition on behalf of the group.²² In the same way that teachers agitated collectively for women’s suffrage, associations of likeminded alumnae could make tangible contributions to the cause.

Suffragist teachers recognized the potential of old girls’ associations for the women’s movement. Educated women who had attended schools that celebrated women’s civic duty were prime recruitment targets. Headmistresses sometimes made direct appeals to old girls. In 1900, the retiring headmistress of Notting Hill High School, Harriet Morant Jones, used her final speech to the old girls’ association to promote women’s suffrage and urge former pupils still seeking useful occupation to volunteer for the cause.²³ On other occasions, old girls took the initiative and raised the question of women’s suffrage with their peers. For example, a group of Nottingham Girls’ High School alumnae selected universal suffrage for women as a subject for a debate at their old girls’ association, the Whetstone of Wit, in 1887.²⁴

As the women’s suffrage campaign grew, so did the scope of school-based suffrage activity. A meeting was held at Notting Hill High School in November 1910 ‘to promote discussion on the burning question of Woman Suffrage’.²⁵ With the permission of the headmistress, Agnes S. Paul, sixth-formers attended alongside teachers and old girls, suggesting that engaging the eldest and most intellectually mature pupils with the suffrage debate was acceptable to both staff and parents. Despite attempts to foster a balanced discussion, the organizers were unable to find a former pupil to speak against suffrage for a formal debate. Representatives from various women’s suffrage societies even sold literature to those who remained undecided.²⁶ The school seemed comfortable publicizing its suffragist stance; the meeting was reported in some detail in the school magazine, reflecting a wider appetite in educational circles for news and information about the women’s suffrage campaign.

School magazines for current and former pupils played a key role in publicizing teachers’ and old girls’ suffrage activities within school communities. For example, North London Collegiate School’s Our Magazine regularly published details of Sophie Bryant’s political work after she became headmistress in 1895. Despite occasional references to other teachers’ political endeavours – like second mistress Sara Burstall’s 1897 lecture series on ‘Elementary Politics’ given to the Oxford Women’s Liberal Federation²⁷ – Bryant’s contributions received the most attention in Our Magazine. Given her reputation for public political activity, this is unsurprising.²⁸ Eleanor Hill (born Eleanor Margaret Childs in 1861), old girl, former teacher, school governor and long-serving editor of the school magazine between 1894 and 1923, shared short, factual updates on Bryant’s political activities with its readership of staff and current and former pupils. We can assume that the attention given to women’s suffrage in these updates owed much to Hill’s own suffragist convictions; Hill was a member of the Hampstead Local Committee of the Central Society for Women’s Suffrage, as Our Magazine noted in February 1907.²⁹ Between 1905 and 1909, readers could learn about Bryant signing women’s suffrage petitions, being invited to speak at suffrage meetings, leading processions and serving as president of the local women’s suffrage committee in Hampstead.³⁰ Similar reports continued in the following years, as the magazine turned its attention towards Bryant’s longstanding support for Irish Home Rule.³¹ Funded primarily through its subscribers, Our Magazine was an important mechanism for publicizing Bryant’s political work to an audience with connections to the school. Although old girls made up the majority of subscriptions – nearly 60% in 1890 – repeated efforts were made to increase readership among girls at the school.³² A reduced subscription rate for current girls was introduced in 1907 and the school’s prospectus repeatedly advertised the publication.³³ Underlying these school magazine reports, then, was an implicit assertion that readers – including current and old girls – had the right to know about their headmistress’s political activities. Perhaps it was hoped they would share Bryant’s suffragist beliefs.

Like school magazines, old girls’ association newsletters also provided opportunities for teachers and former pupils to promote the cause. At Nottingham Girls’ High School, we can see this information sharing process in action. One contributor to the March 1897 hand-made volume of the Whetstone of Wit, produced by Nottingham’s old girls, presented an intellectual case for women’s suffrage in a handwritten plea that ran to seven pages.³⁴ Following established practice, the volume was then circulated between association members, who offered feedback on the contributions. One reviewer especially welcomed the article on the suffrage question – ‘one that ought to be taken up by W. W. Members’.³⁵ Over the years, associations became more explicit in their recruitment efforts. In 1909, the Newsletter of the Blackburn High School Old Girls’ Association printed a lengthy article on ‘Women and the suffrage’ detailing the history and principles of the movement and seeking support for its constitutional side from readers. This included arguments that enfranchisement would bring material improvements to women’s lives, like equal pay, and the contributions women could make to political life.³⁶ In 1911, the school’s headmistress, Margaret Gardner, used her regular newsletter entry to implore her former pupils to be ready for full citizenship which would soon be given to women.³⁷

As well as publicizing potential further education and employment options, old girls’ networks exposed current schoolgirls and alumnae to ideas about women’s suffrage. The small number of pupils who progressed to higher education kept in touch with their schools through ‘college letters’ – a regular feature of girls’ school magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where students wrote back about their experiences at university.³⁸ These students encountered a wealth of opportunities to engage with the suffrage debate and the university political scene featured strongly in their correspondence. Between 1890 and 1912, college letters referencing women’s suffrage were published in the school magazines or old girls’ association newsletters of Blackburn High School for Girls, Central Foundation Girls’ School, North London Collegiate School, Notting Hill High School and Wimbledon High School.³⁹ These were sent from former pupils at a range of higher education institutions, including women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, Royal Holloway and Bedford Colleges, the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and London School of Medicine. Correspondents described women’s suffrage debates, suffrage societies and fundraising. Through their letters, alumnae celebrated the political activities available to them at university and encouraged teacher, old girl and schoolgirl readers to follow their suffrage work with interest.

Girls’ school magazines acted as communication channels for the suffrage movement in other ways. They gave regular updates on former pupils, including changes of address, employment, educational achievements, marriages and the births of children. Occasionally, magazines recorded old girls’ work for the suffrage movement. Between 1906 and 1914, Manchester High School for Girls, Notting Hill High School and North London Collegiate School each referenced former pupils’ involvement with constitutional women’s suffrage societies.⁴⁰ The proliferation of examples from the latter in part reflected the editor’s own suffragist views, as discussed earlier. Old girls took on roles such as secretary, chairman and treasurer of local branches of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the Church League for Women’s Suffrage and various university suffrage societies. Although a large number of alumnae went into teaching, the lack of references to membership of the Women Teachers’ Franchise Union, founded in 1912, can be explained by the relatively small proportion who chose to work in elementary schools, where – in a mixed-gender setting – issues of professional equality like equal pay were more pressing. Nevertheless, the references to suffrage society membership that can be identified demonstrate that school magazines had the potential to play an important role facilitating contact between women active in the movement. They offered a valuable communication tool for maintaining links across the suffragist community and enabling others to get involved.

School magazines sometimes gave lengthy accounts of old girls’ campaigning for the parliamentary vote. These glamorized suffrage work, presenting it as an exciting part of independent, adult life that was attainable for other alumnae and would be for current pupils in the future. The Blackburn High School old girls’ association was keen to publicize its members’ suffragist work, like Leila Williamson’s comic account of her fact-finding mission for a local suffrage organization in 1909.⁴¹ North London Collegiate School had plenty of examples to draw on. In 1913, readers of Our Magazine were informed that old girl and artist Jessie Mothersole had written a poem for the suffrage-themed supplement to the Labour Leader.⁴² Later that year, the magazine reported Gladys Misick’s key organizational role in the Women’s Suffrage Pilgrimage, marching with a group from Cornwall and Devon.⁴³ However, it was Margaret Robertson who dominated Our Magazine reports of Old North Londoners’ suffrage campaigning. From 1908, when she gave up teaching to devote her energies to organizational work for the NUWSS, readers could follow her involvement with the movement in detail. In doing so, she joined a wider group of teachers turned full-time suffrage activists that has more typically been associated with militancy.⁴⁴ Robertson worked as a by-election organizer and later as head of the Election Fighting Fund. She sold suffrage literature, wrote articles and pamphlets, gave speeches and spoke in numerous debates.⁴⁵ The school magazine acknowledged that it was hard to keep track of all her work for the cause: ‘It is impossible, owing to the variety and extent of Miss Margaret Robertson’s activities, merely to mention half of what she does for the cause of Woman Suffrage’.⁴⁶ In these articles, Our Magazine celebrated the outstanding contributions of individual alumnae. Old girls like Robertson were depicted as role models for others to emulate and their example was mobilized to inspire others to action.

The school also celebrated the involvement of teachers, governors and old girls in women’s suffrage processions. Here the narrative shifted from individual effort to collective strength; it was the scale of North London Collegiate School’s participation that was most important. In 1908 and 1911, Our Magazine articles listed the names of marchers associated with the school – sixty-two at the first and thirty-five at the second.⁴⁷ The numbers were not designed to surprise readers but to normalize active involvement in the suffrage campaign. Indeed, in the 1911 article, forty-nine-year-old editor Eleanor Hill wrote, ‘[a]‌mong the 40,000 women who walked in the great suffrage procession of June 17th, there were naturally many representatives of the N.L.C.S.G.’.⁴⁸ Joining mass demonstrations and marching in demand of the parliamentary franchise was presented as a natural response – both characteristic and fitting – for Old North Londoners to the suffrage question.

Although some teachers and old girls were involved in the militant campaign, most girls’ school magazines only recorded constitutional suffrage activities.⁴⁹ Of course, divisions between militant and constitutional suffragism were complex; definitions of militancy were fluid and individuals could be members of multiple organizations simultaneously.⁵⁰ However, teachers were keen to maintain this division as far as possible, as it allowed them to emphasize schools’ interactions with the more palatable, constitutional side of the movement. Reflecting her own allegiance to constitutional suffragism, Eleanor Hill, editor of Our Magazine, was keen to remind readers when mentioning former pupils’ work with the NUWSS that the organization was non-militant.⁵¹ On the few occasions that Hill acknowledged old girls’ involvement with militant suffrage, the activities mentioned remained firmly within the bounds of the law. Participation in militant suffrage organizations was reframed in constitutional terms. For example, Dorothy Evans led a contingent of 400 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) members from Birmingham in the 1911 Coronation Procession, Amy Hicks and Edith How Martyn wrote articles for the official organ of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) and How Martyn participated in a deputation of representatives from various suffrage organizations to the Prime Minister.⁵² References to their militant activity, including arrests, imprisonment and hunger strikes by Evans and Hicks, were avoided.

Across all the schools in this chapter, constitutional suffragism was by far the favoured approach; indeed, for most it was the only legitimate tactic. Although details of former pupil and suffragette Myra Sadd Brown’s activism were published by North London Collegiate School’s magazine in her obituary in 1938, at the time the magazine remained silent on her militancy in the WSPU, WFL and Tax Resistance League, including her arrest, imprisonment and hunger strike in 1912.⁵³ In her 1911 history of Manchester High School for Girls, headmistress Sara Burstall could present a more balanced view. She listed three old girls – Alice Cooke, Alice Crompton and Mary Tout – with positions of responsibility in the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage and Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies. However, she also acknowledged the work of Christabel and Adela Pankhurst for the WSPU, who along with their sister Sylvia had studied at the school from 1893.⁵⁴

Equally, there are far fewer recorded instances in school magazines of old girls engaging in anti-suffrage activities. Only two references have been found to former pupils working actively on the anti-suffrage side of the debate, both from Notting Hill High School, which still had difficulties recruiting anti-suffragist speakers for its 1910 meeting, as highlighted earlier. Jeanie Ross, who left the school around 1892, was recorded in the school magazine as the honorary treasurer of the Kensington branch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League in 1910.⁵⁵ Three years later, Henrietta Stevenson, who first appeared in the old girls’ association membership list in 1886, was noted as vice-president of the Kensington Anti-Suffrage Society.⁵⁶ These examples suggest that anti-suffragism attracted an older generation of alumnae. Bush has demonstrated the considerable scale of women’s involvement in the anti-suffrage movement, so it is unlikely that these women’s experiences were unique. As she observed, anti-suffrage women were less inclined to publicize their position.⁵⁷ They might be particularly reluctant to do so in publications that lauded suffragist alumnae. As with old girls’ suffrage militancy, editorial views probably clouded the picture school magazines gave of old girls’ contributions to the anti-suffrage cause.

While many women teachers were keen advocates of women’s suffrage, carving a path of acceptable public activism required careful negotiation of professional duty and political principle. For example, Sara Burstall, headmistress of Manchester High School for Girls from 1898, described herself in her autobiography as an avowed suffragist, but ‘had never felt able to do anything of a public character’.⁵⁸ The headmistress of a leading middle-class girls’ school, she explained, ‘could not in honour set an example of breaking the law’.⁵⁹ Aware of the risk of reputational damage, Burstall had to choose the nature of her involvement wisely. She recalled with pride that it was at its 1908 meeting hosted at her school that the Headmistresses’ Conference passed a resolution in support of women’s suffrage, leading to a petition to the Prime Minister.⁶⁰ Teachers’ associations provided opportunities for collective action; individual protest was more problematic. Burstall took part in the 1913 suffrage pilgrimage between Manchester and Stockport but felt unable to join the income tax boycott.⁶¹ Although many of the women who refused to pay tax were, like Burstall, educated and financially independent career women, for a headmistress responsible for maintaining an institution’s reputation, this proved a step too far.⁶² Women teachers’ suffrage activism was shaped by their specific personal and school contexts; what was possible for some, perhaps those more junior or with less of a public profile than Burstall, remained beyond others’ reach.

It was even more controversial for women teachers to encourage current schoolgirls to engage with the suffrage campaign. Suffragist teachers were mindful that they had to tread carefully, but this did not necessarily mean concealing their views entirely – at least among older pupils. Vera Brittain appreciated the encouragement of her ‘ardent though always discreet feminist’ teacher, Miss Heath Jones, who introduced her to books on the women’s movement and even accompanied her and other senior girls to a constitutional suffrage meeting.⁶³ As the experience of sixteen-year-old Mary Brinton (later Baroness Stocks) suggests, teachers were more willing to show their suffragist views to a sympathetic audience. Brinton won the tacit approval of her teachers at St Paul’s Girls’ School after taking part in the 1907 Mud March with relatives. Although unsure how her teachers would react to this ‘public exploit’, she later noted in her autobiography: ‘I need not have worried. All the mistresses were suffragists’.⁶⁴ Brinton was from an unusually politically active household, with relatives dividing their allegiance between the WSPU and NUWSS. Suffragist teachers could be more open about their political opinions around adolescent schoolgirls when a supportive family was concerned.

However, in most institutions, teachers who instigated pupils’ active involvement with the movement crossed a line – or were, at least, perceived to do so by a critical and hostile press. Accusations of pro-suffrage bias in schools surfaced multiple times in the Edwardian press. Sutherland and Oram observed that women teachers were widely perceived to support women’s suffrage in this period.⁶⁵ As Bush explained, this sparked numerous controversies over the influence feminist teachers were feared to have on schoolgirls.⁶⁶ With the women’s suffrage movement gaining ground, the press latched onto allegations about women teachers supposedly exploiting their position to recruit for the cause. In June 1907, for example, The London Teacher and London Schools Review reported a case where an assistant mistress distributed ‘Votes for Women’ leaflets outside the school gates.⁶⁷ Three years later, an article in the Girl’s Own Paper and Woman’s Magazine criticized cases of teachers allegedly bringing politics into the classroom, including a mathematics mistress at a large secondary school in South London who, as ‘an ardent worker for Women’s Suffrage’, devoted part of her lessons to the ‘controversial’ subject.⁶⁸

Despite the sensationalized reporting of such scandals, they were probably isolated examples. Certainly, some elementary teachers were warned by local education authorities that their militant suffragism would incur serious consequences for their professional futures.⁶⁹ Indeed, the leading Irish suffragist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was fired from her teaching post in 1912 because of her militant activity.⁷⁰ But teachers’ politics did not always translate straightforwardly to the classroom. Spencer highlighted one example where the headmistress of Sutton High School, herself a local councillor, discouraged the old girls’ society from promoting candidates in a local election.⁷¹ Educational periodicals were also keen to reiterate the need for political neutrality within the classroom and it appears that many teachers took this seriously. The Schoolmaster aimed to reassure its readers in January 1912 by reprinting a testimony from suffragist Lady Chance, which first appeared in the Standard. Chance was an NUWSS member who lived near a large girls’ school, where, she claimed, though the staff are ‘strong Suffragists’, ‘no such thing as propaganda work is allowed in the school’.⁷² The Teacher’s World concurred in December 1913 when it suggested that the press’s accusations of teachers ‘preaching Woman Suffrage doctrines among the girls’ were probably unfounded.⁷³ As Dyhouse observed, though many women teachers were feminists, most were careful to keep their views away from the attention of the education authorities.⁷⁴ The press outcry that was triggered by moments when these opinions entered the classroom – whether inadvertently or intentionally – shows how the charged issue of women’s suffrage crystallized around another contentious subject: the relative authority of teachers and parents in a new educational domain.

This did not mean that women’s suffrage was absent from schoolgirls’ educational experiences. While overt attempts to proselytize for the cause in the classroom were vilified, teachers used subtle strategies to introduce schoolgirls to the suffrage question, offering them constructive ways to engage in suffrage politics through debating societies in middle-class secondary schools and suffrage plays in elementary schools. These extra-curricular activities enabled teachers to familiarize their pupils with the intellectual arguments and satirical tropes surrounding the suffrage debate, as well as channel their own opinions on the subject.

From the 1880s, school debating societies gave middle-class adolescent girls a unique forum to engage with politics. Here, schoolgirls debated a wide range of supposedly ‘masculine’ political issues, from fiscal policy to constitutional reform, foreign affairs and the British Empire.⁷⁵ Women’s suffrage was another popular topic. Schoolgirls debated women’s suffrage thirteen times across six schools between 1900 and 1912, with most discussions taking place between 1904 and 1909.⁷⁶ Schoolgirls’ debates on women’s suffrage were concentrated in the mid-Edwardian years, as support for the constitutional suffrage movement gathered pace but before the campaign of militant violence began. This increase in suffrage debates in the early twentieth century reflected both schoolgirls’ growing interest in the subject and teachers’ encouragement. Teachers were able to lend their support for girls’ intellectual engagement with women’s suffrage as the formal, controlled setting of a debate gave opportunities for both sides of the issue to be aired.

It only became acceptable for schoolgirls to debate women’s suffrage once it was well established within mainstream political debate. The debating society at Notting Hill High School was the first to address women’s suffrage explicitly, in 1892.⁷⁷ However, middle-class schoolboys held similar debates much earlier. In 1875, debaters at Manchester Grammar School rejected a motion for increasing women’s political rights by a large majority.⁷⁸ By contrast, two years later, sixth-formers at City of London School voted narrowly to extend electoral rights to women.⁷⁹ Debating was more prolific in boys’ schools, where a well-established public school debating culture trained schoolboy orators first for the debating chambers of the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, and ultimately Parliament.⁸⁰ Women’s suffrage was arguably more contentious for schoolgirls to tackle because it represented a direct challenge to the political status quo. Debate organizers in girls’ schools had to approach the subject more cautiously than their counterparts in boys’ schools.

Surviving reports of debates published in school magazines allow us to reconstruct the content of some discussions. Schoolgirls’ arguments for and against giving women the vote varied but followed the key themes of the national campaign. Adolescent girls were familiar with suffragist and anti-suffragist discourse and added their voices to the wider debate. Like their adult counterparts, schoolgirl supporters of women’s suffrage preferred logical arguments to sentimental appeal.⁸¹ They referred to ‘no taxation without representation’, the precedent already set by local government at home and women’s enfranchisement overseas and women’s moral right to vote. Suffragist debaters at Central Foundation Girls’ School also insisted that ‘women should not be classed with paupers and lunatics’.⁸² Conversely, opponents emphasized the fundamental differences between the sexes and the damage enfranchisement would inflict on women’s moral standing and domestic duties. Others argued that women were already amply represented in local government and recompensed as taxpayers by public services. Disapproval of the militant suffrage campaign featured prominently. Sometimes debates focused solely on this issue. In December 1910, fifth-formers at the City of London School for Girls agreed ‘That the methods of the militant party of the Women’s Suffrage movement should be censured’. In her brief report to the school magazine, form member Ruby Allen suggested that the outcome was inevitable: ‘Of course, the meeting was in favour of the last motion, which was discussed with great excitement.’⁸³

Women’s suffrage proved popular debating material and girls embraced the subject enthusiastically, as some debating society reports commented.⁸⁴ At North London Collegiate School, women’s suffrage debates drew a large audience. Fifty-one people voted in the November 1905 discussion and 126 in July 1909.⁸⁵ On this second occasion, the presence of the pioneering women’s educational reformer and constitutional suffragist Emily Davies as a guest speaker no doubt prompted the unusually high turnout. Her attendance points to the school’s exceptionalism and the prominent position of its teachers within the women’s movement. However, reflecting her broader pedagogical views on the value of political education, it is important that headmistress Sophie Bryant used these connections to enable pupils to hear from prominent suffragists, in a similar way to their teachers who, as previously highlighted, had met Davies at a staff meeting five years earlier.⁸⁶

It was sometimes assumed that schoolgirls’ debating and suffragism went hand in hand. Some teachers connected girls’ debating skills with their aptitude and motivation for suffrage work. In her autobiography, Sara Burstall recalled her involvement in a short-lived debating society as a sixth-former at North London Collegiate School in the late 1870s. Debating at school, she noted, ‘has trained women speakers from that day to this, some of whom did fine work for the suffrage movement’.⁸⁷ School debating was seen as valuable preparation for future work for the campaign.

However, it should not be presumed that secondary schoolgirls were predisposed to support women’s suffrage, despite their educational privilege. Whereas anti-suffrage sentiment among old girls and teachers is difficult to identify in the sources, schoolgirl debaters voiced their opposition more openly. Sarah Wiggins has eloquently argued that women university students used debating to develop and display a ‘collegiate political identity’.⁸⁸ This was not unique to the higher education context. A similar process took place among schoolgirls, who used debates about women’s suffrage to construct a collective political viewpoint, on either side of the suffrage question. In 1907, Winifred Todd described the anti-suffrage sentiment of her fourth-form classmates following the defeat of a women’s suffrage motion. ‘The majority was against it’, she wrote, ‘which shows that the “Suffragettes” cannot be well represented in our Form.’⁸⁹ Of course, Todd’s allusion to suffragettes overlooked the diversity of the suffrage movement. More importantly, though, it suggested that the school would be an inappropriate venue for schoolgirls to display militant suffrage sympathies. The report of the North London Collegiate School suffrage debate in November 1905 is particularly revealing on this question of collective political opinion. Following the narrow defeat of a motion to introduce women’s suffrage, by twenty-seven votes to twenty-four, the society’s schoolgirl secretary appeared particularly keen to explain the outcome. Betraying her own suffragist sympathies, she credited ‘the persuasive force of a flow of brilliant, though illogical eloquence, from the pen of the opposer’.⁹⁰ As the results show, debaters held diverse views on the matter. However, the secretary’s uncharacteristically detailed reasoning for the defeat suggests she expected North Londoners to support women’s suffrage.

How should we interpret schoolgirl debates that rejected the cause? Of the girls’ schools in this chapter, Central Foundation had by far the most well-developed ‘civics’ curriculum, the subject which taught pupils how Britain was governed. The school’s course was publicized as a model of best practice for other institutions to emulate in Public Schools for Girls (1911).⁹¹ However, two debates on women’s suffrage at the school in 1907 and 1908 resulted in anti-suffragist victories.⁹² As the outcomes of these debates suggest, schoolgirls did not necessarily connect their own political education with the broader question of women’s right to vote. There are a few caveats here. It is impossible to know whether debaters’ arguments accurately reflected their personal opinions. Voters might have been motivated by genuine conviction or voted for the best speakers or simply to support their friends. But these examples are an important reminder that schoolgirls’ political activity may not be as subversive as it seems. The irony was not lost on sixteen-year-old Daisy Adina Green, who wrote a report on the fifth forms’ joint 1908 women’s suffrage debate for the school magazine. She noted wryly that, although the motion was narrowly defeated, ‘most people seemed disposed to use their vote if they had one’.⁹³

Middle-class girls were not the only targets of teachers’ efforts to politicize school experience. In elementary schools, teachers could encourage their working-class pupils to engage with women’s suffrage through dramatic performance, as educational periodicals advised them on how to co-opt the suffrage play genre into school entertainments.⁹⁴ Dramatic performances are an important example of how education operates on and through children’s bodies, contributing to a growing scholarship on embodied educational experiences.⁹⁵ They also evidence how pupils interacted with suffrage humour. In 1885, for example, the educational journal The Teachers’ Aid published a script for a debate on women’s social and political rights in its regular feature on school entertainments.⁹⁶ Although originally scripted for fourteen children, the objectification and othering of women in the debate’s content suggests that it was designed for male speakers. A later article summarizing various entertainment debates confirmed that it was intended for a schoolboy cast.⁹⁷ This was characteristic of the periodical’s political entertainment debates that prioritized male over female voices. However, in this case, it perpetuated the view among an elementary school audience that women’s political rights should be discussed and determined by men. The debate considered arguments on both sides and, somewhat surprisingly, concluded in favour of the suffragists. The claim that the debate would ‘bring down the house’ does, though, cast doubt on whether this outcome was meant to be taken seriously.⁹⁸

By 1909, the focus of the journal’s suffrage-themed entertainments had turned to the militant campaign. In the following examples, schoolgirls embodied a recurring trope in anti-suffrage imagery of children dressed as militants.⁹⁹ In one dialogue, a schoolgirl dressed as a suffragette was midway to a local ‘suffragette lecture’ when a schoolboy soldier – embodying the threat of enlistment that could come with the vote – helped her see the error of her ways.¹⁰⁰ Another article that year gave instructions for a school performance of a song entitled ‘The Suffragettes’.¹⁰¹ This drew on a more sinister theme in anti-suffrage propaganda: violent and sexualized encounters between suffragettes and policemen.¹⁰² Ten infant schoolgirls, each wearing a large letter spelling out ‘Christabel’, would march across the stage, carrying banners of white, green and purple, and shouting ‘Votes for Women’. When a policeman appeared mid-performance, one ‘suffragette’ would wave a ‘dog-whip’ in self-defence. A choreographed ‘scuffle’ with the policeman would then ensue, with the skit finishing with ‘the Law … triumphant’.¹⁰³ It is particularly shocking that dark humour that hinted at the often sexual violence inflicted by policemen on suffragettes was brought into the school. Nor can it be explained away by the young age – and sexual innocence – of the schoolgirl performers. The script was deemed ‘suitable for infants’ but, if ‘elaborated would form a capital item for older children’. Provided that the suffragette cause remained the target of the joke, even the most sinister aspects of suffragette satire were fair game in school entertainments.

The Teachers’ Aid was written primarily for elementary school teachers. It is unclear how many teachers took up these performance suggestions, but the longevity of entertainment articles in the magazine indicates a perceived demand. Articles on suffrage performances encouraged preadolescent, working-class girls to briefly become ‘suffragettes’ for entertainment. Militant suffragism was only allowed into schools in its least threatening form, as an object of derision. However, these spectacles relied on a careful balancing act. The gulf between childhood innocence and suffragette violence was what made the sketches entertaining, but this could never entirely allay fears that, through embodying suffragettes, young and supposedly impressionable working-class girls might sympathize with their cause.

Schoolgirls’ experiences of women’s suffrage were not limited to formal, teacher-sanctioned activities like debating and school plays. Instead, girls engaged with the subject on their own terms. It was the militant side of the movement that captured their interest. Although, as discussed earlier, it was believed inappropriate for teachers to do so, a handful of schoolgirls expressed their militancy in the classroom. The experience of Winifred Starbuck and her private school classmates who, shortly before the First World War, decorated their classroom with WSPU colours and photographs of the Pankhursts, with the tacit approval of their militant suffragist teachers, was exceptional. After the headmistress and four other teachers were dismissed because of their militancy, the school descended into rebellion, with several girls deploying militant tactics against school property.¹⁰⁴ It was exceedingly rare for schoolgirls to adopt militant violence, but they could engage with militant suffragism at school in other ways. With comic poems and fancy dress, girls brought the concept of militancy into school. Beyond the debating platform and appropriating some of the tropes of elementary school suffrage plays, it was the suffragettes who appealed most to schoolgirls, as objects of curiosity, admiration and often ridicule.

It is well known that the suffragettes were targets of Edwardian humour. As Krista Cowman has observed, ‘satirizing the suffragette’ was widespread in both print and popular culture.¹⁰⁵ Schoolgirls contributed to this corpus of suffragette humour with their own jokes about the militant movement. Schoolgirls invoked suffragette humour in their literary efforts, as two poems published in the school magazines of North London Collegiate and Wimbledon High Schools in 1908 demonstrate. In February, fifteen-year-old North Londoner Dorothy Harbottle had her poem – ‘A Suffragette to the Cabinet Ministers’ – published in Our Magazine.

Portraying the desperation of the suffragettes in a comic way, the poem appears to undermine the seriousness of the militant movement. Admittedly, a more positive portrayal of militant suffragism would hardly have been appropriate for publication in the school magazine. Nevertheless, Harbottle focused her criticism on the methods rather than the principles of the suffragettes. The reference to the Liberal Cabinet member Augustine Birrell, a frequent suffragette target despite his pro-suffragist stance, also suggests she had more than a cursory knowledge of militant activity.¹⁰⁷ Schoolgirls’ suffragette humour did not simply repeat adult attitudes but drew creatively on their own knowledge and opinions about the subject. Here, Harbottle participated in a suffragist literary culture that harnessed poetry’s subversive potential to communicate her albeit veiled support for the cause.¹⁰⁸

Lower-third-former Fay Mitchell’s poem, ‘Ten Little Suffragettes’, published two months later in Wimbledon High School Magazine, was more explicit in its criticism of militancy.¹⁰⁹ Although Mitchell would have been too young to participate in the debate on women’s suffrage at the school earlier that year, poetry offered an age-inclusive route for her to express her views. Following the standard format of the well-known racist verse, the poem counted down in rhyming couplets from ten suffragettes to none. One by one, the suffragettes lost interest in the cause, changed their mind, or were imprisoned; four met a nastier end. Some causes of their demise – one suffragette ‘talked herself to death’ at a debate and another got tired of waiting for the vote – suggest that the poem could be interpreted more broadly as anti-suffragist. It was not unusual for girls to adapt well-known literary motifs in their compositions. Five years later, a similar poem – ‘Ten Little Schoolgirls’ – appeared in the school’s magazine.¹¹⁰ Mitchell added her voice to a growing chorus of suffragette jokes that reworked the same tropes. Indeed, a different version of ‘Ten Little Suffragettes’ circulated in a couple of local London newspapers in 1910.¹¹¹ Interestingly, in this case, Mitchell seems to have got there first. Krista Cowman has shown how the WSPU used humour as a ‘political tactic’ to rebut critics, deal with the emotional demands of campaigning and raise publicity for the cause.¹¹² The use of suffragette humour was a calculated move for schoolgirls too. They deployed an irreverent stance towards the militant movement to make their engagement with it acceptable in the school context.

Fancy dress offered girls another outlet for their suffragette humour. From the late Victorian period, fancy dress was an increasingly popular pastime that was adopted by some schools with enthusiasm. Rebecca Mitchell has noted that the late Victorian fancy-dress ball featured ‘abstract costumes that directly engaged with issues of their day’.¹¹³ Schoolgirls’ dressing up choices could also represent current events in sartorial form. At Myra Lodge, one of the North London Collegiate School boarding houses, a costume dance in October 1912 featured ten-year-old Francie Buss – the great-niece of the school’s founder Frances Mary Buss – dressed as ‘a militant suffragette’.¹¹⁴ Incidentally, this was not the only politically themed costume; another guest came dressed as the equally topical subject of ‘The Insurance Act’. Unlike the eighteenth-century masquerade, Victorian fancy dress allowed the wearer to blend their own identity with that of their costume. As Celia Marshik observed, costumes were a way ‘to enhance, but not disguise, their everyday appearance and persona’.¹¹⁵ Francie Buss’s suffragette costume can therefore be read in two ways. It both mocked militant suffragism and allowed a controversial subject to be aired within the school context. Its genius lay in exploiting the same ambiguity in the suffragette school entertainments; the comic dissonance between a young schoolgirl and a violent adult suffragette always contained the possibility of sympathy and identification with the cause.

One example from a Lancashire elementary school suggests that militant suffragism could provide girls with symbolism and resources to deploy, albeit playfully, in their struggles against school authority. The autobiography of Bessie Blackburn, who was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1902, includes a fascinating example of a suffrage-inspired school strike in 1914.¹¹⁶ Bessie and her classmates were angry that the neighbouring boys’ school’s half-holiday (arranged so teachers could watch a local football game) was not extended to them. They responded with ‘a pretend strike at playtime’ – a tactic with which girls from a highly unionized and politicized community were probably familiar. Impersonating the suffragettes, the girls marched around the playground holding strike notices and singing ‘Votes for Women’. Of course, this was lower-key than other school strikes, such as the mass, nationwide walkouts of 1889 and 1911 against grievances like corporal punishment, excessive homework and long school hours.¹¹⁷ However, it suggests the remarkable extent to which this form of political activism could permeate schoolchildren’s culture and imaginary play. The schoolgirls seized upon a small instance of gender inequality to protest the much larger issue of women’s suffrage.

This chapter has demonstrated how the girls’ school community offered physical and textual spaces for teachers, old girls and current schoolgirls to participate in the women’s suffrage debate. At the hyperlocal level of individual institutions, the considerable reach and intergenerational dimensions of the suffrage question become clear. The key arguments for and against women’s suffrage that were voiced on the platform and in Parliament echoed around the school debating chamber. Both the pro-suffragist messages of campaign literature and the popular press’s satirical takes on militant suffragism could be found in the pages of school magazines. Women’s suffrage slogans – voiced with varying levels of conviction – can be traced into the classrooms, corridors and playgrounds of girls’ schools.

At school, teachers and old girls found supportive networks to spark and nurture their commitment to women’s suffrage. This led, at times, to material contributions to the cause, including parliamentary petitions and new recruits. Suffragist teachers and alumnae exploited the growing networking role that the school and its publications offered as a key means of communication to promote their views. In doing so, they had to navigate shifting boundaries of acceptable public engagement with the suffrage movement, reputational risk and personal principle. Within the school community, constitutional suffragism remained the only legitimate form of suffrage activism. School magazines celebrated teachers’ and old girls’ tireless work for the NUWSS but avoided allusions to the militant work of those involved in the WFL and WSPU.

Reframing the educational context as a site for suffrage activity shows that interest in the campaign reached a wide age range. Although constrained by boundaries of respectability, teachers used diverse strategies to bring suffrage into schoolgirls’ educational experiences. Once women’s suffrage had become established in mainstream political discourse, teachers encouraged middle-class adolescent schoolgirls to tackle the subject in their debating societies. Appropriating many of the main arguments on both sides, girls embraced the suffrage question enthusiastically, demonstrating a clear grasp of the national debate. Whereas teachers and old girls were less likely to share their anti-suffrage views with the school community, schoolgirls could express them more freely in the debating chamber.

Outside these debates, it was the militant movement that most interested schoolgirls. Educational journals encouraged elementary teachers to use suffrage plays at school, where preadolescent working-class girls embodied suffragette satire. Schoolgirl ‘suffragettes’ were intended to delegitimize militancy, but there was always the possibility that performers might subvert teachers’ efforts by sympathizing with their characters. Indeed, schoolgirls were never passive recipients of adults’ ideas about suffrage; they could engage with the issue on their own terms, in extreme cases by co-opting the symbolism, tools and language of militancy to protest school authority. More often, girls used suffragette humour in their writing and imaginary play, participating in a popular culture that satirized the militant movement. Middle-class schoolgirls caricatured the suffragettes in their poetry and performed militancy in fancy-dress parties. Schoolgirls therefore responded to the examples of their teachers’ and old girls’ suffragism in their own ways, using subversive humour, expressing anti-suffrage opinions and even on occasion being more militant than their teachers.