On the evening of 29 January 1906, a group of unemployed women from West Ham met to discuss their shared plight. Minnie Baldock, who took the chair, ‘explained … why they should combine together’.¹ It was duly agreed that they should send a deputation to the assistance board, articulating their demands.² The following week, the women met again, where they received a report from the deputation, as well as hearing how working-women in Hammersmith were benefiting from nursery provision. By the third meeting, addressed by the well-known activist Dora Montefiore, the women had resolved to stage a demonstration in favour of women’s suffrage, while at the fourth meeting, where Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper were the speakers, they agreed to make their case in Hyde Park. During the following meeting, Emmeline Pankhurst ‘made a long and good speech’ and the women decided to ‘form themselves into a union. A branch of the Social and Political Union was formed 34 of the women joining’ (sic).³

These women thus founded the first branch of what is now better known as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) outside the Pankhursts’ home territory of Manchester. Through their branch, the unemployed women of West Ham not only attempted to address the difficulties that they were experiencing through lack of work, but made a case for the extension of the franchise, which they believed would make a long-term difference to their lives. These women were at the heart of WSPU activities in its first year in London and formed a prominent part of demonstrations in the capital. Members also campaigned to secure more immediate relief and support by pressurizing local authorities to take their needs seriously. Despite the urgency of their demands, meetings were often joyful occasions, characterized by songs and recitations as well as by speeches and reports, which helped to forge a shared solidarity. Yet by the following autumn membership had plummeted. In early December 1907, members were expressing ‘dissatisfaction’ and demanding to know ‘why the branch had been neglected’.⁴ The minute book ends on this plaintive note. With no further records available, it seems that the organization had collapsed before its second birthday and the promise of this energetic branch and its committed members was lost.⁵

On first reading, the history of the Canning Town branch seems to confirm many of the shortcomings of the WSPU as a political organization. Historians have often argued that the WSPU failed to engage with working-class women’s needs. Many have suggested that working-class women found middle-class women’s concerns irrelevant to their lives, that they perceived feminism and socialism to be incompatible and that they were unable or unwilling to participate in militancy.⁶ Careful attention to the minute book of the Canning Town branch suggests that many of the criticisms levelled at the WSPU are inapplicable here. These women had their own clearly developed political agenda, linked but not limited to acquisition of the vote, which was underpinned by an explicit commitment to socialist principles. They embraced direct action, some undertaking prison sentences themselves, and celebrated others who engaged in militancy.

This chapter therefore examines the Canning Town branch on its own terms, rather than through its relationship to the national organization. It argues that the historical interest of the Canning Town branch lies in its life, not its demise, and that it has much to tell us about the ways which working-class women practised politics at the turn of the century. The women of the Canning Town branch used the opportunities offered by a woman-led organization to further their own political objectives. These women identified as workers and, as such, demanded both the right to work and the right to vote. Though a product of a thriving socialist culture, they were not afraid to challenge the gendered practice of a labour movement they thought was neglecting their interests. They embraced direct action to make immediate improvements to their own lives and to secure the vote. They took the anticipated responsibilities of citizenship seriously, and prioritized political education, determined to prepare themselves to use the vote effectively. Their efforts were grounded in an intensely sociable political culture which, by turns, expressed joy and optimism, and sorrow and sympathy. By highlighting these features, this chapter sheds new light on the nature of working-class women’s political priorities and practice. It emphasizes both their political capabilities and their efforts to expand and enhance these capabilities. The significance of the Canning Town branch lies not in how we interpret its failure but in how we assess its strengths.

The recent historiographical focus on the local politics of suffrage has transformed our understanding of the suffrage campaign. Studies of the WSPU have challenged the reductive portrait of a supposedly autocratic organization run as Christabel Pankhurst’s personal fiefdom. Instead, these studies have shown how much agency and autonomy local branches exercised in determining their own priorities and strategies.⁷ National policy was never simply replicated in local practice. These local branches were often the initial and primary means by which women engaged with the suffrage campaign. As such, they defined both the nature of the campaign in local communities and women’s experiences of it. Historians of the Labour Party have also emphasized the importance of the local context for women activists.⁸ Here, women both furthered their own political agenda, and helped to shape party policy.⁹ Studies of local politics more generally have demonstrated how reformers sought to utilize the increasing power of municipal authorities to implement a progressive agenda.¹⁰ These activists often included women, who frequently saw concerns around housing, health and education as particularly relevant to their own capacities, expertise and interests.¹¹ Male and female labour activists, and middle- and working-class women activists, thus found extensive common ground and scope for dialogue and alliances in the sphere.¹² In this chapter, detailed attention to the local dynamics of the local suffrage campaign demonstrates that it was grounded in concerns about women’s unemployment and their need for paid work.

A renewed focus on working-class women’s own political beliefs, motivations and demands, achieved by examining their own testimonies, has also been a transformative development in recent suffrage history.¹³ Aided by digitalization, new source material continues to come to light, leading to productive reinterpretations of older material. For example, a wealth of scholarship has not only identified many of the working-class women who were involved in militant suffrage, but has also sensitively considered their motivations and contributions.¹⁴ This is characteristic of a broader historiographical trend which seeks to address the relative absence of working-class women both in labour and feminist histories. Scholars increasingly insist that these histories cannot be written without placing women at their centre, and that doing so changes how we conceptualize class, gender and politics in this period.¹⁵

The Canning Town minute book is particularly engaging for suffrage scholars not only because it represents a detailed account of working-class women’s involvement with suffrage, but because of its rarity.¹⁶ While minute books have often been read as straightforward and detailed accounts of local organizations, historians such as Stephanie Ward and Zoë Thomas have also shown that they can be used to give richer insight into the subjective experiences, meanings and emotions of political activity.¹⁷ The Canning Town minutes are particularly useful in this respect. While they follow the form of conventional political minutes – noting the formalities of attendance, procedures and finances – their tone, language and selection of material indicates how women were working out new forms of political identities and practice within the branch. Their words were also sometimes reported in the contemporary press. Using these means that we can understand their efforts on their own terms, rather than interpreting them through the priorities of the middle-class leadership.¹⁸ In keeping with this emphasis, this chapter replicates the spelling and grammar of the minute book, without the repeated and intrusive use of ‘sic’. The minute book shows how members used the Canning Town branch of the WSPU both to experience and to reshape the practice of contemporary progressive politics.

A brief history of the Canning Town branch of the WSPU

Few areas of the country can have been the subject of such contemporary concern and historiographical scrutiny as the East End of London. In the second half of the nineteenth century, evocative and impassioned descriptions by Charles Dickens reinforced by the supposedly scientific studies of Charles Booth and the growth of the sensationalist press had helped construct a very particular image of the community in the public imagination. By the turn of the twentieth century, failures in the ship-building and weaving industries meant that skilled or well-paid work was all but impossible to find. West Ham was the first borough to implement provisions under the 1905 Unemployed Workmen’s Act which set up local distress committees to reduce unemployment among ‘respectable’ and ‘deserving’ men through temporary schemes.¹⁹ Demand, however, far outstripped supply, while there were frequent complaints in the local press about the cost to ratepayers.²⁰

Concerns about unemployment were social as much as economic. Economic deprivation was understood to cause all manner of crime, deviance and vice. A 1907 investigation into the specific social problems in West Ham attributed these to the ‘evil’ of casual labour, which led to ‘irregular earnings’, ‘chronic under-employment’ and ‘chronic poverty’.²¹ Middle-class reformers – often religiously inspired – flocked to the neighbourhood to tackle the social consequences of poverty and deprivation from within. It was believed that local people were essentially passive and would be unable to improve their own lives without outside intervention.²²

Yet the local labour movement was particularly strong and well-organized.²³ West Ham South returned Keir Hardie to Parliament in 1893 and Will Thorne in 1906, and become the first (albeit short-lived) Labour-controlled council in the country. The famous ‘land grab’ which founded the even shorter-lived Triangle Camp at Plaistow, involving unemployed men led by local councillor Ben Cunningham, aimed to show that unemployed men were the very opposite of idle and irresponsible.²⁴ Women also participated in local labour politics, as members of school boards, as Poor Law Guardians and as members of socialist organizations.²⁵ They had been instrumental in the 1889 strikes at Silvertown, one of the defining moments in the emergence of New Unionism, which had brought figures such as Eleanor Marx, Tom Mann and Will Thorne to national attention.²⁶ Despite the challenging conditions, then, the local political context was favourable to grassroots political activism.

Two women were particularly central to the Canning Town branch of the WSPU. The first was Minnie Baldock, who was either chair, secretary or speaker at almost every meeting of the organization in its first months. By the time she took the chair of the inaugural meeting, she was already a seasoned local activist.²⁷ Born in Poplar in 1864, her early working life was spent in a shirt factory. She was married to Harry Baldock, and the couple had two sons. They were both enthusiastic members of the local Independent Labour Party. Harry served as a local councillor and Minnie was elected to the local Board of Guardians. Their immersion in local labour politics made them typical of early WSPU supporters.²⁸

Another who quickly became a mainstay of the branch was Adelaide Knight. Knight’s political vision and capacities were, in part, a product of a personal history marked by poverty, illness and trauma. She was born with deformed hands which limited her capacity for work, and, at the age of eight, was run over by a horse cart, necessitating a long period of recovery and a permanent limp and pain. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who beat her mother and eventually hanged himself in front of his youngest daughter. She also lost a sister to suicide. Yet she possessed significant personal resources as well. Despite her father’s many shortcomings, he had invested in her education and introduced her to political debates. She also drew strength from an intense religious faith, which found expression in the temperance movement. But Knight’s primary source of support was her intensely loving marriage to Donald Brown.²⁹ The two married in 1894, against the wishes of her sisters, who believed that, as the son of a Guyanese father, his colour was a threat to their respectability. Their marriage was marred by tragedy – they lost three children to smallpox after being misinformed about vaccination – but was intensely strong, respectful, and egalitarian. Brown took his wife’s name and the division of household labour was unconventional. Knight was not, of course, unusual in supplementing her husband’s income by sewing, but Donald was certainly atypical in his willingness to undertake domestic labour. He took on the heavy work of washing, which was especially difficult for Knight owing to her physical disabilities. The pair shared interests in collective solutions – trade unions, cooperative organization and socialist groups – to the problems of pervasive alcoholism and poverty in their neighbourhood.³⁰

The first year of the Canning Town branch was characterized by a frenzy of activity. One of its first actions, on 19 February 1906, was to protest at the state opening of Parliament, alongside hundreds of other women from the East End in Parliament Square. The women then joined an audience of several thousand in Caxton Hall to hear Christabel Pankhurst assert that the union was formed ‘solely of the women who had to work for their living’ and claim their direct descendance from Chartism.³¹ The meeting followed Emmeline Pankhurst to the House of Commons, but was initially refused entry, until small groups were finally allowed in.

Energized by these events, the following week the women committed to a further demonstration in May 1906. At one planning meeting, there was ‘So Much Business to do that no Minutes were read’.³² No fewer than 125 women from Canning Town took part in a thousand-strong march down the Embankment to Downing Street, where eight women led by Mrs Pankhurst met with the Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, only to hear that he would not help them, and that they should continue to work on converting the country. The Canning Town women joined the crowds in Trafalgar Square to hear WSPU leaders report on the disappointing discussion with the Prime Minister. A few weeks later, on 21 June, several dozen women from the branch joined Annie Kenney and around 150 others at the home of Herbert Asquith, demanding an audience. Annie Kenney, Teresa Billington, Adelaide Knight and sixty-four-year-old Jane Sparborough, a needlewoman from the neighbouring Bromley and Bow branch, were arrested.³³

In between these large demonstrations, women held weekly meetings with invited speakers and a social element. Attendance held steady at between thirty and forty-five members at each meeting, but sixty-five women attended the social meeting at the end of April, and attendance doubled in May to between seventy-two and seventy-eight as the women planned for and reflected on their contribution to the major deputation. A few meetings attracted only sparse attendance, but many drew more than forty or fifty women, and eighty-nine turned out in November to hear Charlotte Despard. 1907 started promisingly, with nearly seventy or more attending each meeting in January. This was very much a shared and collective endeavour, which did not – at first – rely solely on particular individuals.

But a series of disruptive events rocked and weakened the branch. At the turn of the year, Dora Montefiore’s supposed ‘treatment’ by the central committee of the WSPU was the subject of intense debate. She had apparently been reprimanded for writing to a Liberal, increasingly seen by WSPU leaders as the enemy regardless of individual views. Annie Kenney promised to take her case to the committee, but it was Adelaide Knight who took a more decisive stand by drafting a resolution in support of Montefiore, which was read and agreed at the following branch meeting. Though Montefiore spoke effusively of ‘the manner that the canning town branch always received her saying she was more at home with them every time she visited them’, she does not appear to have visited the branch again.³⁴ She did maintain her relationship with Adelaide Knight, however, and her collaboration with the women in Canning Town was important in shaping her politics.³⁵

Worse was to follow. A few weeks later, ‘Mrs Baldock spoke a few words concerning the scandal about her self which was [illeg] all ensure members sympathise with her’.³⁶ Some kind of crisis had taken place, although it seems to have been overcome, and was never referred to again. However, Knight’s concerns about the national leadership of the WSPU continued to deepen. In March, she reported in her capacity as liaison to the national executive committee that Canning Town women ‘were to keep in the back ground’ at a future demonstration ‘because the central could not be responsible for any one. Mrs Knight thought it was because the branch did not pay any affiliation fee to the Central’ and ‘spoke of sending in her resignation’.³⁷ At the following meeting, she followed through on this threat, and read out her resignation letter, saying that ‘the Central were not keeping their promises to the working women’.³⁸

Further details of this dispute can be found in Knight’s biography. Knight shared Montefiore’s concerns that working-class women would inevitably lose out if the WSPU continued to press for votes on the same terms as men, linked to property. She prompted the Canning Town branch to write to Keir Hardie to secure his support for ‘full and equal representation’. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were scathing about this decision, essentially suggesting that the Canning Town women were too ignorant to know what they were doing. At the next executive committee meeting, Christabel reported back on Hardie’s response, saying that he agreed with her that the women clearly needed educated leadership. Knight then played her trump card. The letter had not been posted. Pankhurst was making this up. Pankhurst was able to bluster her way out of the situation, but the women back in Canning Town were horrified. Some criticized the ‘lies and deception’ while others were ‘reluctant to accept that there had been such dishonesty and treachery’, calling it a ‘misunderstanding’. Those who shared Knight’s outrage left along with her.³⁹

The fact that these events were not recorded in the minutes may well reflect members’ turmoil, as well as a desire to maintain the appearance of unity. The following week, there was a vote of confidence in Minnie Baldock, but without a full explanation. Though she evidently won the vote, the damage had been done. In May, she ‘explained what was expected from the members of the WSPU she did not want women to come from what they could get in the way of Charity. But to stand by the union & abide by the rules.’⁴⁰ Clearly significant tensions remained. From then, apart from a social in September when fifty-five women attended, no meeting attracted more than thirty women. A much-discussed and anticipated excursion to Chingford involved only nine members. Minnie Baldock’s presence or absence increasingly determined the success of the meeting, and her absences became ever more frequent as she was called away on business for the national branch. Meanwhile, involvement in mass direct action seems to have all but ceased in 1907. A Mrs Smith attempted to keep the women together, but the branch limped on for only a few more months. At the beginning of December, a Mrs Riley reported on a meeting of the Adult Suffrage Society she had attended, ‘saying that she could see but very little difference in the two clubs’. While this entry marked the end of the WSPU, two weeks later, a group of women led by Adelaide Knight and backed by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) founded a new branch of the Adult Suffrage Society (ASS). ‘When the rich woman gets a vote, let the poor woman have one also’, Knight proclaimed.⁴¹ Soon, however, pregnancy and illness forced her resignation from both the ASS and the SDF. Though Minnie Baldock had several very successful years as a national WSPU organizer, she too eventually had to resign on the grounds of ill health.

Membership and culture

While Baldock and Knight are well known to suffrage scholars, the remainder of the membership has never previously been analysed. Yet at the back of the minute book is a list of ninety members.⁴² As only their surnames and addresses are listed, comprehensive identification of all the women has proven impossible. Nevertheless, the list demonstrates that this branch attracted women from a tight-knit community. Many members lived in close proximity to one another, just a few doors apart on the same street. This may well be why the minutes never note any formal efforts at recruitment: women were able to draw on their existing networks to attract members. As well as Canning Town itself, members came from other boroughs within the locality, including Plaistow, Silvertown and Tidal Basin. Their sense of community was reflected in their ongoing concern for women experiencing particularly difficult personal circumstance. Bereavement or illness were marked with votes of sympathy and letters of condolence.⁴³

Nine working-class members can be identified with near certainty in the census and, using these records, we can infer more about the branch and its members.⁴⁴ Five of the women had been born in the local area, while the others came from Birmingham, Westbury, Swansea and Frome. All were married. Indeed, only two of the branch members were listed as ‘Miss’, one of whom was Annie Kenney, though other unmarried women were mentioned in the minutes. These women were born between 1851 and 1877, making them aged between fifty-five and twenty-nine when the branch was founded in 1906. They were not young girls, but mature women.

None of the women had an occupation listed in the census, probably because they were married. Earlier records indicate that two of the women had worked as domestic servants. One, Prudence Hornblower, an active branch member who served as treasurer, had married a blacksmith relatively late in life and so more of her work history was recorded, with periods ironing for her brother in his business, as a housekeeper, and then as a forewoman in a laundry. Unsurprisingly, nearly all their husbands appear to have been employed in trades relating to the local docks, and included several who worked directly on board ships. Other roles included a house painter, wood sawyer and iron dresser. Their husbands occupied a range of positions on the social scale, from the relatively genteel assistant shopkeeper married to Emily Andrews, to Mary Ann Smith’s husband, who was a manure worker.

The 1911 census indicates that many of the women’s older children – girls and boys alike – were also employed. They tended to enter a greater variety of work than their parents, not necessarily related to the docks. Charlotte Bishop’s three eldest daughters were employed as a shirt machinist, a bicycle tyre maker and a tailoress. Annie Ewers had one daughter making tennis balls and another making footballs. Their sons’ employment perhaps hinted at a greater potential for skilled work and improved prospects. Annie Ewers’ son Fred worked in a chemist and druggist wholesalers, while Eliza Oliver’s son Harry was an office boy. Five also had boarders living with them, which would likely have generated more domestic work for the women, and is suggestive of the overcrowded housing which was a focus of reformers’ concerns.

Large numbers of children and high rates of infant mortality characterized these women’s families. Emily Andrews and Prudence Hornblower had only three children between them, all of whom lived. The remaining seven women, however, had fifty-eight children between them – an average of more than eight each – of which twenty had died by 1911. Mary Ann Smith, only thirty-seven, had twelve children by 1911, the first born when she was just seventeen. Seven had died. The statistics alone cannot illustrate how these women coped with the physical, mental and emotional toll of repeated pregnancy, childbirth and loss, but Ellen Ross’s study of working-class motherhood testifies to the intense domestic burden that this involved – as well as the profound sense of grief and loss when their children died.⁴⁵

However, the branch was by no means exclusively made up of working-class members. Other women came from wealthier backgrounds, but were present in the East End by virtue of their commitment to social reform, manifested in their relationship to the settlement movement. Canning Town had long been the focus of significant efforts by reformers concerned about the effects of unemployment, poverty and overcrowding.⁴⁶ The appeal of such territory for middle-class activists, who sought to reform the community while living as part of it, has been well-documented, as has the gendered nature of their activities.⁴⁷ The Canning Town Women’s Settlement, founded in 1892, complemented the work done by men at the nearby Malvern College Settlement. The settlement ran a girls’ club and a women’s employment office.⁴⁸ Settlement women sought to collaborate with poorer women on terms of equality and, in doing so, to transcend barriers of wealth, class and status – or, as a later statement of policy put it, ‘interpret east to west; west to east’.⁴⁹ The most significant of these members was Sister Edith Kerrison, a Welsh resident at the Canning Town Women’s Settlement. She had come to the area via her connection to the Mansfield House University Settlement and longstanding work as a matron at the Seaman’s Hospital in Greenwich.⁵⁰ Inspired by Keir Hardie, she became a socialist and active in the ILP. The founder of Canning Town Socialist Sunday School, a member of the Board of Guardians and the first woman councillor in West Ham, Kerrison went on to serve for a decade on the Women’s Labour League executive committee, and became West Ham’s first female alderman.⁵¹ Another was Miss Tillyard, who was also associated with the Settlement, and had established a female-run hospital to serve local women.⁵² Like Minnie Baldock, both these women were Poor Law Guardians, and they served together on a number of committees associated with relief administration.⁵³ The earliest efforts of this branch were also encouraged and supported – but not directed – by other women from outside the community, including Teresa Billington (later Billington-Grieg) and Dora Montefiore, who first introduced Annie Kenney to Minnie Baldock and her associates.⁵⁴

The Canning Town branch clearly emerged out of existing personal relationships and political structures. This is an important point, because it contrasts so sharply with the narrative constructed by the WSPU. In its version, the Canning Town women were brought together under the leadership of Annie Kenney, who supposedly arrived with £2 in her pocket to ‘rouse London’. This story – often repeated in Votes for Women, and later reiterated in autobiographical accounts – reflects the suffragettes’ desire to suggest they possessed a unique ability to galvanize women who had not previously been engaged in politics.⁵⁵ However, it was evidently not true. Instead, Kenney joined a pre-existing network and community of women with longstanding interests in political and social reform. Moreover, Kenney was only one of many women mentioned in the minutes. She does not appear to have had a particularly distinctive or visible role in the organization. Minnie Baldock clearly assumed the leadership, and a number of other women – not including Kenney – took on prominent and administrative roles. The description of Kenney’s arrival in a meeting in April 1906 as a ‘surprise’ where ‘she came among us as angels do’ does not suggest that she was a frequent or regular attendee.⁵⁶ Unlike Montefiore, however, she does appear on the list of members within the minute book.

The focus on the vote for women as a specific demand made the Canning Town WSPU distinct from other political groups within the community. Though still a very new organization, the disruptive activities of WSPU members such as Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney had drawn both significant press attention and wider public sympathy. The cause of women’s suffrage had become both a prominent and urgent national political issue. In this context, it appears that women who were already politically active sought to capitalize on renewed interest in politics in general, and suffrage in particular, to attract recruits. At the first meeting, Sister Kerrison said she felt ‘very hopeful that women were awakening.’⁵⁷ The perception that the working classes were inclined to be apathetic and resigned to their situation was of great concern for political activists at this time, who sought to stress the merits and possibilities of organization and collective action.⁵⁸ Trade unions provided the most obvious model and structure, and many feminist activists focused on persuading women to unionize. There was, for example, a women’s branch of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers in Canning Town.⁵⁹ Centred around the workplace, however, they would not have been a natural choice for women who were not currently employed. The WSPU thus helped to create a context in which women’s political activities were taken seriously outside the workplace. They also offered the focus of a clear and defined political objective and an institutional structure which women’s efforts could be channelled through.

Two dimensions of branch culture are particularly evident in the minutes: the women’s allegiance to socialism and the importance of sociability. While branch members furthered their interests in women-focused politics, they retained an explicit commitment to socialist principles. They welcomed many socialist speakers who spoke of the compatibility of their beliefs and their commitment to their demand. A Mr Wishart, for example, explained ‘why he became a strict socialist and why he agreed with women suffrage’ because women ‘had to work just as hard in the home as well as the factory trusting that women would get the vote to be able to work hand in hand with the men and so make home more comfortable and interesting for both sexes’.⁶⁰ George Shreve, the only man present at the first meeting of the branch, was a member of the National Union of Gasworkers.⁶¹ The branch used premises owned by the ILP, though a few months into its existence, the ILP said that as it had formed a separate entity, the women would have to pay ‘a half fee that is a shilling’ after a further month’s grace.⁶² Rousing choruses of ‘The Red Flag’ closed branch meetings throughout its existence, and when Adelaide Knight went to prison she scratched the lyrics into the window sill with her hairpin.⁶³

As a result, the women placed particular faith in Keir Hardie to deliver their demands. They wrote to him in January 1907 to ‘thank him for his noble stand for women & demanding immediate enfranchisement of women on the same terms as men’.⁶⁴ Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he was a national political figure of real significance and long associated with their own local community, the women looked to him, rather than to the Pankhursts, to deliver their objectives. Indeed, in the light of the fact that the WSPU and the Pankhursts later became almost synonymous, it is worth noting that the Pankhursts are only mentioned in the minutes on the two occasions when they visited the branch.

Their immersion in socialist culture, however, did not necessarily mean that these women were active within formal labour organizations. Rather, they were a product of a community in which such beliefs were taken for granted. For some women, it was membership of the WSPU which acted as an entry point into labour organizations rather than vice versa. In July 1906, the women discussed joining the ILP, ‘some promising to do so’, and at the next meeting they reported having followed through on their decision.⁶⁵ It is worth highlighting that it is the ILP which is mentioned, rather than any other group, including a trade union or even the Women’s Co-operative Guild, indicating the women’s focus on politics.

Sociability, as Stephanie Ward has argued, was critical to the practice of women’s politics in the interwar period. Many of the features which she identifies as important to a distinctively female culture among Labour women, particularly food, were also relevant here.⁶⁶ The first meeting explicitly designated as a ‘social’ noted that members ‘were admitted to a very nice & substantial tea prepared by members who worked very hard indeed to make it a success. They were rewarded in this as everything went off splendid … Nuts and Oranges were shared around & everyone I am sure felt better after the fun of the evening.’⁶⁷ The sense of relief evident here indicates that a successful tea was key to a successful meeting. It can have been no mean feat to provide tea for sixty-five members and efforts were evidently greatly appreciated.

Singing was a consistent feature of the meetings. ‘The Red Flag’ was the most frequently mentioned song, but ‘Old Lang Syne’ (sic) was often sung too, and members regularly joined together around the piano to sing old favourites and learn new tunes. Annie Kenney stepped in to act as choir mistress on one occasion despite being a notoriously poor singer.⁶⁸ These songs were brought to larger meetings too. At the protest at the state opening of Parliament, women sang ‘The Marseillaise’, ‘Comrades Come Rally’ and ‘The Red Flag’, reported in one newspaper as ‘Socialistic and revolutionary songs’.⁶⁹ Though some meetings were specifically designated as ‘social’ – and probably not coincidentally were usually the best attended – barely a meeting went without some form of shared entertainment.

Prayer was mentioned almost as frequently as song, though as the content or form of the prayer is not recorded it is difficult to reach further conclusions about the place of faith and spirituality within the branch. With some members part of the Settlement community, and the hopes invested in Keir Hardie, it is not difficult to imagine that these women were drawn to some form of Christian socialism. A belief in the divine righteousness of their cause would have provided a further source of strength, while participating in the rituals of collective worship would have strengthened the bonds of community.

This camaraderie was essential to sustain the women’s commitment to the cause and the organization. Their political activity was difficult to maintain among their many other commitments. Nor was it necessarily popular, even within their local community. As Dora Montefiore recalled, other residents were ‘often unintentionally cruel in their judgement. They had no notion of the idealism which inspired all of us militant women and they were only too ready with gibe and pointed finger to point out the “jail birds” or to persecute the children of these women, and annoy by rough ignorant jests the husbands.’⁷⁰ The importance of combining the explicitly political with the social was summarized by Minnie Baldock, who expressed pride in the way members ‘were always good fighters & ready for work when called upon also they were to look forward to a tea in a week or two’.⁷¹ The projected benefits of securing the vote were abstract and there was no certain timetable for victory. In the meantime, women needed the smaller but profoundly meaningful benefits of sustenance, friendship and solidarity.

Beliefs and objectives

Within the branch records, neither the conditions of their lives nor their claims for the vote were ever discussed in terms of motherhood or any particular qualities the women shared as mothers. Indeed, children, husbands and the demands of household duties are almost entirely absent from the minutes. When children are mentioned, it is either out of concern for an individual member whose child is ill, or in the abstract, such as a discussion of education without specific reference to the needs of their own children. Only one speaker, Mrs Podmore, told the women ‘not to think that they were doing their work just for themselves but for the sake of their children & others & that would give them strength to go on’.⁷² Unlike many women active in the labour movement at the time, these women do not seem to have campaigned on maternity rights or nursery provision. When they heard from speakers on this issue, it was in relation to women elsewhere, and the women do not seem to have insisted that they themselves needed similar provision.⁷³ This lack of reference to children is a striking contrast to the maternalist rhetoric which underpinned the reforming efforts of many middle-class women.⁷⁴ When Adelaide Knight and Jane Sparborough were arrested, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence framed their sacrifice in terms of domestic responsibilities, regretting that they had to leave behind a ‘little baby’ and an ‘invalid husband’. ‘Perhaps such devotion to the cause will really convince the British public that women – and poor women too – are really in earnest’, she said.⁷⁵

These women were not claiming the vote on the basis of their rights, capacities or duties as mothers. This was a self-consciously political space in which the domestic did not explicitly feature or shape their demands. Instead, the women defined themselves as ‘unemployed’. This in itself was an important political statement. Most people – including some labour activists and socialists – saw work for women as a temporary phase or as a necessary evil, secondary and subordinate to their primary roles within the home. There are, for example, obvious assumptions behind the title of the Unemployed Workmen’s Act. Men were expected to be providers, and women to be dependent. It was therefore unusual for the concept of ‘unemployment’ to be applied to women and certainly a radical assertion for the women themselves to claim the label.⁷⁶

Efforts by local administrators to address unemployment primarily focused on male workers. At the Board of Guardians, no women served on the special committee appointed to ‘Deal with the Question of the Unemployed’ established in 1904.⁷⁷ In January 1906, the local distress committee itself advertised for prospective employers for unemployed women, but after several weeks, only three women were successfully employed. They believed, however, that the Charity Organization Society was ‘making a tremendous effort’.⁷⁸ In 1906, the women of the Canning Town Settlement made several efforts to establish workrooms for unemployed women, though this was dependent on voluntary contributions which were often slow to materialize.⁷⁹ Both the Settlement and the Women’s Industrial Council raised their concerns with the local distress committee in efforts to find more sustainable solutions.

Frustration at this fragmented effort and lack of urgency may well have prompted the two women who served on the Board of Guardians, Minnie Baldock and Edith Kerrison, to organize the first meeting. Here, Baldock stated that women needed ‘to show the authorities it was time’ to intervene, especially for single women and widows. She argued that ‘women should be able to demand work in the same way as men, and that such work should be paid for at a rate that would not sweat the receivers’.⁸⁰ In a June deputation to the local distress committee, women testified to the lack of practical action to help them. All the women had registered for work, but officials had done little beyond asking them how many pawntickets they had. In a clear rejection of this insinuation that they were incapable of managing their budgets, the women stressed their ages, the length of their marriages and their contribution through the rates to implicitly underscore their respectability.⁸¹ Minnie Baldock asserted that ‘it was hard upon women who were able and willing to work’ to be excluded from relief efforts.⁸²

Historians have shown that labour activists at this time saw work, not welfare, as the most effective solution to poverty. Work provided not only wages, but also dignity and self-respect.⁸³ Yet male socialists did not necessarily extend this analysis to women. Rather, they saw these attributes as forming the backbone of working-class masculinity.⁸⁴ The ‘male breadwinner’ model of working-class family life was championed by many of the trade unions as a means of guaranteeing jobs and higher wages for their male members, and was accepted more widely because of its resonance with middle-class ideals of separate spheres. Women workers could be perceived as victims of oppression by their male counterparts, but could also be seen as threats and rivals for work. Some men also continued to doubt women’s capacity and commitment to union organization.⁸⁵ These ideas were reflected in the wider labour movement and the party, where emphasis was placed on women’s domestic role.⁸⁶

In contrast, the women of the Canning Town branch clearly believed that employment for themselves – not necessarily their male relations – would improve their situations. This was reflected by the several speakers who discussed work and working conditions for women, with an emphasis on the provisions such as fair wages and nurseries which made work possible and something more than a necessary means of subsistence.⁸⁷ This chimes with June Hannam’s analysis of Labour women, who drew on a wide variety of experiences, including work, and not necessarily primarily motherhood, in their politics.⁸⁸ In positioning themselves in relation to the labour market, the women asserted their right to be taken seriously and on equal terms with men. As Adelaide Knight told her comrades when she was arrested, ‘We want honest, respectable, decent conditions for the workers of both sexes, whether in work or out – for if the government won’t provide work for a man or a woman, they have a duty to support him or her.’ This belief in their essential equality with, rather than difference from, men was essential to her claim for the vote and transcended all her other principles.

Priorities and strategies

The Canning Town women embraced direct action as a political strategy. These women saw visibility through deputations, processions and protest as being critical to furthering their cause. The numbers of women who attended the large deputations and processions always far exceeded the numbers who attended formal meetings. Questioned in court, Minnie Baldock had said ‘for a number of years … they had agitated in a quiet and ladylike manner, and had done all they could to try and bring the suffrage question to the front’ and would not admit that demands to see Asquith in person were ‘unreasonable’.⁹⁰ The women did not use the terms ‘militancy’ or ‘militant tactics’ in the minutes, but the language of political struggle was often used by visiting speakers, who variously stressed the need for women to ‘fight for this vote’, to ‘fight out this great fight’ and to ‘fight for their rights’.⁹¹ Fighting talk was also adopted by the members. Minnie Baldock, for example, praised the members as ‘good fighters’ and Adelaide Knight wrote to her comrades from prison through Dora Montefiore, telling them:

There is no suggestion that any of the women experienced either shame or hesitation in their attitude towards prison sentences. They seem to have accepted it as necessary, and were proud of the women who demonstrated their bravery in this way. Only a few members served a sentence themselves but they were supported wholeheartedly. After several comrades were arrested, a resolution was passed expressing their commitment to the women. ‘The Members of the WSPU Pledging its self to stand by Mrs Knight Miss Kenney & Mrs Sparsboro in their hour of trial’.⁹³ Forty members of the branch presented Minnie Baldock with a petition ‘to show their appreciation of the loyal, brave and noble manner in which you bore imprisonment, faced slander and criticism’ in order that she had ‘a lasting record of their love and admiration’.⁹⁴ A ‘hearty social’ with ‘a beautiful recitation’ and ‘several labour songs’ commemorated the release of Miss Steel.⁹⁵ The women also listened to the accounts of other ex-prisoners, like Marguerite Sidley, with interest.⁹⁶

Understanding the sacrifice involved seems to have cemented the women’s sense of solidarity with one another. When Annie Kenney told the women of her plans to risk arrest, ‘it was rather a sad meeting for we knew & felt that some of our own members would be sent to prison’.⁹⁷ Reaction elsewhere was more mixed. Some Labour MPs, including Keir Hardie, raised questions about the sentencing of Adelaide Knight and her comrades, claiming that ‘the feeling among people of all opinions … was that the sentence was unduly harsh’. The Lib-Lab member for Burnley, Fred Maddison, however, called them ‘female hooligans’ and said that ‘no real working woman would have disgraced themselves in the way these women had done’.⁹⁸ The Countess of Carlisle, meanwhile, told the Women’s Liberal Federation that the women were ‘making an impertinent mockery of womanhood’.⁹⁹

The women were concerned not only about acquiring the vote, but also preparing themselves for using it, and exercising the responsibilities of citizenship. The women’s desire for political education is evident throughout the minutes. They were determined to train themselves in the business of political organization, or, as Annie Kenney put it in the first meeting, ‘to organise and do things in a proper way’. George Shreve suggested – somewhat patronizingly – that this meant ‘taking a cue from the men’, since ‘with a proper method of carrying out the meetings they would soon equal the organization that men had at present’.¹⁰⁰ Their methods both reflected and adapted conventional political practice. Particularly in the early months, the chair rotated among different members as women tested out different skills and roles. At one social evening, a novice speaker, Miss Miller, was given the opportunity to try her hand and received warm encouragement. ‘This being the first time Miss Miller had spoken in Public. A very good speech which ought to encourage those who have not yet tried.’¹⁰¹ The women debated the timing of the meeting to ensure that it could best fit around women’s other commitments.¹⁰² Members who were absent owing to illness or family circumstances were remembered with sympathy within the minutes.¹⁰³

Part of this commitment to political education involved inviting outside speakers to address the branch. Popular speakers attracted large audiences hungry for knowledge and news. The history of women’s achievements was one recurring theme. For example, Sister Kerrison offered an account of Florence Nightingale, a Miss Macauley discussed women’s contribution to the defence of the country, while Miss Millar simply ‘gave a very interesting speech about some women in the olden times & just showed us what women can do when their minds are made up’.¹⁰⁴ These speeches were evidently meant to offer women a sense of legitimacy, connection to a political tradition and belief in women’s capabilities, which would be more fully realized once they had acquired the vote.

More frequently, however, it was the contemporary context which provided the subject material. Some speakers offered accounts of social conditions and problems, particularly as they affected women.¹⁰⁵ Members provided first-hand accounts of their experiences at deputations or public meetings, and reported back on their encounters with outside bodies such as the Right to Work Committee. Others shared indirect information from newspapers. Absent members could also continue to participate and share information through letters. Letters were also used to lobby individuals and groups external to the organization.

Once informed on a particular issue, women believed they had a right to contribute to the broader public debate. Following a lecture by Harry Baldock on ‘the unrest among the natives of Natal’, members passed a resolution calling on the government to bring the crisis to an end and ensuring that women took part in a recommended enquiry into the situation. They determined that they would share their decision with ‘the Local MP, the Local Papers, Prime Minister, Colonial Sec etc’.¹⁰⁶ This testifies to their self-confidence in political participation. It also indicates that their belief in their ability to contribute to government extended well beyond their local community and issues directly relating to women.

The women kept a careful eye on the development of the movement elsewhere. New branches in nearby neighbourhoods and communities – for example, in Croydon, East Ham, Bow and Bromley – were cited by name, probably because these names resonated in a more meaningful way for these women than larger but more distant cities and towns. This meant members of the Canning Town branch were able to connect their own work to a broader community outside. These developments confirmed their membership of an expanding, dynamic and successful organization, but also underscored their status as pioneers breaking new ground for others to follow. Their status as ‘the first’ branch was referred to several times by visiting speakers, suggesting it was a particular point of pride for members.¹⁰⁷

In the end, the branch failed when this connection to a wider community weakened. Members felt not just ‘neglected’ by Minnie Baldock, but also isolated from events elsewhere. A lack of visitors eventually prompted the downfall of the branch. In the last few months of the minutes, few speakers are recorded beyond Minnie Baldock discussing her activities elsewhere. She reported back on her individual efforts to heckle Sidney Buxton; the women were no longer acting together, as a collective, as they had done in the early period of the branch. Almost all the other speakers were existing members of the branch who offered their own stories of their journey to activism. While these may have been moderately interesting, they effectively told members only what they already knew. Familiar and popular faces such as Teresa Billington-Grieg and Dora Montefiore had long since departed and as the number of WSPU branches had multiplied, leading lights of the suffrage movement such as Clara Morden and Charlotte Despard had many other calls on their time. Minnie Baldock seems to have increasingly seen her own role as an ambassador and advocate for working-class women beyond the branch. Members complained that there were ‘not sufficient speakers’, but nor were they actually engaging in any collective action.¹⁰⁸ The minutes of one later meeting read simply ‘Mrs Baldock away no speaker members amusing themselves with songs and the piano’.¹⁰⁹ But though, as has been stressed, conviviality was important to the women, it was not sufficient to sustain the branch.

Conclusion

At first sight, the history of the Canning Town branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union appears to represent a failed experiment. Its decline appears to confirm longstanding narratives about the failure of the militant suffrage movement to engage and attract working-class women, limiting its effectiveness and radicalism and illustrating the difficulties of reconciling feminist and socialist principles and practice. Tensions arose not just because of Christabel Pankhurst’s leadership style, but reflected more fundamental disagreements on the necessity of adult suffrage or women’s suffrage.

Yet for all the difficulties outlined in this chapter, it also offers a more optimistic reading of the possibilities for working-class women’s politics in this period. The women’s belief in the importance of the vote went hand-in-hand with a more immediate focus on stressing their right to work, pressuring local administrative bodies and asserting their importance within the local labour market. At the same time, they clearly perceived the vote as a vital tool for bringing about longer-term positive change. Though they were visited by many outside speakers – several of whom were already, or later became, household names – these women looked to their speakers for information, not for instruction. They determined their own course of action, and were not told what to do. Reports from the WSPU national executive were only one of many sources of information from diverse events and organizations. As such, the minutes of the Canning Town WSPU provide an important account of contemporary working-class women’s political capabilities and capacities.

The Canning Town WSPU should not be seen as a brief flickering of activism which was extinguished by the clumsy mishandling by an insensitive central committee. The relative historiographical neglect of the Canning Town WSPU contrasts with the careful and detailed attention paid to the later East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS).¹¹⁰ Yet to see the ELFS in isolation is to risk the implication that feminist politics was a later innovation in East London. This was not the case. The Canning Town branch not only grew out of pre-existing solidarity between women, but had a lasting legacy. Indeed, several members of the Canning Town WSPU, including Sarah Hockham and Prudence Hornblower, became Canning Town district leaders in the ELFS.¹¹¹ Daisy Parsons, later an important figure within the ELFS, specifically cited the inspirational example of Minnie Baldock as a formative influence on her political development.¹¹² It is vital that we see the continuities and traditions in women’s politics at the local level as part of a richer and more comprehensive history of women’s activism.