At the height of the suffrage campaign, Scottish suffragist Helen Fraser was one of the many paid organizers sent to regions across Britain to bolster activity and initiate local branches. In 1908, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) despatched Fraser to Wales, where she carried out the routine work of an organizer: travelling from town to town, speaking at local meetings, raising funds and distributing suffrage propaganda.¹ In a later oral interview with historian Brian Harrison, Fraser recalled her time there.

Fraser’s contacts and educational networks introduced her to what she described as ‘leading women’ across Wales – predominantly headmistresses and middle-class women with whom she lodged and often formed lasting friendships.³ But her recollections also hint at broader divisions in the campaign and of the difficulties some of her predecessors had encountered. Many of the first organizers to work in Wales hailed from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds and often failed to breach class boundaries with the communities to which they were sent. While social and party political divisions cut across the wider suffrage movement, in Wales this was further complicated by linguistic and cultural differences. Examining the interactions between suffrage organizers and Welsh-speaking and industrial regions in particular, this chapter highlights some of the issues suffrage societies faced in building a truly inclusive movement across Britain. It explores why certain organizers were sent to Wales and how they were received by local communities, and points to some of the different ways support for the campaign manifested at a grassroots level. In doing so, the chapter suggests that to fully contextualize women’s engagement with the movement, we need to employ a much broader definition of activism which is relative to the specific socioeconomic context and local political cultures.

Organizers’ testimonies and regional reports have helped to shape both contemporary perceptions and subsequent historiographical narratives of the movement in Wales: slow to develop and implanted by a middle-class leadership on ‘rather stony soil’, as another visiting speaker wrote.⁴ This chapter examines the frequent disconnect between the intentions of organizers and their reception in local communities by analysing organizers’ correspondence and suffrage papers, in tandem with local press reports and sources. The historiographical contribution of the chapter is twofold. First, it builds upon a recent body of scholarship which has challenged the interpretation that the women’s movement in Wales lacked a grassroots base by exploring some of the ways support manifested outside dominant suffrage structures, as well as the economic and cultural factors which could inhibit engagement with the mainstream suffrage movement. Second, the chapter considers more broadly how historians conceptualize the relationship between centres and so-called geographical peripheries in the early twentieth-century suffrage movement: between national leadership and the regions, and between dominant local suffrage branches and their neighbouring districts.

A key question for historians of suffrage in Wales has been the extent to which there was a specifically ‘Welsh’ movement. While early scholarship questioned the existence of a native grassroots movement in Wales, subsequent studies have begun to revise this interpretation. Pioneering research by Kay Cook and Neil Evans and by Angela V. John provided the first surveys of Welsh women’s suffrage and explored how it intersected with national identity.⁵ This was followed by Ryland Wallace’s comprehensive and meticulous account which charted the fortunes of the major suffrage societies across Wales and revealed no absence of agitation in even the most remote towns and villages.⁶ In her nuanced analysis of Welsh women’s liberalism, Ursula Masson demonstrated how support for suffrage initially flourished through other reform movements. Masson argued that although the impetus for the suffrage campaign did, to some extent, come from elsewhere, ‘the conditions in its favour brought together the “outside” stimulus with elements usually considered as impeccably “national”, the forces of Welsh Nonconformity’.⁷ Embodied in the Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) movement, Welsh Liberal nationalism combined the causes of disestablishment, land reform, education, language and temperance in the late nineteenth century.⁸ Masson highlighted that women’s claims to citizenship in Wales had ideological and personnel continuities with these issues which had created fertile ground for the suffrage campaign to take hold. In particular, the Welsh Union of Women’s Liberal Associations became the main early vehicle for suffrage – linking, albeit briefly, feminism and nationalism in party politics.⁹

More broadly, recent scholarship on the suffrage campaign in Britain and Ireland has adopted an increasingly critical approach to conceptual understandings of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ by rejecting a one-way transmission of ideas between dominant metropolitan centres and the so-called Celtic fringe.¹⁰ Local or regional case studies, too, have challenged top-down narratives of suffrage by showing how policy initiatives and campaign tactics could be developed in the regions before they were adopted nationally.¹¹ These studies have shown that for most women it was the local branch which was the key site of their campaign; as June Hannam summarized, ‘local suffrage politics was not just about building support for a national movement – at particular times the local branches were the movement’.¹² Moreover, a local framework of analysis has proved particularly fruitful in revealing the intricate web of overlapping associations in support of the cause, and the social and friendship networks which underpinned women’s activism.¹³ As Myriam Boussahba-Bravard reminds us, ‘suffrage outside suffragism’ was an integral part of the campaign for the vote and non-suffrage associations, such as party political organizations or reforming groups, did not preclude members’ support for suffrage.¹⁴ This is particularly pertinent to the Welsh context where the relatively late development of branches of the major suffrage societies has been used by some as a metric of apathy towards the cause. However, the campaign for the vote was part of a much longer process of women’s politicization and movement into public life, and a variety of party political and non-political organizations worked for suffrage in Welsh communities, including Women’s Liberal Association branches, temperance societies, Women’s Labour League branches, Women’s Cooperative Guilds and literary and debating societies.¹⁵ Such support which manifested outside the administrative machinery of major suffrage societies is often overshadowed by the more high-profile events, but by using a broader definition of political activism we can see that support for the campaign manifested differently across communities and contexts.

Indeed, Wales, like elsewhere, was not a homogeneous entity when it came to women’s suffrage. Yet limited analysis of the constituent nations in surveys of the British suffrage movement has often led to one-dimensional interpretations which mask these regional and local complexities. Working-class communities were overwhelmingly concentrated in the densely populated coalfield of the southern valleys and the slate-quarrying region of the north; both were centred around a mono-industrial economic base which afforded few opportunities for women’s paid employment outside of the home. Wales’s small middle and upper classes developed in the commercial centres and coastal towns of the south and north-west, whereas the Welsh-speaking heartland was predominantly rooted in the agricultural regions of the middle and north of the country. These social and cultural differences were mapped onto political differences. The Liberal Party, which had become entwined with Welsh national identity, dominated the political landscape throughout most of the suffrage campaign. By the turn of the twentieth century, this Welsh Liberal Nonconformist hegemony was also beginning to fracture under a burgeoning labour movement in the industrial and cosmopolitan south-east, areas increasingly identified with ‘de-nationalising’ values.¹⁶ For suffrage organizers unfamiliar with the national context, these subtle complexities could pose significant challenges. Focusing on the reception organizers received across different communities in Wales, then, provides a lens into how the socioeconomic structure, cultural landscape and political priorities affected localities’ specific engagement with the mainstream campaign.

Suffrage societies and Welsh identity: an overview

While the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Women’s Freedom League (WFL) did make significant inroads throughout Wales, it was the NUWSS which had the most success across the country – particularly as suffrage branches began to replace Liberal women’s associations in the years preceding the war.¹⁷ Active societies initially flourished along the relatively anglicized and affluent port cities of the south and the seaside resorts of the north-west. By 1912, the Cardiff and District society claimed the title of the largest branch outside London and, at the outbreak of the First World War, the NUWSS boasted around fifty branches in Wales.¹⁸ The introduction of regional federations in 1909 provided alternative devolved centres of power which had financial autonomy and could challenge the national leadership over policy.¹⁹ Pre-existing regional divisions in Wales were reflected in this new organizational structure; branches in the south joined the South Wales and Montgomeryshire Federation, while their northern counterparts were affiliated to the West Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales Federation. The Cardiff and Bangor NUWSS branches were two of the strongest and, both situated in university towns, were largely dominated by a civic middle-class leadership. They also had close and sometimes fraught relationships with their respective neighbouring coalfield communities in the south, and the slate-quarrying villages of the north.

Welsh iconography, like that of Scottish and Irish, was co-opted by all suffrage societies to further the campaign. As Angela V. John has shown, the linking of Welsh national identity with the cause was used by both supporters and opponents of women’s suffrage.²⁰ For the former, it was not only an expression of local or national identity but a propagandist strategy to demonstrate the spatial and cultural reach of the movement. Participants in marches and demonstrations were encouraged to don national costume, and it was not uncommon for the national anthem or Welsh hymns to be sung at meetings.²¹ A specifically Welsh offshoot of the WSPU, the Cymric Suffrage Union (CSU), was founded in 1911 by a prominent London-Welsh suffrage activist, Edith Mansell Moullin.²² The CSU made use of Welsh costume, language and music and a rhetoric of Celtic liberty.²³ It also distributed Welsh handbills at concerts and lectures held in Welsh chapels in London and published material in Welsh-language newspapers.²⁴ Although the Union did establish several branches throughout Wales, it was predominantly London-based.²⁵ The symbolic use of Welshness was particularly pertinent for the national suffrage leadership because one of the leading Liberal politicians, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, was a Welshman. Lloyd George had a notoriously ambivalent stance on women’s suffrage and initially opposed it. The WSPU arranged classes, taught by a Welsh inhabitant of London, Iris Davies, for its members to learn Welsh phrases so that they could heckle Lloyd George in his native tongue.²⁶ However, his contemporary status as a hero of Welsh cultural nationalism could also complicate the suffrage movement’s engagement with Liberal strongholds within Wales.

Suffrage organizers, cultural clashes and regional centres

As the campaign gained momentum in the years preceding the First World War, full-time paid organizers were sent to regions across Britain to stimulate the formation of local branches. While the vibrancy of branch activity was dependent on and sustained by the enthusiasm of the local membership, suffrage societies recognized the deployment of organizers as the most effective and efficient way to reach sympathizers, especially during the event of a by-election. Their work entailed arranging meetings, raising funds, canvassing candidates and compiling reports on the region’s activities. The reception organizers received across regions was mixed. Although Krista Cowman has pointed to the success organizers had in some regions in helping to raise local suffrage membership, other historians have highlighted the resentment provoked by the importation of English ‘stars’ to Wales, who sometimes caused more harm than good.²⁷ To a certain degree, the characterization of visiting campaigners as having a limited ability to empathize with some of the Welsh communities in which they worked was true. Stereotypes of Welsh women as marginal, passive and disinterested are certainly evident in some organizers’ letters and reports, and this reflected broader class prejudices as well as the specificities of the Welsh context.²⁸ For instance, NUWSS organizer Mary Hilston lamented that ‘the women are very hopeless’ while working in the mining town of Blaenavon.²⁹ Frustrated by the limited progress she felt she was making in the town, Hilston described its inhabitants as ‘naturally slow in taking things in’, and reported that she had to give them ‘small doses and let them filter’.³⁰

Vivid descriptions of an isolated and rugged Welsh landscape were evident in many suffrage organizers’ reports too – landscapes which were for some analogous to an alien and hostile cultural environment. Organizers frequently used geological metaphors to underscore the challenges they faced in gaining local trust. Hilston wrote of the ‘stone wall’ she met in her ‘heavy task’ to ‘break up the ground’ in North Monmouthshire.³¹ Similarly, the sparsely populated ‘remote little villages among the mountains’ in mid and north Wales were a source of amazement for some visitors who encountered ‘people who do not speak or understand English’.³² This sense of ‘otherness’ also extended to attempts to recruit volunteers for campaigns; WSPU organizer Annie Williams, for instance, marketed the 1913 holiday campaign in the Rhondda Valley as providing ‘a unique opportunity for coming into touch with the typical collier and his surroundings’.³³ Like other popular tourist towns across Britain, the western and northern coastal towns of Wales became targets for the holiday campaigns. During the summer months, organizers frequently made calls for members to notify them if they intended to spend their holiday nearby, with the promise to combine ‘work and play’.³⁴

The initial deployment of organizers was often based on simplistic stereotypes or a superficial perception of the region by national leaders. When later asked why she was sent to Wales, Helen Fraser replied: ‘I think they thought that a good speaker was very attractive in Wales. You see, the Welsh are very eloquent … a refined flourish for oratory. And they thought that I would be good in Wales because I was a really good speaker.’³⁵ Other visiting campaigners tried to find shared cultural affinity with their audience. Speaking in Rhyl on behalf of the WFL, Muriel Matters reported that she had ‘asked the people at headquarters to allow me to come down and take on the job because I am partly Welsh, and because I would understand your little ways, and you understand mine’.³⁶ The Tonypandy riots of 1910 and 1911 also contributed towards a perception of the coalfield communities as a hotbed of militancy, and the WSPU used them as evidence to argue that the Welsh understood the need for militant tactics.³⁷ Ahead of Pankhurst’s tour of Wales in 1911, the WSPU claimed that ‘the Welsh are keenly interested in matters political, and there is nothing they enjoy so thoroughly as a rousing enthusiastic meeting’.³⁸ The strikes were also cited by the WSPU leadership as an example of the government’s hypocrisy in relation to its treatment of militant action; the miners were treated more favourably by the government and press, they argued, because of the need for their votes.³⁹ Reports in the suffrage press often fuelled these class and national stereotypes, even when they had little material basis. Detailing her initial caution about visiting slate-quarrying villages in north Wales in 1909, Helga Gill wrote: ‘These are mining districts, and have the reputation of being terribly rough.’⁴⁰ Similar apprehension was expressed by a WSPU visiting campaigner about a meeting in the rural town of Dolgellau, ‘as the large audience were almost entirely Welsh, and there appeared to be every possibility of a troublesome time’.⁴¹ Despite their trepidation, organizers or visiting speakers were often surprised to find that they received a warm reception.⁴²

Yet suffrage organizers – like their society’s membership – were also a diverse group. In her study of WSPU organizers, Cowman estimates that at least 140 women from a broad range of social backgrounds worked for the society as paid agents across Britain.⁴³ Usually promoted from within its membership ranks, the earliest WSPU workers were drawn from the radical socialist networks which formed around the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and had some experience of agitation and propagandizing in trade unions.⁴⁴ In Wales, too, the WSPU and WFL agents appear to have been drawn from a wider range of social backgrounds than most of their NUWSS counterparts, with some hailing from the communities in which they campaigned. The selection of organizers was predominantly based on the executive committee’s perceived needs of the district and their understanding of a worker’s abilities.⁴⁵ NUWSS organizers were initially sent to different nations and regions from their own so that they would not get involved in partisan politics. This contrasted with the WFL policy which, following its introduction of regional organizers in May 1910, sought to appoint women already familiar with their region. Such a strategy, however, was not always successful. This was evident in the appointment of Mary McCleod Cleeves, secretary of the Swansea WFL branch and a national executive committee member, as WFL organizer for Wales. For a year, she was active in promoting the suffrage cause throughout the region, chairing meetings and helping to establish branches. But her tenure soon ended in acrimony when her fellow Swansea members claimed she was assuming too much authority – leading to her eventual resignation and defection to the WSPU. As Alexandra Hughes-Johnson notes in her chapter in this volume, McCleod Cleeves changed allegiances again in 1915 when she served on the executive committee of the Suffragettes of the WSPU, a wartime suffrage organization established in opposition to the Pankhursts’ patriotic feminism. Nonetheless, such regional events could determine national policy; following a full enquiry by WFL officials from London into her resignation as Welsh organizer, the national executive concluded that the relationship between branches and organizers was unsatisfactory and shortly after terminated the scheme.⁴⁶

Following the introduction of the NUWSS Federation Scheme in 1909, the regions were given greater autonomy to choose and fund organizers. When the Cardiff and District Women’s Suffrage Society (CDWSS) sought a full-time campaigner in 1912, their secretary Mabel Howell asked the national secretary, Kathleen Courtney, for ‘someone not too young and not aggressive’.⁴⁷ Howell also wrote to the women’s university residential halls in Wales to see whether they had any graduates suitable for the position. The qualities they sought in an organizer were clearly a reflection of the composition of the local leadership and their caution to not upset the delicate factions of their support base. Like most large branches, the CDWSS executive committee comprised a mixture of political persuasions; its president, Rose Mabel Lewis, was a Conservative, while its vice president, Millicent Mackenzie, a professor of education at the local university college, would stand as a Labour parliamentary candidate in 1918. These prominent members were also linked to major civic and educational institutions in the city. Howell, a local graduate, was to be secretary of the Cardiff WLA from 1925. Other influential committee members included Barbara Foxley, who was to be Mackenzie’s successor as professor of education and a Liberal councillor in the 1920s, Mary Collin, headmistress of the city’s prestigious Cardiff High School for Girls, and Ethel Hurlbatt, principal of the women’s university residence, Aberdare Hall. The foundation of the university colleges in Wales and their women’s halls provided important institutional spaces for visiting speakers and campaigners. Lewis, Hurlbatt and Collin all hosted NUWSS organizer Helen Fraser on her numerous visits to Cardiff – Hurlbatt in Aberdare Hall and Collin in her house attached to Cardiff High School for Girls.⁴⁸

Organizers were often stationed in the strongest branch in the district and used this as a centre from which to reach sympathizers, especially because they were usually larger urban towns with good communication and transport links. This meant that working-class communities could be doubly marginalized by the regional civic middle-class leadership and the suffrage society leadership. Dominant regional branches, such as the CDWSS, sometimes perpetuated class stereotypes of their surrounding industrial communities, reflecting pre-existing tensions between different classes and communities. Some of these tensions came to the fore when the NUWSS abandoned its non-partisan policy in 1912 and adopted the Election Fighting Fund (EFF), which gave electoral support to the Labour Party. This new stance alienated some Liberal supporters, who comprised a majority of the NUWSS membership. As a Liberal stronghold, the South Wales Federation was one of the most ardently opposed to the policy. Claiming a superior local understanding of labour politics, Mabel Howell wrote to the EFF committee: ‘Cardiff is in the mining district – perhaps this accounts for the difference in one’s estimate of their value as supporters’.⁴⁹

In other instances, the greater autonomy given to regions was beneficial for breaching cultural divides. Branches in the north of Wales were affiliated to the West Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales Federation. However, difficulties experienced by the Federation in maintaining contact with the more remote Welsh societies, as well as communicating with predominantly Welsh-language communities, prompted the formation of a Welsh Sub-Committee.⁵⁰ Established in January 1912, Charlotte Price White, secretary of the Bangor NUWSS branch, acted as the organizing secretary for the coordination of Welsh work within the Federation. A former teacher and early graduate of the University College of North Wales, Price White did much to bolster and coordinate activity in north Wales through her translation of suffrage material and sensitivity to regions’ local political allegiances and cultural landscape.⁵¹

Welsh language, Liberalism and rural communities

Linguistic differences were a significant obstacle for all major suffrage societies in Wales, who frequently expressed the need for a Welsh-speaking organizer and understood that their campaign work in the country was significantly hampered by the lack of one.⁵² At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly half of the population spoke Welsh, and in some rural and northern counties, such as Merionethshire, the proportion of monoglot speakers was over 50%.⁵³ As part of their broader strategy to engage the regions more effectively, in late 1909 the WSPU sought to address this gap by appointing Rachel Barrett as Wales’s permanent organizer. Born to Welsh-speaking parents in Carmarthen and educated at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, Barrett joined the WSPU in 1906 while working as a teacher in Penarth. During Adela Pankhurst’s visit to Cardiff the following year, Barrett helped her in her work and reportedly fell into disfavour with her headmistress ‘when her science mistress was reported in the local papers as drenched with flour at an open-air meeting at the Cardiff docks’.⁵⁴ She worked alongside Annie Kenney in Bristol as a volunteer before she was sent to Newport, Monmouthshire in the autumn of 1909. There she recalled carrying out the regular activities of a WSPU organizer: arranging meetings, speaking, raising funds, taking part in protests and organizing militancy.⁵⁵ Barrett’s Welsh background was frequently perceived as an asset to the WSPU. During the 1910 Mid-Glamorgan by-election, the suffrage press claimed that ‘[i]‌t was fortunate that Miss Barrett, who was in charge of the campaign, is Welsh by birth, and was able to make short speeches to the people in their own language to their great delight and interest’.⁵⁶

The support of Welsh-speaking campaigners could be a crucial factor in garnering support in communities where language barriers, rather than hostility to the message, inhibited engagement with the mainstream movement. An influential and vigorous campaigner, Barrett also addressed crowds throughout north Wales in Welsh and had a similar effect in breaching cultural divides during Pankhurst’s tour of the country in 1911.⁵⁷ The spatial composition of the audience at a meeting held in the spa town of Llanwrtyd Wells reflects the initial caution felt by local residents; the front seats were filled up with tourists visiting the spa, while the body of the hall comprised Welsh miners, farmers, townspeople and their wives and daughters.⁵⁸ A report described the reception they received.

Despite the patronizing tone of the report, the importance of the suffrage message being delivered through the medium of Welsh is clear. The NUWSS, too, recognized that the support of Welsh-speaking activists during their campaigns was vital to their ability to gain access to some communities. For instance, the positive reception of their Welsh caravan tour during the summer of 1909 was attributed to the presence of another University of Wales graduate and teacher from Merthyr, Magdalen Morgan, ‘whose fluency in Welsh is greatly appreciated in the villages, where little or no English is spoken’.⁶⁰ At a meeting in Bala, the local press reported that Morgan, who spoke in Welsh, got a fair hearing, but attempts by her friend, Miss Edwards, to follow in English, proved abortive, with the meeting breaking up in disorder.⁶¹

The involvement of Welsh-speaking activists was also essential for the translation of the suffrage societies’ propaganda material. Although references were scarce, there are early examples of support for women’s enfranchisement in women’s Welsh-language print culture, such as the periodical Y Gymraes (Welshwoman), and of literature being translated by some provincial suffrage societies in Wales from the 1870s.⁶² In the early twentieth century, Welsh campaigners again highlighted the need for material to be translated and were positive about the willingness of the Welsh language press to publish it.⁶³ However, it was not until 1910 that the translation of propaganda material by the major suffrage societies truly gained pace. This was largely carried out by Charlotte Price White and the Bangor and District Suffrage Society, who recognized the urgent need to give people ‘propaganda in their own language’.⁶⁴ Translated material included extracts from Lloyd George’s speeches and pamphlets explaining the Conciliation Bill. The Welsh Organization Sub-Committee of the regional NUWSS federation was particularly active in working closely with local papers and the Welsh-language press to gain coverage of suffrage news.⁶⁵ Reports consistently highlighted the warm reception that the Welsh leaflets received at local markets and in campaign work.⁶⁶ The increased coordination of translated material seemed to have been a significant factor in facilitating the engagement of Welsh-speaking communities with the suffrage movement. This was reflected in the formation of branches in 1911 in the Welsh-speaking and slate-quarrying communities of Bethesda, Tal-y-sarn and Pen-y-groes in Caernarfonshire.⁶⁷ Edith Eskrigge, NUWSS organizer for north Wales, discussing the formation of a branch in the slate-quarrying village of Bethesda in 1911, noted that: ‘Bethesda will be the first society in north Wales that is composed entirely of Welsh women and it is hoped that this progressive little quarry town will prove a centre from which “The Movement” will spread to other quarry villages, hidden away among the hills.’⁶⁸

As suffrage societies began to gain greater access to Welsh-speaking communities, the acceleration of militant tactics by the WSPU from 1911 led to an increased resistance to all suffrage organizers and speakers within some Liberal communities. Advocating the need for a more cautious and considered approach in north Wales, NUWSS organizer Edith Eskrigge reported: ‘I should not be giving any idea of the situation as I found it, without saying that nine out of ten people who have expressed agreement with our aims would not have even listened to me for a minute, had I not first explained that I was “non-militant”.’⁶⁹ This was further evidenced when Eskrigge visited members of the Caernarfon NUWSS branch in Lloyd George’s parliamentary constituency in February 1912. Plans were discussed for a joint demonstration by the local WLA and the suffrage society in the town, but the feeling of antagonism aroused by the increase in militancy was so strong that the WLA decided not to lend its support to the event.⁷⁰ A series of highly publicized attacks on Lloyd George in Wales later that year did little to gain the sympathy of Wales’s Liberal strongholds, and, as the local press secretary Miss Wortham reported back to the NUWSS executive committee, could do ‘incalculable harm to suffragism in Wales’.⁷¹ In particular, violent treatment afforded to suffragettes by local men at the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham and Lloyd George’s opening of a Village Institute in his home village of Llanystumdwy attracted significant local and national press attention.⁷² In the succeeding weeks, Eskrigge organized a small meeting in Mold, which was not as successful as she had anticipated, owing to the hostile feeling which had been aroused by the incident.⁷³ While such propagandist stunts certainly gave visibility to the cause on a national level, they did little to advance the movement in certain Welsh communities and served to alienate some sympathizers who interpreted them as an attack on their national culture.⁷⁴

Coalfield communities, the labour movement and suffrage

Although the Liberal Party maintained parliamentary dominance throughout Wales until the war, by the turn of the century its hegemony was beginning to fracture under an emerging labour movement in the south. Historians have suggested that the low levels of working-class women’s paid employment inhibited the development of a fully coordinated suffrage movement in the South Wales Valleys, in comparison to their unionized northern counterparts in the Lancashire cotton mills.⁷⁵ To a certain extent this was true. The mono-industrial structure of the coalfield afforded few opportunities for women’s formal labour participation outside of the home and this had a profound effect on gendered political cultures; miner’s lodges and trades and labour councils, which women had limited access to, were central to political and social life of these communities. In the years preceding the war there was, however, some degree of convergence between an emerging women’s labour politics and the suffrage movement. Parallel to the decline of women’s liberal associations, active branches of the Women’s Labour League (WLL) flourished in Cardiff and Swansea and were soon followed by ones in Newport, Abertillery, Merthyr, Ogmore Vale and other mining towns across the coalfield.⁷⁶ Local membership of the WLLs overlapped with Women’s Cooperative Guilds, eighteen branches of which were formed in Wales between 1909 and 1914.⁷⁷ These associations introduced women to public speaking, propagandizing and organizational skills which would aid their suffrage work. In some instances, suffrage activity could act as a catalyst to women’s involvement in other political causes by introducing them to collective organizing. For example, following Annie Kenney’s agitation in Cardiff and the South Wales Valleys in 1906, twelve of her audience at Trecynon joined the ILP and also formed a branch of the WSPU, though the latter appeared to have been short-lived.⁷⁸

This developing women’s political culture was reflected in their increased contribution to local labour newspapers.⁷⁹ In December 1911, the first ‘Our women’s column’ appeared in the Rhondda Socialist, a mouthpiece for the local Rhondda ILP branches until its merger with the Merthyr-based South Wales Worker in 1913.⁸⁰ Anonymously authored by ‘Matron’, the women’s column addressed issues such as pithead baths, health, education, housing, poverty, maternal and child welfare, alongside women’s suffrage.⁸¹ Similarly, an ‘Our women’s column’ was included in the Swansea and District Workers’ Journal (1899–1914), which was published by the Swansea ILP. Though mostly unsigned, some articles can be attributed to the secretary of the Swansea WLL, Ruth Chalk.⁸² Within these pages, support for women’s enfranchisement was interwoven with a wider range of demands which reflected the priorities of the local community and were concerned with improving the material basis of working-class women’s day-to-day lives.

The authors of these articles were astutely aware of the material constraints many working-class women faced in participating fully in local politics. An article by ‘Matron’ lamented the lack of working-class leaders in the women’s labour movement. Published in December 1912, ‘Matron’ wrote that ‘[a]‌ll the names of women prominent in the Labour Movement are women who have come into the movement out of sympathy, and not out of a real experience of the working woman’s needs and struggles’.⁸³ She attributed the lack of representation of working-class women in leadership positions to the fact that they ‘cannot afford to pay secretaries, agents and leaders to give their time to organization’.⁸⁴ Instead, ‘Matron’ argued, ‘these upper-class women step in; they have money and leisure to bestow, and they do the work gratuitously’.⁸⁵ ‘Matron’s’ criticism of the well-meaning condescension from a middle-class leadership was also confirmed, as we have seen, by the behaviour of some suffrage organizers at a time when the NUWSS and labour movement were moving closer together.⁸⁶ Also sensitive to the practical obstacles and childcare constraints inhibiting working-class women’s political activism, an anonymous author of the women’s column in the Swansea and District Workers’ Journal argued that women could not fully participate in the work of the ILP ‘unless the men of the movement sacrifice a little of their leisure time in order to afford their wives an opportunity of attending our meetings’.⁸⁷ For both authors, class solidarity superseded gender politics; only with the support and cooperation of working-class men, they believed, would women be able to achieve greater equality.

Despite their increasing hostility to the labour movement at national level, in 1913 the WSPU specifically began to target trade union and ILP branches in the South Wales coalfield. Annie Williams, a former teacher and Rachel Barrett’s successor as Wales’s WSPU organizer, led a three-week campaign in the Rhondda and Cynon valleys throughout August, addressing branches of the National Union of Railwaymen.⁸⁸ The campaign was well supported by influential figures in the community, including trade union leaders who often chaired the meetings and provided an avenue into the local political institutions.⁸⁹ The local labour press heralded the tour as a success and reported the conversion of many railwaymen to the cause. The South Wales Worker, for instance, noted the effect the tour had in swaying local opinion on women’s suffrage: ‘it has dawned upon the minds of hundreds of workers that to secure their emancipation without bringing along the women is hopeless.’⁹⁰ It also praised the tactics of the organizers, who it believed ‘were well advised when they decided upon this line of propaganda’.⁹¹ By the outbreak of the war, conferences of miners and railwaymen passed resolutions that women’s suffrage should be one of the planks in their platform, and members of the suffrage society were co-opted onto the local Trades Council.⁹²

At the same time as the WSPU began to make inroads, the constitutional suffrage movement also increasingly turned its attention to coalfield communities and focused its campaign on trade unions and labour institutions – a policy which did appear to have a positive impact. In a further attempt to widen its support base, the NUWSS began to deploy experienced working-class activists or those who had been involved in the labour movement, such as Selina Cooper and Margaret Aldersley, to South Wales.⁹³ Also with the aim of further building up working-class support, the Friends of Women’s Suffrage scheme was adopted by the NUWSS in August 1912 to enable supporters to register as ‘friends’ and become adherents to the society without making any financial contribution; it recognized that for some working-class women, the cost of society membership or literature could prove prohibitive. Across Britain the scheme was received with varying degrees of warmth by district societies, but at the end of 1912 over 100 branches of the NUWSS had inaugurated the programme. When the NUWSS undertook a targeted campaign of the coalfield to coincide with the annual ILP conference in 1912, the large number of Friends of Women’s Suffrage enrolled was testament to the amount of sympathy for the cause.⁹⁴

The NUWSS’s adoption of a partisan policy, a succession of targeted campaigns by the major suffrage societies, and the support provided by dominant local labour figures and institutions had a significant effect on the development of the suffrage campaign in industrial communities. When NUWSS organizer for South Wales L. F. Waring campaigned in the Rhondda Valley in the summer of 1912, she reported how the campaigners canvassed their way up the valley from Pentre, to Treorchy and Treherbert, and noted, ‘[n]‌ever before have I been so well supported with helpers and workers as here in the mining district’.⁹⁵ Also outlining what she saw as a shift in the attitude of working-class women by 1913, Erie Evans, a local doctor and prominent member of the CDWSS, wrote: ‘They are so much more alive to their own value and their own needs, and answering to this there is a greater sense of friendship between men and women, so that one now hardly ever meets a labouring man who expresses any fear or anger at the prospect of his wife or daughter having a vote.’⁹⁶ In a region where class solidarity could trump gender loyalties, the support of their male counterparts and dominant political institutions, such as trade unions, was crucial in advancing the movement and embedding it into community structures.

Conclusion

Focusing on the interactions between visiting campaigners and local communities, this chapter has sought to develop our understanding of some of the challenges suffrage societies faced in building a truly coordinated and inclusive movement across Britain. The reception suffrage organizers received in Wales was sometimes fraught. This could reflect specific linguistic and cultural differences, as well as broader party political and class divisions which criss-crossed the wider campaign. The targeting of national political figures and cultural events by some campaigners did little to advance the movement in Liberal Nonconformist strongholds, while the initial lack of bilingual organizers and visiting speakers posed a significant barrier for engagement between mainstream societies and Welsh-speaking communities. Similarly, the early deployment of some middle- and upper-class campaigners to the South Wales coalfield failed to break down social barriers with some working-class associations. In turn, the regular reports and letters organizers sent back to central committees could reflect the prejudices of their authors and helped to shape dominant contemporary – and sometimes historiographical – perceptions of the campaign in these regions.

But to focus solely on the social and cultural differences between organizers and local communities skews our understanding of the complex nature of the relationship between regions and national leadership, as well as the diversity of the movement across Wales. While encounters between Welsh communities and visiting organizers could – and, indeed, did – lead to cultural clashes, they could also be fruitful exchanges which informed the tactics and agendas of outside campaigners. Organizers also understood that the support of local activists was crucial for the day-to-day running of the campaign and their ability to coordinate regional activity; they provided access to community institutions, enlisted the cooperation of the local press, translated literature and shared knowledge of local political cultures. A turning point for the engagement of Welsh-speaking communities with the mainstream movement was the coordinated translation of suffrage propaganda, largely undertaken by Charlotte Price White and the Bangor NUWSS branch, and the appointment of Welsh-speaking WSPU organizer Rachel Barrett. In the southern coalfields, the development of a grassroots suffrage movement was symbiotic with an emerging women’s labour politics. This was given added impetus from 1911 as the constitutional suffrage movement and labour movement moved increasingly closer together, with the former initiating new schemes to enlist working-class support and deploy more working-class speakers.

Levels of engagement with the movement are, of course, difficult to measure. But by giving greater sensitivity to the different ways women expressed their political agency, we can see how the late manifestation of suffrage branches does not necessarily represent disinterest or apathy, as some visiting campaigners suggested. It is important to move beyond simplistic stereotypes perpetuated by some organizers’ reports to understand the multiple ways that support for the campaign flourished across regions, as well as the socioeconomic and cultural constraints they faced. The positive reception of Welsh-language literature or Friends of Women’s Suffrage enrolments, for instance, highlights some of the practical obstacles which could inhibit engagement with the mainstream movement. Especially in communities which were isolated – both geographically and culturally – the need to gain the support of prominent community figures or to access existing political networks could be vital for garnering the support of local sympathizers. This was particularly true for rural Welsh-speaking and coalfield communities, both of which had less of a tradition of women-only organizing than their more urban and cosmopolitan neighbouring districts. In these regions, grassroots suffrage activism was embedded within, rather than in opposition to, existing community structures and organizations. Decentralizing the geographical focus of the campaign, then, highlights the complex web of party political loyalties, class interests and cultural identities which helped to shape the specific nature of the campaign across localities, regions and nations.