By the outbreak of war in 1914, three women’s suffrage organizations had been established in Walsall, a medium-sized industrial town in England. Branches of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Church League for Women’s Suffrage (CLWS) were founded here in 1911, 1912 and 1913, respectively. Until then, it appears there was limited suffrage activism in the town carried out by suffrage organizations. Furthermore, even once these three branches were active, it seems that their membership was relatively small, and dominated by middle-class women. As this chapter will suggest, however, the rather limited reach of the suffrage movement in Walsall did not mean that women in the town were not politically engaged. On the contrary, a larger and somewhat more socially diverse group of women were particularly active in campaigns to improve infant welfare and reduce infant mortality rates locally. In considering both the suffrage and infant welfare movements in Walsall immediately before, and during, the First World War, this chapter offers one indication of the many other parallel, energetic and woman-led campaigns which preoccupied many activists in this period.

The chapter reflects on Karen Hunt and June Hannam’s call for an ‘archaeology’ of women’s politics, in which they argue that, by focusing on the local, historians might better understand how women’s political activism developed. It was in their own neighbourhoods, communities and towns that most women tended to ‘do’ politics, through local organizations and campaigns.¹ This chapter, therefore, traces how certain women in Walsall ‘did’ politics through several local organizations working on suffrage and infant welfare in the town. There is evidence that members of Walsall’s branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) – an organization which, nationwide, campaigned for improvements to maternal welfare, among many other initiatives – sought to implement strategies which might address the town’s high infant mortality rate.² A locally focused understanding of women’s politics in contemporary Walsall must therefore embrace both the suffrage and infant welfare movements, pointing to the diversity of issues through which women might have become politicized at this time, and adding to research which highlights the plurality of campaigns in which the women’s movement engaged, both during and beyond the suffrage campaign.³

This chapter largely utilizes evidence from the suffrage press and Walsall’s two newspapers (the Walsall Advertiser and the Walsall Observer), as any records kept by the local WSPU, NUWSS or CLWS branches have not survived. From these sources, it is possible to ascertain that the membership of these three branches overlapped, and, from census returns, that their most visible activists were relatively affluent women. Both the suffrage and local press also provide evidence of contemporary organizations working on issues of infant welfare here: a Ladies’ Health Society (LHS), Walsall’s Women’s Co-operative Guild and, from 1916, Walsall Child Welfare Association (WCWA). This reporting is supplemented by minutes of WCWA’s meetings, which, unlike records from the LHS or WCG, have survived. These sources provide evidence for the ways both campaigns – for female enfranchisement, and for improvements to infant welfare – operated ‘on the ground’ in the town.

While Walsall’s female activism has received relatively little attention, there is now a very extensive literature on both the suffrage and infant welfare movements in early twentieth-century Britain.⁴ Although participants in the suffrage campaign differed in their tactics and approaches, all sought legislative change which would allow women to vote in parliamentary elections. The infant welfare movement, meanwhile, encompassed not only the male-dominated medical profession, but also the many voluntary societies which sought to reduce infant and maternal death rates, and improve living conditions for families. The local membership of such societies was made up of what Anna Davin has termed the ‘socially conscious gentry’: medical professionals, teachers, local councillors and especially ‘ladies whose work was voluntary’.⁵ Within both movements, social class had a significant impact on how women were able to participate in, and interact with, specific organizations. The presence of working-class women in the fight for women’s enfranchisement, both as suffragists and suffragettes, has been extensively detailed,⁶ although the persistent class tensions within the campaign have also been acknowledged.⁷ Similarly, class has long been recognized as a particularly contentious issue within the infant welfare movement. Imperialist and eugenicist ideologies informed much of the official discourse; at the turn of the twentieth century, falling birth rates and rising infant mortality rates among the working classes were felt to have a negative impact on the future maintenance of the British Empire, leading to a ‘surge of concern about the bearing and rearing of children’.⁸ On a more practical level, middle-class activists – often women acting in a voluntary capacity – frequently undertook to ‘visit’ working-class mothers, offering advice and guidance on child-rearing. Even where well-intentioned, this advice was rooted in middle-class domestic ideology, and rarely demonstrated any understanding of the lived experiences of working-class mothers, who responded with a mix of indifference and resentment towards such visitors.⁹

Until recently, relatively little consideration has been afforded to how these two contemporary campaigns were interconnected, with more attention being paid to the overlap between the anti-suffrage movement and infant welfare campaigns. As Julia Bush has argued, some anti-suffrage activists felt that ‘national’ politics (and thus the franchise) were of limited value to women, whose energies were best expended in municipal politics, where issues related to women’s and children’s welfare were discussed.¹⁰ Yet many suffrage campaigners were also deeply concerned with the problem of high infant and maternal mortality rates, and there is now an emerging scholarship on the overlap between these two movements, much of which is locally focused.¹¹ This chapter seeks to contribute to this scholarship through a case study of Walsall, an area where women’s politics before enfranchisement has been afforded little attention.¹²

Walsall lies within the Black Country, an area synonymous with heavy industry, and was then particularly associated with the leather trade. In 1911, census returns indicate that this was Walsall’s largest female employment sector; 3,727 women (and 5,789 men) worked in the trade, about a third of all employed women in Walsall.¹³ There is little suggestion, however, that many of these women were unionized within either a mixed-sex or female union; indeed, a branch of the National Federation of Women Workers was not established here until 1915.¹⁴ Politically, the constituency of Walsall returned Liberal MPs almost without exception until 1910, when Sir Richard Cooper (Unionist) was elected. Municipal politics in the town were similarly dominated by the Liberals, although Labour was gathering strength from the 1910s; two Labour councillors were elected in 1913 and 1914.¹⁵ Slightly earlier, in 1910, Walsall elected its first female councillor, Ada Newman (Unionist). The daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Newman was one of the first women in Britain to be elected to a county borough council. Despite this, she appears not to have been active in other women’s organizations in Walsall, including its suffrage societies, which began to develop around this time.¹⁶

Women’s suffrage in Walsall

The suffrage campaign came relatively late to Walsall. In 1875, Lydia Becker chaired a meeting here, but there is no further record of any local suffrage activity until 1907, when WSPU activist Nell Kenney planned to visit the town, as part of a tour of the Midlands.¹⁷ In 1908, a local woman, Dorothea Layton, arranged a ‘WSPU-inspired meeting’, but it was not until February 1911 that a WSPU branch was formally established.¹⁸ A WSPU shop opened in Walsall’s town centre in 1912, which was to prove a pivotal year for suffrage here. The failure of the third and final Conciliation Bill that year, and especially the lack of support given to the bill by Richard Cooper, Walsall’s Unionist MP, appears to have galvanized local campaigners, who wrote to the Walsall Advertiser to express their displeasure at his decision.¹⁹

Their letters to the newspaper suggest Cooper had given the impression that he could not vote for a bill which might be seen as tacitly supporting WSPU militancy, although, as a Conservative backbencher, there were likely party political factors which impacted his decision not to support the Liberal government’s proposal. Three letters appeared, one from George Moorcroft Wood, one from Ellen Pearman-Cooke and an open letter signed by ten local women (Dorothea Layton, Amy and Mary Cottam, Muriel Barnard, Emma and Eveline Thacker, Amy Lowry, Dorothy Hill, Nancie Cotterell and Edith Elliot).²⁰ The letters were measured in tone, with the signatories seeking to distance themselves from the WSPU’s militancy, especially window-breaking, despite several (Layton, Barnard and Cotterell) being members of Walsall WSPU. The open letter acknowledged Cooper’s ‘horror at the breakers of windows and laws’, but urged him to ‘remember the vast number of law-abiding women who … have been working hard for years to obtain the franchise’, while Pearman-Cooke went further, declaring that she did not have ‘any sympathy with militant tactics’.²¹ Two months later, and likely as a consequence, a new suffrage society was established in Walsall, which formally affiliated to the NUWSS; Amy Lowry became its secretary.²² There had been some prior attempts at organizing an NUWSS branch here – brief reference to a Walsall NUWSS branch ‘having a terrible time’ appears in Common Cause in 1909.²³ However, the branch does not seem to have taken off, and little other evidence of NUWSS activity in Walsall can be found until the 1912 branch got to work. Finally, in early 1913, the third of the town’s suffrage societies, the Church League for Women’s Suffrage, was established, with Pearman-Cooke serving as secretary.²⁴

There was significant overlap in the membership of these three branches, with many names appearing in connection with more than one society. As Krista Cowman has demonstrated, at a local level there was often crossover in membership between different suffrage societies, facilitated by women’s friendship networks, which allowed for the breaking down of ‘barriers between organizations that appear impenetrable at national level’,²⁵ while, in this volume, Alexandra Hughes-Johnson’s work on the Suffragettes of the WSPU and the Independent WSPU points to the ways that women’s friendship networks could span organizations.²⁶ This appears to have been the case in Walsall. For example, Dorothy Hill and Amy Lowry, two signatories of the open letter, were on the Walsall CLWS committee,²⁷ with Lowry also acting as Walsall NUWSS secretary.²⁸ In November 1913, the two organizations held a joint meeting in Walsall’s Congregational Hall, indicating that these connections facilitated their work.²⁹ Dorothea Layton, meanwhile, had organized the ‘WSPU-inspired meeting’ in Walsall in 1908, and may have encouraged her husband, Frank, to take an interest in women’s suffrage; he spoke in support of women’s suffrage at Walsall WSPU’s December 1912 meeting, over which Muriel Barnard, another signatory to the letter, presided.³⁰ Frank had earlier taken the chair at Walsall NUWSS’s inaugural meeting in May 1912, at which Dorothea also appears to have been present.³¹

Within Walsall, suffrage activism centred around holding meetings and, for the WSPU, fundraising through their shop. No obvious or violent acts of militancy occurred in the town. Indeed, only one Walsall WSPU member, Florence Ward (not among the signatories of the open letters, who had sought to distance themselves from violent tactics) undertook overtly militant action, significantly, outside of the town.³² Ward participated in a window-smashing campaign in nearby Birmingham when Prime Minister Asquith spoke there in July 1913. She was arrested and imprisoned in Winson Green, where she went on hunger strike.³³ However, other local WSPU members appear to have been reluctant to publicly associate themselves with the organization even by selling its literature. A July 1913 notice in the Suffragette suggested that, ‘the many members in Walsall who do not like, for various reasons, to sell papers on Walsall Bridge [in the town centre]’ should note that ‘the summer holiday is a great opportunity for doing so in a place where you are not known’; they were urged to let Walsall WSPU know where they intended to holiday, so they could be put in touch with the branch at their destination.³⁴

Most suffrage activity in Walsall therefore appears to have taken more conventional forms, typically through meetings at which a speaker addressed audiences in one of the town’s civic buildings. Numbers attending these meetings do not, from the evidence available, appear to have been huge. For instance, the WSPU meeting at which Frank Layton spoke in December 1912, was described as having ‘a small attendance’, though his speech was reported in the Walsall Advertiser, possibly reaching a wider audience.³⁵ Local NUWSS meetings similarly do not appear to have had large attendances. The May 1912 inaugural meeting resulted in the enrolment of twenty-six members, and a further ‘eleven new members were obtained’ following an ‘at home’ in Walsall’s Masonic Hall in August.³⁶ After this point, attendance figures were rarely recorded, though an April 1913 meeting addressed by NUWSS Executive Committee member and CLWS activist Maude Royden was noted to have ‘roused fresh enthusiasm, and some new members were enrolled’, suggesting that membership of suffrage organizations continued to grow into and beyond 1913.³⁷

As well as being relatively small, suffrage organizations in Walsall appear to have been dominated by fairly affluent women. Those who were most visible in the organizations, the signatories to the Advertiser letters and those who went on to take leading roles in Walsall’s NUWSS, WSPU and CLWS branches, appear to have been drawn from the middle classes.³⁸ Of the signatories to the Advertiser letters, five (Barnard, Cotterell, Elliott and the two Thackers) were the wives, sisters or daughters of men who owned businesses, and George Moorcroft Wood, the lone male signatory, also gave his occupation as ‘business owner’. Dorothea Layton’s husband, Frank, was a GP; Lowry was the daughter of a clergyman, and the two Miss Cottams, Hill and Pearman-Cooke all stated that they lived on ‘private means’, usually indicating a degree of familial wealth. All twelve lived in households employing at least one, if not two, live-in domestic servants; the Laytons employed three.³⁹

While those who took leading roles in these societies appear to have been middle-class, this is not to suggest that working-class women in Walsall were unsupportive of the campaign for the vote. They may, instead, have been active in the local campaign in other ways, for example, by attending meetings, but not taking on organizational roles such as branch secretary, because of the commitments this entailed. Such women rarely appear within suffrage or local press reports, rendering them less visible to the historian. Others, meanwhile, may have campaigned through women’s organizations which were outside the suffrage societies themselves.⁴⁰ Evidence from other locations suggests that some working-class women, particularly within the Labour Party, were more focused on achieving universal adult suffrage, rather than a limited female franchise tied to property.⁴¹ The WCG took this stance, aligning itself with adult suffrage organizations like the People’s Suffrage Federation (led by the WGC general secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies).⁴² Walsall WCG had been established around the turn of the century, although because its records have not survived, it is unclear whether it participated in any local suffrage activism.⁴³ Certainly, any such campaigning did not reach the attention of the local or suffrage press. Similarly, local newspapers do not provide evidence of adult suffrage organizations which were active in contemporary Walsall, suggesting that any suffrage campaigning outside of Walsall’s NUWSS, WSPU or CLWS branches was, at most, limited.

Furthermore, there appear to have been very few direct attempts by these three organizations to recruit working-class women. There was, for instance, no attempt to utilize the NUWSS’s Friends of Women’s Suffrage scheme in Walsall. This resulted from its alliance with the Labour Party from 1912, and ‘aimed at attracting and demonstrating working-class support for women’s suffrage’.⁴⁴ In November 1912, the Walsall WSPU arranged a ‘poster parade’ which ‘caused much excitement among the crowds issuing from the factories’, but this appears to have been a one-off, and reporting is unclear whether this ‘excitement’ resulted in new members.⁴⁵ Though factory work was common among women working in Walsall’s leather trade, there was little tradition of women’s trade unionism in the town, suggesting few had experience organizing collectively. Elsewhere in Britain, informal meetings in coffee houses or tea rooms arranged by suffrage societies proved somewhat more accessible spaces for working-class women, and helped to draw them into local branches.⁴⁶ Though the paucity of the archival record must again be acknowledged here – such informal events were less likely to appear in local newspapers’ reporting – it seems that such tactics were not used in Walsall.

It is possible that the relatively late arrival of the suffrage movement here impacted on the extent to which Walsall’s suffrage societies were able to actively work with local working-class women’s associations, like the WCG. As observed, organized and sustained suffrage activism does not seem to have begun here in earnest until the 1911 formation of a WSPU branch, while the NUWSS and CLWS branches were not established until 1912 and 1913. All three branches’ suffrage campaigning ceased in Walsall with the outbreak of war in 1914, although, as is shortly discussed, many members redirected their energies into other work.⁴⁷ Locally, then, these groups had only a little over two years in which to build an active community. Given longer, they may have found ways to work more constructively with local working-class women’s organizations, bringing them into the campaign.

The infant welfare movement in Walsall

In the prewar era, efforts to promote infant welfare in Walsall were also dominated by a limited number of middle-class women. The town had long suffered a particularly high infant mortality rate. In 1907, 154 babies out of every 1,000 born sadly died, significantly higher than the national average of 127. This worried the town council enough that councillors employed a ‘lady health visitor’, who, along with ‘voluntary lady visitors’, would advise local mothers on infant welfare.⁴⁸ These volunteers were members of Walsall’s Ladies’ Health Society (LHS), who also aimed to support the health visitor by delivering talks on topics such as ‘home life and the care of children’, ‘cookery’ and ‘general subjects of health’.⁴⁹ The LHS’s organizing committee seems to have been dominated by women from backgrounds similar to Walsall’s most visible suffrage activists. The LHS president, Mrs Duignan, was the wife of a local solicitor and antiquarian; its secretary, Julia Slater, was also a solicitor’s wife.⁵⁰ Both their husbands were municipal councillors, and both (per the 1911 census) employed live-in servants. As LHS records have not survived, it is unclear how many women were involved with the organization, but there does appear to have been a small amount of crossover with Walsall’s suffrage societies. Though neither Duignan nor Slater appear connected to the suffrage movement, WSPU member Nancie Cotterell gave a talk on at least one occasion, and Frank Layton was involved with the LHS in his capacity as a GP, suggesting his wife Dorothea was at least aware of its work.⁵¹ The LHS sought to actively engage working-class women with its talks; for example, the Advertiser notice of Cotterell’s talk expressly highlighted that ‘all working-class women [were] invited’.⁵²

Despite these efforts, high infant mortality rates persisted in Walsall, but the outbreak of war spurred Walsall’s Women’s Co-operative Guild into action; in October 1914, it organized a conference to discuss the town’s ‘very high’ infant mortality rate, and how it might be addressed.⁵³ Because Walsall WCG’s records no longer survive, it is not possible to know the extent to which it had been active in the infant welfare movement locally before 1914. Nationally, however, the WCG had been campaigning for improvements to maternity care for working-class women for many years, collecting testimony from these women which gave voice to their own experiences, published as Maternity: Letters From Working Women in 1915.⁵⁴ These national campaigns may have spurred Walsall WCG to arrange its conference. The conference sought to draw together numerous local women’s organizations to campaign collectively for improvements to infant welfare in Walsall.⁵⁵ A letter encouraging attendance at the event, signed by WCG general secretary Margaret Llewellyn Davis and WCG member and prominent Labour activist Margaret Bondfield, appeared in the Walsall Observer.⁵⁶

Presiding over the conference was Mary Bradley Dewsbury, chair of Walsall WCG and already a well-known figure in local politics, having been a Poor Law guardian since 1909.⁵⁷ Walsall WCG’s secretary, Mary Button, posted notice of the meeting in the local press, and guildswomen Mary Dix and Gertrude Cresswell proposed motions at the meeting. Though a full membership list of Walsall WCG does not survive, tracing these four women back through census returns offers some understanding of their backgrounds. Nationally, most WCG members in this period were married housewives from the more prosperous working class, which appears broadly true here.⁵⁸ Dix was married to an engine driver and Button a warehouseman, though Dewsbury and Cresswell, married to a clerk and an elementary schoolteacher, respectively, might be considered lower-middle-class, although neither employed live-in domestic servants.⁵⁹ All had several children, with census returns indicating that Cresswell and Button had tragically lost children in infancy, which may have contributed to their personal motivations for involvement in the cause of infant welfare. Though none of the four were representative of Walsall’s most impoverished women, they do appear to have been from less affluent backgrounds than many of the town’s leading suffrage activists.

There is, therefore, some suggestion that the infant welfare movement locally was somewhat more socially diverse than its suffrage movement. This is also reflected in the diversity of the organizations Walsall WCG invited to participate in the conference. Alongside representatives from several other Staffordshire WCGs, delegates came from the Walsall Labour Association, the LHS (‘Mrs Duignan and Mrs Slater’), Walsall NUWSS (‘Miss Lowry’), ‘the Ancient Order of Foresters (women’s section)’ and ‘the NSPCC [National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children]’, while a letter of support was read from Walsall’s branch of the British Women’s Temperance Association (BWTA).⁶⁰ The WCG had called the conference because, as Mary Dewsbury explained, ‘it was felt that more ought to be done on behalf of expectant or nursing mothers’ than the support currently provided by Walsall’s ‘one or two small maternity schemes’. Dewsbury acknowledged the work of the council-appointed health visitor, but noted that she ‘had more to do than could ever be accomplished’ and, despite the ‘3,200 visits’ she made to local mothers in 1913, Walsall’s ‘infant mortality rate remained high’.⁶¹ Small wonder; to make all 3,200 visits, she would have been required to average nearly nine appointments daily, including weekends, without a single day off.

Having outlined the problems in Walsall, the delegates planned a series of practical steps which might improve the local situation. A resolution proposed by Amy Lowry passed, urging the council to ‘safeguard infant life in Walsall by extending the work for maternity in the town on the lines of the Local Government Board Scheme’; specifically, they sought to use the funding this scheme offered to set up a weekly baby clinic staffed by medical professionals.⁶² A second proposal from the WCG’s Mary Dix and Gertrude Cresswell also passed, urging funding for the provision of ‘meals for expectant and nursing mothers when medical opinion [suggests] such nourishment is necessary [for] the life and health of the child’.⁶³ While the health of the child was the ultimate goal here, it is notable that the support centred around providing meals for mothers in need. This was one of the WGC’s proposals from Maternity.⁶⁴ It was further decided that a ‘deputation of ladies concerned with [infant welfare] work’ would seek to address the council on these proposals.⁶⁵ This deputation comprised Mary Dewsbury (representing Walsall WCG), Amy Lowry (NUWSS), Julia Slater (LHS) and Mrs Camburn (BWTA).⁶⁶ The plurality of the organizations is notable; the deputation consisted of representatives of four groups with different objects and aims, but which were able to find common ground on this issue. Some of these representatives worked with Walsall council to establish the Walsall Child Welfare Association (WCWA), which was formally inaugurated at a special meeting in Walsall Town Hall in July 1916.⁶⁷ The WCWA was partially funded by the Local Government Board Scheme grant money (as the conference had suggested), with local rates making up the shortfall, and provided a variety of support for mothers in Walsall. This included two infant welfare clinics, established in different parts of town by July 1916, for ‘those who were not in a position to pay for the medical treatment that was necessary if their children were to grow up to be strong men and women’.⁶⁸ Each clinic operated twice a week, was staffed by medical professionals who gave advice and treatment and was supported by volunteers.

The establishment of the WCWA must, of course, be set within the national developments in the infant welfare movement during the First World War. That the WCG’s conference was called two months after war was declared is no coincidence; Mary Dewsbury stated that although there was ‘not yet much distress’ in Walsall attributable to the conflict, the experience of the Boer War suggested that this would ‘come later’ and that, consequently, relief measures should not be organized ‘at the last moment, but should be ready to meet the strain’.⁶⁹ War likely gave renewed impetus to those working on these issues locally. Many historians have highlighted the increasing concern shown to problems of infant welfare during the war,⁷⁰ while, as Susan R. Grayzel has demonstrated, motherhood became increasingly central to women’s identities during – indeed, because of – the conflict.⁷¹ Nationwide, the number of infant welfare centres had ‘more than doubled’ by 1918, when ‘the state took on an altogether more extensive responsibility, [passing] the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act’.⁷² The WCWA’s formation in 1916, then, must be understood within this wider context, but locally women’s organizations may have taken advantage of this greater emphasis on improving infant welfare to pursue their aims with more vigour.

The WCWA came under the council’s auspices, signalling increased involvement of the state in infant welfare locally. This was approvingly noted by Mary Dewsbury at its inaugural public meeting in July 1916, where she informed delegates that a feature of the WCWA ‘which commended itself to her was that it was municipal and thus carried more weight than a purely voluntary scheme’.⁷³ She then went on to address what she felt was one of the most pressing problems facing mothers in contemporary Walsall: provision of childcare. Though keen to assure those attending the meeting that ‘she believed [that] the place of the child was with the mother at home, and the state ought to make the mother independent of work, so that she could remain at home’, Dewsbury believed that the war meant that mothers ‘could not stay at home for financial reasons and while they were arguing about whether the state ought to do this or that, babies were dying’.⁷⁴ Accordingly, she proposed the establishment of a nursery in Walsall, and in October 1916 one duly opened, with much of its funding coming from the council.⁷⁵ By mid 1918, over 160 such state-funded nurseries had opened across Britain, as increasing numbers of women undertook employment in the war industries.⁷⁶ While Walsall’s nursery was largely organized by the council, the WCWA was also involved with its organization, and Mary Dewsbury chaired the WCWA’s Day Nursery Sub-Committee until 1918.

Dewsbury was actively involved with the WCWA, and guildswomen Mrs Dix and Mrs Cresswell also appear to have regularly attended its committee meetings. Some of those who had been involved with Walsall’s three suffrage organizations, including Amy Lowry, Nancie Cotterell and Dorothea Layton, were also active within the WCWA, suggesting a shifting of personal priorities within the wartime climate as local campaigning for the franchise largely ceased. However, the WCWA appears to have attracted far more women than those who were already active in organizations like the WCG, or the town’s suffrage associations. By its first annual general meeting, in February 1917, around seventy women had attended at least one WCWA committee meeting.⁷⁷ The infant welfare movement does appear, therefore, to have engaged a somewhat larger number of women in Walsall than the number involved with the town’s three suffrage organizations. For these women, especially those who had no obvious connection to the suffrage campaign, this kind of activism may have been a more acceptable form of engagement in public life than activism within suffrage groups.⁷⁸ Others may have perceived campaigns centred around infant welfare as having more relevance to their lives than the fight for enfranchisement, or perhaps felt that they had more practical experience with the former. Still others may simply have felt that there were more opportunities for active involvement in the day-to-day work that the WCWA undertook than were previously possible within Walsall’s suffrage societies, where work appears to have largely been limited to attending meetings.

In addition to attending committee meetings, women were able to undertake various forms of voluntary work through the WCWA. At biweekly clinics, volunteers delivered lectures on mothercraft and helped to organize sewing parties and thrift clubs. In September 1916, a Material Aid Committee (MAC) was established, to which mothers in need could apply for temporary grants, which usually came in the form of food, milk, money or coal.⁷⁹ The MAC was administered by an entirely female sub-committee of volunteers, one of whom would visit the applicant’s home to assess her circumstances, before the committee decided what aid, if any, should be supplied. The MAC also arranged for sewing machines to be available for hire by local mothers, and for volunteers to make baby garments to be sold at the clinics. Significant numbers appear to have done so; 484 such garments were made by ‘helpers’ in the first seven months of 1917 alone.⁸⁰ Furthermore, between January and July of that year, forty-two more women signed up to be ‘voluntary visitors’ of mothers who had recently given birth, collectively making ‘427 visits’ by July.⁸¹

The response of working-class mothers to these visits is unrecorded; neither newspaper reporting or the WCWA minutes give voice to their experiences. Nonetheless, there is a suggestion that at least some of the WCWA’s services did provide local mothers with genuine support. By July 1917, only one year after the WCWA’s formal inauguration, there was sufficient demand for a third clinic to open in another part of town.⁸² The success of the two existing clinics likely fuelled this demand, and indicates that local mothers were engaging with their services. The practical support the WCWA offered in other ways – the nursery, or the hire of a sewing machine for those who could not otherwise afford one – likely also benefited these women. Furthermore, July 1917 also saw ‘232 garments’ made by local mothers ‘entered for the National Mothercraft Competition’, held as part of National Baby Week.⁸³ What proportion of clinic attendees this represented is unclear; however, that 232 garments were made for the competition suggests that at least some women engaged with more than just the medical advice provided at clinics. Perhaps most telling, however, was the longevity of the WCWA. Far from being a wartime phenomenon, its work continued for many years, and women remained as volunteers in various capacities until 1950, when paid workers took over the WCWA entirely.⁸⁴

Walsall in the aftermath of enfranchisement

During the war, many, though not all, of Walsall’s leading suffrage activists joined the WCWA – Ellen Pearman-Cooke, secretary to Walsall’s CLWS, was not among the WCWA’s members, for instance. Only the CLWS continued to meet in Walsall during the war, although its priorities seem to have shifted away from women’s enfranchisement towards welfare work instead. As early as November 1914, the branch reported on its efforts to support Belgian refugees, and noted the ‘useful work’ Walsall CLWS members were doing through the Prince of Wales Relief Committee and the Red Cross.⁸⁵ Members of other local suffrage societies were similarly active in such welfare work; Amy Lowry, for example, acted as Walsall’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association’s secretary,⁸⁶ while Dorothea Layton was on the organizing committee of Walsall’s ‘Tipperary Rooms’ (a social club for women family members of servicemen).⁸⁷ Overall, however, suffrage campaigning largely vanished from public view in Walsall. The town’s NUWSS remained listed in Common Cause – indeed, it appointed a new secretary in 1916 – but it was not reported as holding any meetings, or undertaking suffrage activism, within the suffrage or local press.⁸⁸ Similarly, Walsall WSPU remained listed in Walsall’s Red Book (a town directory) until 1917, but did not arrange meetings.

Despite the apparent lack of wartime suffrage activism locally, the passage of the Representation of the People Act on 6 February 1918, which enfranchised women over thirty who met certain property qualifications, was swiftly celebrated through a service of thanksgiving in Walsall, arranged by the CLWS. The service was attended by ‘suffragists and their friends’ – perhaps a reference to local WSPU or NUWSS members – and judged to be ‘deeply impressive and inspiring’.⁸⁹ Ellen Pearman-Cooke’s report on proceedings for the Church Militant concluded by noting that ‘in view now of women’s additional responsibilities as electors, the Secretary hopes to join with other suffrage societies in [Walsall] to arrange meetings for the education of women in the duties of citizenship’.⁹⁰ Her language is notable in reflecting the approach of many non-partisan women’s organizations which made the education of newly enfranchised women central to their aims in the interwar period.⁹¹ However, the paucity of the archival record once again means it is not possible to know whether any local suffrage activists joined such organizations postwar.

Walsall’s suffrage activists do not appear among the women who took up public office in the town after 1918 either. In contrast, two Walsall WCG members, Gertrude Cresswell and Mary Dewsbury, both active members of the Labour Party, won election to municipal office, and, significantly, maintained their interest in infant and maternal welfare as elected officials. Cresswell became Walsall’s first female Labour councillor in 1925, remaining in post until her death in 1944.⁹² Shortly after her initial election, Cresswell was made chair of the council’s Maternity and Child Welfare Committee. She became so associated with this work that she was elected Walsall’s first woman Mayor in 1934, ‘largely as tribute to the work she has done in the maternity and child welfare movement’.⁹³ Mary Dewsbury, meanwhile, was a co-opted member of the same committee throughout the 1920s, and continued to sit on the committee after winning election to the council in 1931.⁹⁴

Women’s role in interwar local government needs to be more fully understood, but existing work suggests that women councillors could sometimes be ‘pigeonholed’ into taking responsibility for so-called ‘women’s issues’, including those associated with infant and maternal welfare.⁹⁵ Cresswell and Dewsbury maintained their activism on this issue through their local government work, but do not necessarily seem to have been ‘pigeonholed’. Both held numerous other, non-gendered responsibilities within municipal governance; Cresswell, for example, also sat on the council’s finance, mental welfare, National Health Insurance, library and art gallery committees.⁹⁶ Both women were also local magistrates. Dewsbury, indeed, became Walsall’s second woman magistrate in 1924, only five years after women became eligible for the role.⁹⁷ The plurality of issues on which they were involved perhaps suggests that infant and child welfare was one of many causes in which they remained actively interested.

Conclusion

In early twentieth-century Walsall, women were politically active within multiple organizations and campaigns. This chapter has examined their activism in local branches of suffrage societies, and in organizations involved with infant welfare. The patchiness of the archival record negates a full and complete understanding of how both movements worked locally, but it is nonetheless possible to understand how the fight for women’s enfranchisement operated in Walsall through suffrage and local press reporting. Although women’s suffrage societies formally arrived relatively late to the town, from 1911, three organizations were working for women’s enfranchisement here. However, Walsall’s three suffrage societies do not appear to have been particularly large in number, and their membership was dominated by relatively affluent women, who made little attempt to involve working-class women in the campaign locally, suggesting that Walsall’s suffrage movement had somewhat limited reach.

As this chapter has demonstrated, however, suffrage was far from the only cause which attracted Walsall women in the period immediately prior to, and during, the First World War. Multiple women’s organizations actively sought to improve infant and, to a lesser extent, maternal welfare through the provision of practical support for local mothers. There is some suggestion that a more socially diverse range of organizations were actively involved with these campaigns; Walsall’s Women’s Co-operative Guild was particularly concerned with the negative impact the war might have on the town’s already high infant mortality rate, and some guildswomen went on to become involved with Walsall’s Child Welfare Association, established in 1916. The WCWA drew together a significant number of women in its practical work, which appears to have facilitated a greater degree of participation in local public life than the town’s suffrage movement had.

To more fully understand how women engaged in politics in this period – that is, how and through which organizations, and on which issues, they campaigned – it is necessary, as Hunt and Hannam argue, to turn to the local. This was the space in which most women, even while still unenfranchised, experienced politics.⁹⁸ In Walsall, women were actively involved with the fight for the vote alongside campaigns for improvements to infant welfare, though it was the latter which drew together a greater number of women. Refocusing on the local, therefore, helps to both highlight the diversity of the women’s movement in the pre-enfranchisement era, while also developing our understanding of how women’s activism actually worked, especially in areas which appear, at first glance, to have had little engagement with the suffrage campaign.