‘All women were appealed to. Class barriers were broken down; political distinctions swept away; religious differences forgotten. All women were as one.’¹ Annie Kenney’s 1924 memoir offered an idealized vision of equality and unity in the women’s suffrage movement, but this has been qualified and challenged by a succession of recent scholars.² The recognition that working-class women played a significant and active role in the suffrage campaign, including within the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union, has revealed not the erasure of class distinctions but rather a history of careful negotiation and tactical deployment.³ As studies have shown, while cross-class solidarity and a concern for the plight of the most destitute and exploited women in society were a prominent part of the campaign’s image, the lived experience and active agency of working-class women were often elided, and they were reduced to passivity and helpless victimhood.⁴ Seamstress Hannah Mitchell proudly recalled that ‘there was a unity of purpose in the suffrage movement, which made social distinction seem of little importance’; but, as she famously noted, for working women with families to care for, suffrage campaigning could only be done ‘with one hand tied behind us’, producing a strain that eventually led Mitchell to a nervous breakdown and serious illness, through which some of her richer colleagues supported her while others turned aside.⁵

As has been well documented by scholars such as Lisa Tickner, Julie Holledge, Sheila Stowell, Naomi Paxton, Maroula Joannou, Katharine Cockin and Sowon Park, literature and dramatic performances were a valuable resource for the suffrage campaign.⁶ The year 1908 saw the formation of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL) and the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), ‘To work for Votes for Women on the same terms as they are, or may be, granted to men’, by disseminating propaganda literature, staging performances and raising funds. The WWSL declared itself ‘entirely independent of any other suffrage league’ and at the same time ‘formed with the intention of assisting every other suffrage society’, and its membership was, as Park has noted, remarkably inclusive in terms of gender, literary genre and political persuasion.⁷ The AFL similarly aimed to ‘assist all other leagues whenever possible’, thus requiring a tactful navigation of political and policy differences.⁸

Qualifications for membership of the WWSL involved an annual payment of 2s 6d and the requirement that members had received payment for a book, article, story, poem or play, thus enabling them to claim the status of professional workers. Given the limits to state education, however, the League’s membership was inevitably drawn from the middle and upper classes. The AFL’s membership was potentially far broader. As Tracy Davis notes, after a huge increase in middle-class entry to the profession in the later decades of the nineteenth century, ‘performers’ incomes spanned the highest upper middle-class salary and the lowest working-class wage, and were earned in work places that ranged in status from patent theatres to penny saloons’.⁹ The AFL responded vigorously to these disparities, campaigning to improve actresses’ working conditions and wages. Leading members of the WWSL and the AFL, such as Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, Inez Bensusan and Gertrude Jennings, came from comfortable middle-class professional backgrounds, but their working lives as theatremakers, including in touring companies, took them far beyond the shelter of their class origins, bringing them in contact with women from a wide range of social backgrounds and giving them first-hand experience of the precarity and hardship of the majority of working women’s lives.

Committed to using their professional skills to recruit, educate and entertain on behalf of the suffrage cause, members of the WWSL and the AFL were therefore called upon to support the message of cross-class female solidarity – particularly important when some advocates of adult suffrage warned against enfranchising women on the same terms as men, on the grounds that adding propertied women to the electoral rolls could exacerbate the sufferings of working women who had ‘more to fear from propertied women than from unpropertied men’.¹⁰ Any impulse towards idealized visions of cross-class unity was simultaneously tempered by a call from Elizabeth Robins, president of the WWSL, for writers to take this opportunity to escape the constraints of male editors and publishers, and to describe life ‘fearlessly from the woman’s standpoint’, to look clearly at the ‘Real Girl’ and to ‘report her faithfully’.¹¹ These complex dynamics can be traced in a range of suffrage dramas, sketches and novels, as writers sought to meet the potentially conflicting requirements of propaganda and verisimilitude, while negotiating the literary conventions, class perspectives and consumer expectations inherent in each medium. By comparing short-form dramas with the longer-form literature of the four-act play and the novel, this chapter reveals how a number of suffrage writers did not simply promote the key suffrage message of cross-class unity but carefully calibrated their writing to cater to the particular sensibilities of bourgeois and aristocratic consumers and to assuage potential class anxieties. Analysis of the fiction of leading anti-suffragist Mary Augusta (Mrs Humphry) Ward offers a further challenge to suffragist claims to an exclusive interest in women’s social and economic deprivation in contrast to the supposed self-interest and snobbery of the ‘antis’.

Short plays and sketches were a central part of the suffrage campaign’s arsenal, performed as fundraisers at theatres and as entertainment at outdoor meetings, rallies, ‘At Homes’ and exhibitions. In these plays compassion for the suffering of exploited working-class women was repeatedly represented as the inspiration for more privileged women’s conversion to the cause. Gertrude Vaughan’s The Woman with a Pack (first performed at the Portman Rooms, Baker Street, on 8 December 1911 by the Actresses’ Franchise League) staged the awakening of a female graduate through a series of visionary and symbolic tableaux. Comedy, however, was by far the most common mode, as in Joan Dugdale’s 10, Clowning Street (1913) in which the Prime Minister’s plan to distract women from suffrage activities by a scheme of National Service backfires. The PM’s three anti-suffragist daughters lead the way by working as a laundress, shopkeeper and parlour maid, but return outraged by their first-hand knowledge of women’s employment conditions, angrily demanding the vote – and, in the maid’s case, further enlightened as to the ‘humbug’ of Labour concerns for the ‘downtrodden classes’ after slaving from 5am till midnight in the house of a Labour MP.¹²

The capacity for compassion, or indeed the most basic interest in working-class lives, commonly marked out the difference between suffragists and anti-suffragists in such plays. Antis were depicted as snobbish, complacent, self-centred and ignorant. In Evelyn Glover’s popular skit A Chat with Mrs Chicky (1909), for example, Mrs Houlbrook sits lecturing the eponymous charwoman about the dangers of female suffrage, while Mrs Chicky cleans efficiently around her, calmly dismantling the middle-class woman’s arguments with her superior knowledge of man-made law, having been made aware of its absurdities by ‘knockin’ up against it’.¹³ Mrs Chicky proudly recalls an encounter with anti-suffragists: ‘“We’ve h’always got on very well without women ’avin’ the vote” says one. “Yus’ I calls back, you may ’ave but what price us?”’¹⁴ In another one-act play by Evelyn Glover, Miss Appleyard’s Awakening (1911), Miss Appleyard marks herself out from her fellow anti-suffragist by recognizing that her employees have a right to their own political views, after agreeing to sign an anti-suffrage petition.

Mrs Crabtree unwittingly converts her colleague to the suffrage cause by revealing the gross misogyny that underlies opposition to women’s enfranchisement. Miss Appleyard determines to find out more about the cause and calls for her maid, whose political affiliations are first signalled to the audience at the beginning of the play as she hums Ethel Smyth’s suffrage anthem ‘March of the Women’ while laying the table.

Newly awakened to her servants’ political autonomy, the employer’s education is brought up from the kitchen.

Such sketches provided an opportunity for suffragists to bond together in laughter, rather than necessarily being designed to convert opponents. Logically, the idiocy and ignorance of privileged anti-suffragist women would hardly have made a convincing argument for extending the franchise to encompass precisely such propertied women. The short-form play conveniently allowed writers to stage significant or entertaining incidents without following through their further implications. How Miss Appleyard will interact with her cook and her maid now they have become fellow suffragists, reading the same papers and attending the same meetings, lies conveniently outside the borders of Miss Appleyard’s Awakening. The relation between suffragists and their employees could be contentious; as a heated exchange of letters between employers and domestic workers in Common Cause over six months from August 1911 attested, many suffragists could be blind to the long hours and low wages suffered by their servants.¹⁷ There was a reason, as Laura Schwarz has shown, why domestic servants were the workers least likely to be depicted in suffrage propaganda, despite being by far the most common employment for women; suffragist mistresses did not necessarily appreciate independence in their female employees.¹⁸ While airing the issues and facts that underpinned suffrage arguments, performances did not necessarily aspire to realism. For example, Christopher St John and Cicely Hamilton’s Pot and Kettle (1909), in which an anti-suffragist loses her temper with an aristocratic suffragette interrupting a political meeting and punches her, was advertised in a programme as based on ‘an incident which occurred at a Meeting held by the Anti-suffrage League at Queen’s Hall, London, in March 1909’.¹⁹ The play turns on a comic reversal; the anti-suffragist Marjorie has been drawn into politics for the opportunities it offers to mix with the aristocratic leaders of the movement, but instead her social ambitions are fulfilled when the woman she assaulted, Lady Susan Pengarvon, proves to be a ‘ripping good sort’ and invites her assailant to tea despite a black eye.²⁰

Simple character types and broad humour similarly characterize the style of Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s How the Vote Was Won (1909), one of the most popular suffrage plays, which offers a comic vision of victory achieved through cross-class solidarity. Expanded from a pamphlet with cartoon illustrations, the play repurposed archetypes – an overworked governess, a golf-playing New Woman novelist, a wealthy business owner, a music-hall singer and a boarding-house landlady – to new effect, as they all join a national strike and come to live with their nearest male relative, anti-suffragist Horace Cole.²¹ Each of them wage-earning and self-supporting, the women embrace each other’s acquaintance as members of the same family – metaphorically as well as literally – and welcome Horace’s forced conversion (and energetic mansplaining) as he leaves to join a march of desperate men demanding that the government grant women the vote.

These sketches staged working women refusing to be overlooked or silenced and embracing suffrage on the basis of their own lived experience, but their voices were largely the creation of middle-class women; A Chat with Mrs Chicky, for example, was written by Evelyn Glover, who was born into an upper-middle-class family, and the charwoman was first played by Inez Bensusan, playwright, suffragette, head of the AFL’s play department and daughter of a wealthy Australian businessman. When Bensusan played Mrs Chicky at the Rehearsal Theatre in 1912, The Vote congratulated her on the ‘absolute fidelity’ of her performance, but it also indicated that she chose to play ‘the over-worked, under-fed, char-woman with a “code id ’er dose,” but with a magnificent spirit of independence’.²² The head cold was an addition to Glover’s script, and while it perhaps emphasized the hardship of Mrs Chicky’s life, it also introduced an element of potentially reductive humour to the role. Designed to be playable in makeshift conditions with minimal props and set, these plays did not aspire to naturalistic verisimilitude; they alluded to the off-stage reality of working women’s lives without claiming to bring those lives on stage.

Where sketches and one-act plays were made available to working-class suffragists – tickets for exhibition performances cost 1s but plays were often performed free of charge at rallies and meetings – novels and full-length plays were necessarily more limited in their reach, being confined to those with the money and leisure to access them.²³ Where short plays were often extravagantly comic, fantastical or visionary, suffrage novels tended to advertise their verisimilitude; so, for example, Constance Maud prefaced No Surrender (1911) with a disclaimer as to any reference to specific individuals or historical events, but then added that her fictional characters ‘move among events that are historically real and true, and there is not a statement touching prison and law-court experiences, or present laws regarding women in this country, related here, for which chapter and verse cannot be given’.²⁴ Alliances and friendships across the class divide remained a central element in the pro-suffrage message of such works, but the greater space to explore issues in more depth and the requirements of realism to engage with the complexities and tensions within such relations produced a notably different vision of social relations – as did the more privileged status of their readers and audiences.

American actress, playwright and novelist Elizabeth Robins was the first woman to write a play as a deliberate contribution to the suffrage campaign. Votes for Women! opened at the Court Theatre, London, on 9 April 1907, and Robins divided half her profits between the WSPU and the NUWSS. Subtitled ‘A Dramatic Tract in Three Acts’, it was a drama of suffrage conversion, including a scene set in Trafalgar Square that made the audience proxy attendees at a suffrage rally. A member of the NUWSS, Robins converted to militancy in the course of her research for the play, joining the WSPU committee at the invitation of Mrs Pankhurst.²⁵ She was a founding member of the WWSL and the AFL with fellow writers and theatre professionals such as Cecily Hamilton, Bessie Hatton, Winifred Mayo and Inez Bensusan, who together campaigned for improved working conditions and equal pay for women, and produced a host of works that not only promoted the suffrage cause but also challenged the sexual double standard, legal inequalities and economic injustice.²⁶

A message of cross-class solidarity is central to Votes for Women!, in which Vida Levering, a suffrage activist, encounters a former lover, the rising Conservative MP Geoffrey Stonor, and recruits him to the cause. Vida’s sexual past is not, as in so many ‘fallen woman’ plays, a key to her moral character, but a spur to her politicization as she determines to improve other women’s financial and social situations and so ‘move that rock of offence’ – women’s economic and sexual vulnerability – on which she herself stumbled.²⁷ Women’s shared interests are a theme of the Trafalgar Square speeches, from a Working Woman (notably not given a name beyond her class designation) who declares that ‘Every child is our child’, to Vida’s declaration that a servant girl jailed for the death of a baby fathered by her employer will only secure justice when she faces a jury of ‘her peers’ – in other words, women who can understand the trials of childbirth and post-partum mania.²⁸

As Maroula Joannou has noted, the play was written at a moment when cross-class solidarity was key to the suffrage movement’s political positioning, yet, despite the shared interests that Joannou notes, the play’s texture is actually one of constant disagreements and tensions.²⁹ Allegiances are formed between women, but they are tactical alliances, not personal bonds. The first act takes place at a country-house weekend party, common to so many Edwardian West End plays, but the action, more unusually, consists of women arguing over suffrage tactics, protests in the Commons and funding for women’s refuges. Solidarity, even within the closed circle of the upper classes, must overcome ideological and personal differences. The personal is subordinate to the political; Stonor’s fresh-faced fiancée is enthralled by Vida – an emotional bond which Vida calmly exploits to leverage Stonor’s cooperation. Eschewing sentimentality, Robins represented women’s shared interests as essentially political rather than emotional, rooted in a cross-class recognition of sexual, economic and legal vulnerability.

While unsure of securing a producer for her play, Robins wrote a novelized version, The Convert (1907), taking her narrative back to Vida’s first encounters with the suffrage campaign and tracing her slow conversion from a class-based to a gender-based identity. Prompted by disdainful curiosity, Vida attends a suffrage rally together with her sister in outlandishly dowdy clothes, disguised as a ‘Woman of the People’.³⁰ Bemused and disgusted by the lower-class speakers, the sisters are simply bored by a working-class woman: ‘having no key either to her pathos or her power, [they] saw nothing but “low cockney effrontery”’.³¹ A lower-middle-class speaker sporting an extravagant hat strikes them as ‘excruciatingly genteel’ and her flowery rhetoric is ‘torturing’ to their ‘fastidious feminine sense’.³² The speaker’s crude performance of gentility serves as an uncomfortable reminder that class superiority is a matter of costume and manners; stripped of such theatrical props, Vida and her sister are disconcerted at the ‘coolly watchful, slightly contemptuous stare’ of two policemen – ‘a way no policeman had ever looked at either of them before’.³³ A gulf of disdain divides the upper-class women from the speakers, whose power to move the crowd remains incomprehensible to them. Robins and the play’s director, Harley Granville Barker, produced this dynamic of class distance in the Court Theatre staging of the Trafalgar Square rally by placing the sceptical Stonor, his hostess Lady John and his adoring fiancée Jean between the suffrage speakers and the audience. Doubly distanced by the heckling crowd and the amused indifference of the upper-class thrill-seekers, the working-class speakers deliver their appeals to the audience across a visible class divide.

The Convert charts Vida’s growing awareness and questioning of the gender conditioning that accompanies her social position. She struggles to shake off her instinctive desire to please men like Lord Borrodaile, who, given a choice between women progressing to suffrage and higher education or reverting back, impulsively exclaims, ‘Back. Yes, back to the harem.’³⁴ The greatest shock to Vida’s class loyalties, however, comes from a suffragette who dismisses aristocratic women as ‘sexless’ – these ‘curled darlings of society’ have ‘no sex-pride’, declares the seasoned campaigner, who notoriously carries a dog-whip to ward off indecent assaults when she is thrown out of political meetings.³⁵ Vida describes her political conversion as ‘seeing beyond my usual range’, a new ‘view of life’.³⁶ This new perspective reveals her former class-based instincts as those of a ‘geisha’ whose only role was to please the men around her; released from her class conditioning, Vida can begin to develop the sympathies that constitute sex-pride.³⁷ The novel’s narrative perspective mirrors Vida’s enlightenment, shifting from her initial bourgeois perspective in which lower-class women are incomprehensible and absurd to a defamiliarized view of upper-class women as complicit in their own and other women’s exploitation.

While Vida is awakened to her class conditioning amid the democratic jostle of suffrage meetings, her maid Gorringe experiences only ‘genteel horror’ at ‘the proximity to her mistress of these canaille’.³⁸ Vida attempts to make light of ‘the affront to seemliness’ she feels at her servant seeing her pushed and shoved aside; as the narrator comments, ‘Under circumstances like these the observant are reminded that no section of the modern community is so scornfully aristocratic as our servants.’³⁹ In Maud’s No Surrender, a butler is depicted as similarly protective of class distinctions, deriving a sense of his own social status from the eminence of his employers; it is therefore necessary to smuggle members of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage into the household under the guise of footmen in order to deliver a petition to Cabinet ministers dining there. The notion that servants were less democratically minded than their employers was perhaps a more comfortable notion for a middle- and upper-class readership than the contrary position.

For all Vida’s glowing description of the movement as ‘Women, the poorest and the most ignorant (except of hardship), working shoulder to shoulder with women of substance and position’, both novel and play make clear the differences that temper cross-class solidarity.⁴⁰ When Geoffrey Stonor determines to espouse female suffrage as just the ‘political dynamite’ that his career needs, his decision is framed in both play and novel as a moment of intense self-absorption and isolation. Oblivious to his fiancée’s distress at discovering his past involvement with Vida, Stonor muses that, ‘After all, women are much more Conservative naturally than men, aren’t they?’ He believes that civilization itself will be in danger if only women of the lower classes, ‘inoculated with the Socialist virus’, have political training when the vote is eventually granted.⁴¹ If Vida’s conversion is motivated by cross-class sympathy and a concern for the most vulnerable women in society, Stonor’s conversion is motivated by the interests of class, party and personal ambition. Class divisions and divergent interests remain robustly apparent in Robins’s vision of the suffrage campaign, though Vida Levering has begun to see beyond them.

The most famous act of cross-class solidarity in the suffrage campaign took place in 1910, when Lady Constance Lytton disguised herself as a seamstress in order to expose the differential prison treatment accorded to working-class suffragettes. Lytton, the most prominent aristocratic member of the WSPU, was arrested in her own persona in 1909, her heart condition was carefully diagnosed and she was confined to the prison’s sickbay; a year later, disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, her heart condition was overlooked and she was force-fed eight times before serious illness and suspicions of her identity led to her release. Praise for Lytton’s self-sacrifice was unanimous across the full spectrum of suffrage organizations. The authorities’ reluctance to inflict force-feeding on a member of the aristocracy exposed force-feeding as a torture, designed to punish women and intimidate them into abandoning militant tactics – not the ‘special medical treatment’ the government claimed.⁴² In her memoir Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences, ‘by Constance Lytton and Jane Warton, Spinster’ (1914), Lytton, like Robins, was to condemn the aristocratic woman of leisure as ‘the weakest link in the chain of womanhood. Isolated and detached, she has but little sense of kinship with other women’, uncritical of the constraints and limitations imposed on their lives because a ‘maiming subserviency’ has become their ideal.⁴³

Lytton’s self-sacrifice was fictionalized in two novels structured around cross-class allegiances and friendships in the suffrage movement: Gertrude Colmore’s Suffragette Sally (1911) and Constance Maud’s No Surrender (1911). Both novels contain multiple narrative strands, tracing the interwoven lives of working-class, middle-class and upper-class activists. These novels are designed to showcase the cross-class solidarity of the movement, but, aspiring to offer a truthful portrait of contemporary events and aware of the sensibilities of their readership, the resultant narratives also acknowledge class tensions and the limitations of empathy and imagination. Colmore, like Robins and Lytton, was a member of the WSPU, and Maud was a member of the Women’s Freedom League and dedicated her novel to Charlotte Despard. The allegiances in their novels underline the potential benefits to working-class women that even partial female enfranchisement could bring.

Lady Geraldine Hill is a fictional incarnation of Constance Lytton in Colmore’s Suffragette Sally. A concern for the less privileged drives Geraldine’s activism and gives ‘force to her words, the ring of conviction to her voice’, enabling her to recruit Sally Simmonds, a maid-of-all-work, to the cause, and to inspire her middle-class friend Edith Carstairs to make the step from constitutional to militant suffragism.⁴⁴ Where Elizabeth Robins and Constance Lytton took full aim at the cushioned and useless lives of the upper classes among whom they mixed, Colmore instead questioned how far class distinctions apply to women. Informing her husband that she is determined to engage in militant activism, Lady Hill dismisses his appeal to her social standing: ‘What is my position? what is it, after all? Lower, politically, than the meanest man’s on the Duke’s estate. Yet I am to be held back by it from doing anything towards attaining the position of a citizen!’⁴⁵ Edith is awakened to the realities of class distinction in men’s eyes when she appeals to male voters to sign her NUWSS petition and discovers that a woman seeking political rights is treated ‘with manners so different from the manners of the drawing-room and the tennis-court!’⁴⁶ Class status is merely a veneer, Suffragette Sally informs its socially privileged readership; women need not fear a loss of caste from their political activism, for in truth they never had it. Hearing an anti-suffragist speaker explain that men’s electoral rights depend on qualifications of class, but women’s are ineluctably a matter of sex alone, Edith finds herself dwelling on the question, ‘If a woman has no class, how can she be declassé?’⁴⁷

Despite giving her name to the novel, Sally’s primary role in the book is as an adoring follower of Lady Hill, whose suffrage speech she responds to instinctively while she ‘could not recall the words, the meaning of many of which was naught to her’, experiencing it instead as a ‘song of freedom’ that awakens a fluttering bird within her.⁴⁸ As she becomes a speaker herself, the narrative notes her earthy wit and repartee without recording her actual words, locating her political voice sufficiently far from the reader as to be virtually inaudible. Colmore’s account of Sally’s treatment in prison mirrors the brutal treatment of working-class suffragettes Selina Martin and Leslie Hall – force-fed, mercilessly beaten, thrown handcuffed into a cold punishment cell, kicked down the stairs and left to fall on her face with her hands locked behind her.⁴⁹ A single woman with no family to support, and living more comfortably on a salary from the suffrage society than she did as a maid-of-all-work, Sally does not face the greater hurdle to working-class suffrage involvement described by Hannah Mitchell in her autobiography: running a household, tending to children and facing not only public disapproval but domestic unhappiness.⁵⁰ But Sally’s lifetime of hard work and poor diet and her brutal prison treatment mean she pays with her life for her activism. She remains a somewhat childlike recruit to the cause, however, referring to the internal injuries sustained from being kicked by a policeman as ‘the toothache’.⁵¹ Far from setting aside class differences, Sally’s deference makes an impulsive kiss from Lady Hill her greatest moment of pride: ‘That she, Sally, the erstwhile “general”, should be kissed by the lady of all ladies, was a bliss of which she had never dreamed. It made prison worth while, apart from the Cause; it was compensation, consecration, and reward.’⁵²

Colmore not only eschewed Lytton’s scathing criticism of the leisured class to which she belonged, she significantly revised her source material to elevate her version of Constance Lytton to a Christ-like role. She closely mirrored Lytton’s accounts of her prison experience, including the near-fatal weakness to which Lytton almost succumbed after being repeatedly force-fed and left in a freezing cell, and from which she was revived by the thought of the oppressed and destitute women for whom she must continue to fight. In numerous speeches to suffrage audiences and in her memoirs, Lytton also recounted being almost overwhelmed by bitterness at the cruelty of some prison wardresses and doctors, a feeling which was only dispelled by the light falling upon the crossbars of her cell window, reminding her of the three crosses of Calvary: ‘One for the Lord Christ who died for sinners, and one for the sinner who was kind, and one for the sinner who had not yet learnt to be kind.’⁵³ Behind the third cross Lytton pictured all the hateful institutions and blind officialdom within and beyond the prison, and reminded herself that it was for such as these that Christ died. In Suffragette Sally, by contrast, after parallel musings on Lady Hill’s part, the narrative shifts to focus on the cruellest of the prison doctors, noting that:

Lytton humbly reminds herself of Christ’s ordinance; Colmore’s aristocrat, like Christ, raises the sinner.

Suffragette Sally was greeted by The Observer as ‘propaganda, pure and simple’, a copy of which ‘might be placed with advantage in the hands of every broad-minded Anti-Suffragist’.⁵⁵ If so, its target readership was one to whom class distinctions remained important. An episode in which Sally encounters Edith and her mother while selling suffrage papers on the street demonstrates the fine line the novel treads between celebrating cross-class friendships and tactfully marking their limits. Edith shocks her mother by greeting this ‘common-looking woman’ and telling her they are on their way to have tea with Lady Hill. Left alone, Sally warms herself with the thought that, ‘She was helping her dear ladyship more by standing there in the cold than if she were to go and share her tea.’⁵⁶ Sally’s adoring dedication quietly elides the fact she was never invited. Not for Sally the intimate friendships that Annie Kenney enjoyed with her middle- and upper-class WSPU colleagues, the Pankhursts and Pethick-Lawrences – such proximity might be celebrated by Kenney in her memoir, but it was less likely to be attractive to the novel’s well-heeled readers.⁵⁷ Colmore’s fictional tale of cross-class solidarity was carefully targeted to flatter and reassure a privileged readership.

Constance Maud’s novel No Surrender is similarly structured around a growing friendship between mill-worker Jenny Clegg and Mary O’Neil, niece of the mill owner, Sir Godfrey Walker. Sympathies and concerns for the most deprived women are presented as the primary inspiration for suffragists throughout the novel. In a chapter titled ‘The Canterbury Tales’, imprisoned suffragettes each recount their conversion, variously motivated by compassion, principles of social justice and the determination to save other women from the sufferings they themselves endured. A central plot strand establishes shared interests between working men and the women’s movement. Joe Hopton, a trade union leader, is firmly opposed to women’s enfranchisement and has forged an alliance with the Liberal Party, unaware of the contempt in which Sir Godfrey, a Liberal MP, holds his workers, whose political opinions he believes he has a right to dictate. Joe learns where working-class interests really lie when his young sister is seduced and abandoned by her employer, and in desperation she attempts suicide, thereby killing her baby. She is sentenced to death by the magistrate (part of a recurring pattern in the novel of male judges favouring men’s interests and feelings over those of the women they abuse), and Joe is rebuffed by his Liberal allies when he seeks their help; as he comments bitterly, ‘They’ve no time to waste on a poor workin’ girl. Why, a girl don’t count as much as one o’ their horses or dogs – not by a long shot.’⁵⁸ It is the suffragists who raise a petition for clemency and ensure the girl’s sentence is commuted, proving their genuine commitment to helping the most vulnerable in society.

Mary O’Neill’s disguise as a working-class woman and her consequent force-feeding remain a relatively minor detail in No Surrender, which climaxes with the 1911 suffrage march through London, uniting women of all classes, together with the Men’s League, led by Joe Hopton carrying a banner of John Stuart Mill. Jenny, unlike Colmore’s Sally, is an articulate and autonomous political agent, a committed socialist from the start. But class deference nonetheless guides her relationship with Mary; when both friends are imprisoned and set to scrub their cells,

Given the Academy reviewer’s objection to the ‘bludgeon-like argument … delivered by Lancashire mill-hands in very broad dialect’ in this ‘extremely aggressive volume’, Colmore was evidently wise to include such conciliatory details to flatter her upper-class readers.⁶⁰

Like Colmore, Constance Maud negotiated class sensibilities with strategic tact, as exemplified by the careful nuancing of the image of suffrage women as an army united across class differences. The metaphor is first used when Mary offers a holiday to Jenny’s brother, who has been injured in an industrial accident. Jenny demurs, and Mary responds:

And the offer is gratefully accepted. The image recurs when Jack Wilmot, the son of an upper-class suffragist, falls in love with Jenny and proposes marriage. Jenny declines, explaining that she may have left the mill, but she has not left ‘my own people or my own class. I am one with them … I suffer with them – I feel as they do, Mr. Wilmot, and not as you do.’⁶² Jack insists that he feels with the workers, not his own class, but Jenny is adamant.

Jenny’s response serves as a reassurance for the upper-class reader that unfortunate marriages will not result from campaigning alongside lower-class women. But Jenny’s response to Jack’s faith in the power of his artist’s imagination also deliberately marks out the limits to representation – both artistic and political. Nothing can replace direct experience and the knowledge that is born of it. The crucial limits to imaginative empathy and art’s ability to communicate lived experience mark not only the constraints of the novel but also the essential need for individual enfranchisement as the only true form of political representation; no gender or class can fully represent another’s interests.

This issue of representation became particularly problematic in suffrage fiction when it came to the most abject members of society. A central plank of the suffrage argument was the need for qualified women to secure the vote in order to speak on behalf of the poorest women, those doubly deprived by gender and class; but to assert the ability of privileged women to imagine the lives and needs of the most deprived also risked undermining the principle of self-representation. In Suffragette Sally, Edith’s friend Rachel explains how, as a middle-class young woman, she was left destitute and forced to work for starvation wages among the poorest women, and it is for their sake that she believes in militant tactics, because they cannot afford to wait patiently for constitutional methods to take effect. These are the women who most need the vote, but who ‘don’t know that they need it; who are so crushed, so broken, so near the level of animals that they don’t even desire it; because they desire nothing, are capable of desiring nothing, beyond food, sleep – just, and nothing more than just – what an animal desires.’⁶⁴ Living beyond the borders of the text, these women’s lives can only be communicated in negatives – a distance that raises questions both about Rachel’s confidence in filling the blank of their needs and desires, and the precise mechanism whereby those needs are to be met by the vote.

Elizabeth Robins was less convinced than Colmore of the ability or right of more privileged women to access the lives of the most socially deprived. In The Convert, a campaign leader stops a less experienced speaker going into detail about the lives of the women she has encountered in a homeless shelter. As the leader explains to Vida, ‘We sometimes make a passing reference – just to set men thinking, and there leave it. But it always makes them furious, of course. It does no good. Either people know and just accept it, or else they won’t believe, and it only gets them on the raw.’⁶⁵ Based on the real-life activist Mary Higgs, who disguised herself as a tramp to visit a homeless shelter and recorded her experiences in Three Nights in Women’s Lodging Houses (1905), Robins’s activist pays the same price for her experiences as Higgs did: three months serious illness. Inspired by the leader’s example, Vida too takes a ‘pilgrimage’ in the ‘Underworld’, as she later tells an aristocratic house party.

Vida’s experiences, like those of the suffrage leader, lie discreetly outside the boundaries of the novel. Her masquerade serves to highlight rather than bridge the gap between classes. ‘You needn’t suppose’, objects an aristocratic houseguest, ‘that those wretched creatures feel it as we would’. To which Vida responds, ‘The girls who need shelter and work aren’t all serving-maids.’⁶⁷ Vida does not challenge the notion that a serving maid feels differently; her cross-class masquerade gives her knowledge of ‘that look’ but she does not presume to have experienced how ‘those wretched creatures feel’. Vida Levering speaks for the abject, but she does not presume to speak as.

A concern for the most vulnerable women in society was not, of course, unique to suffrage campaigners. The first organized female opposition to women’s enfranchisement, the 1889 ‘Appeal Against Female Suffrage’ penned by Mary Ward and signed by over 1,500 women, declared that, ‘The care of the sick and the insane; the treatment of the poor; the education of children’ were matters in which women ‘have made good their claim to larger and more extended powers’, but crucially argued that women’s activism should be confined to the local not the national or international arenas.⁶⁸ The Appeal concluded both that ‘the emancipating process’ had reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution and occupations of women, and that ‘certain injustices of the law towards women’, especially among working women, could safely be entrusted to the current constitutional machinery given the ‘new spirit of justice and sympathy among men’.⁶⁹ Campaigns to improve conditions for working women brought together supporters and opponents of suffrage. The National Union for Women Workers, for example, was formed in 1895 to advance women’s work through collective organization and political influence, and included both Millicent Fawcett and leading anti-suffragist Mary Ward among its members – until the passing of a special pro-suffrage motion in 1912 prompted Ward to resign.

Mary Ward, a founder and president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, was both a tireless campaigner against women’s enfranchisement and an energetic and effective social activist, who founded children’s play-centres and in 1899 established the first Invalid Children’s School.⁷⁰ A proponent of the ‘Forward Policy’ for women, Ward campaigned to expand women’s role on school boards, as Poor Law guardians, in local elections and even to have seats reserved on county and borough councils.⁷¹ Cross-class sympathies were at the heart of her political mission, but crucially within a clearly hierarchical social structure. A prolific novelist, Ward, like so many suffrage writers, used her fiction as a platform for her views. In her 1894 novel Marcella, for example, the idealistic young heroine espouses Fabian socialism and exhausts herself as a rent-collector and a nurse in the East End until she embraces her position as a member of the landowning classes, improving her tenants’ lives through good management and the introduction of a carefully measured minimum wage, which raises living standards while preserving the wealth of the estate. Ward depicts Marcella’s aspiration to solidarity with the working classes as naive and misplaced; attempting to comfort the wife of a poacher hung for murder, she does not realize that her presence is ‘a burden and constraint’, isolating the widow from the ‘homelier speech and simpler consolations’ of her community.⁷²

Ward launched her most direct fictional attack on militant suffragism in Delia Blanchflower (1916), whose eponymous heroine is a motherless girl drawn into the movement by her fierce governess, Gertrude Marvell. After her father’s death, Delia devotes her energies and money to the suffrage cause, in the company of a disparate collection of female malcontents, each motivated by personal resentments and injuries, and bound together in their hatred of men. A dressmaker, excited by her unwonted access to Maumsey Abbey, the Blanchflowers’ ancestral home, muses rhapsodically on Delia’s involvement in ‘The Daughters of Revolt’: ‘The Movement was indeed wonderful! How it broke down class barriers, and knit all women together!’⁷³ In the eyes of Delia’s guardian, Mark Winnington, however, this supposed class solidarity is no more than Gertrude’s dereliction of her duties as a paid companion, leaving Delia unchaperoned while she pursues her suffrage activities and then requisitioning Delia’s flat with scant regard to its owner.

Like Marcella, Delia must be educated by her guardian to understand her responsibilities as the owner of Maumsey Abbey, learning to focus her energies on giving informed help to the cottagers on her estate rather than concerning herself with the more distant plight of sweated women. Symbolically, Gertrude’s militant arson attack on the ancient estate of a local Cabinet minister results not only in the destruction of part of England’s heritage but also the accidental death of the caretaker’s invalid daughter, a child whom Mark had enrolled in his newly established school for handicapped children. The novel sets up a direct conflict between personal duties and political activism when Delia chooses to nurse the maid who has been with her since childhood rather than obeying Gertrude’s demand that she attend militant meetings in London. But it is Mark’s example, above all, that converts Delia to a more parochial and hierarchical model of philanthropy.

In Ward’s depiction, cross-class alliances, however well intended, are self-deceiving and disruptive; the key to social improvement lies in deference, service and duty.

Mark echoes Ward’s own views as he muses on the travails of working-class women and then on the men, ‘marred and worn like them, only more deeply, more tragically’.⁷⁵ The answer, Mark determines, is not the vote, which has done so little to alleviate the men’s suffering. The parliamentary vote, underpinned by male power, rules the Empire, while women and men together must take on responsibility for the ‘national house-keeping’ of England.⁷⁶ But Ward allows a plethora of voices into her novel, including that of Miss Dempsey, a long-term suffragist who has devoted her life to ‘rescue’ work, and who ‘loved those whom no one else would love – the meanest and feeblest of the outcast race’.⁷⁷ Despite desiring the vote, she is, alongside older fellow suffragists, willing to wait as long as it takes to be granted the franchise peaceably. To Mary Ward there was nothing utopian about Annie Kenney’s vision of a movement that transcended class barriers. Class distinctions and gender roles were intrinsically linked in her vision of social structure, and the most vulnerable must depend upon the leadership of men and women within their particular spheres. The traditional heterosexual romance plot enabled Ward to validate both gender and class structures; the marriage of Delia Blanchflower and Mark Winnington confirms the chivalrous landowner’s place as a natural leader, the propertied man whose knowledge and sensitivity enable him to represent the interests of every section of the community.

Gender and class structures were inherently entwined, as both suffragists and anti-suffragists recognized. To grant the vote to women would be, as Robins wrote to her sister-in-law in 1908, ‘a pulling out of the chief cornerstones of privilege. Ibsen saw that years ago.’⁷⁸ There was a significant difference between compassion for society’s vulnerable – which both suffragists and anti-suffragists expressed – and aspirations to greater social equality. Mary Ward’s novels offered a counterpoint to the ignorant, self-interested anti-suffragists depicted in plays such as Glover’s A Chat with Mrs Chicky and Miss Appleyard’s Awakening, while the Anti-Suffrage League was keen to emphasize the social commitment of its members; a series of profiles of aristocratic leaders of the movement in The Anti-Suffrage Review, for example, repeatedly highlighted the women’s philanthropic activities – even when such activism was limited to the opening of an extensive art collection to weekly public viewings.⁷⁹ Both suffragists and antis claimed to be more urgently concerned with the sufferings of the poor than their political opponents, but, crucially, the anti-suffragists insisted that women must accept, like Ward’s Marcella and Delia Blanchflower, that their service could most effectively be delivered through established structures and hierarchies.

Suffrage writers, by contrast, faced the more considerable challenge of envisioning the dismantling of gender structures and the conjoined hierarchies of class without offending or alienating middle- and upper-class audiences and readers. The multi-stranded plots of Suffragette Sally and No Surrender sought an innovative egalitarian form to represent the interconnected lives and interests of their diverse cast of women.⁸⁰ But Colmore and Maud showed more respect for class distinctions and hierarchies than the utopian vision of cross-class unity in plays such as How the Vote Was Won might suggest. Where Constance Lytton and Elizabeth Robins were robust and unsparing in their critiques of the parasitism of the aristocratic women of leisure in whose circles they moved, middle-class writers such as Maud and Colmore were more conciliatory, constructing fictions that bound women together in cross-class friendships while carefully preserving a class deference that Lytton firmly repudiated. For suffragist writers, harnessing the truth-telling claims of realism to propagandist effect also meant acknowledging and negotiating the tensions between different class interests and sensibilities; visions of perfect solidarity remained the province of the utopian and the comic. Vitally, it was when suffrage writers acknowledged the limits of representation – the poverty and suffering that lay beyond the margins of their texts and performances – that they achieved the fine balance between highlighting the deprivation that blighted working-class lives and laying claim to a right or ability to represent them.