One woman, one vote

Or, political activism through the prism of genealogy.

Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst

A few weeks ago, I received my polling card for the Election of Members of the European Parliament for the South East Region, as the A5 piece of cardboard grandly states. I pinned it to the noticeboard, stuck the date in the diary and thought no more about it. It was the Easter holidays here, all the children were off school and time to work was limited. I'd been filling my day with little bits of silly historical novels, in between refereeing disagreements, throwing tweenage boys off the computer and into the garden, and providing an endless stream of snacks.

One of the books I took a quick trot through was the lovely Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges by Geraldine Symons (to see if it was appropriate for a bright 9 year old; the answer is yes, but the historical aspects might well be beyond their awareness), about two thirteen year old girls in 1911 (ish) who decide to join the agitation for Votes for Women. They adopt the pseudonyms Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges and conduct a brief campaign of civil disobedience with the expected consequences. In many ways, the book says a lot more about the flights of fancy to which teenage girls are prone rather than anything profound about the campaign for women's suffrage, but it led me back to my polling card.

Whatever I may feel about the European Union (personally, it seems not that different to the British Empire to me, we're just not in charge any more), I shall vote on 22 May because I can. When my maternal grandmother was born in 1910, women had no democratic voice, although she was born into a politically-aware family. She, her mother and her five sisters waited until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 for vote to be extended to all women of 21 and over. It took a little under a century for women to be granted the vote, the first petition in favour of it being presented by Mary Smith shortly after the Representation of the People Act 1832, (2 & 3 Will. IV c.45) which defined voters as "male persons" (and still only extended the vote to about 5% of the population).

Political activism and social change can be hard to see in individual censuses. Trends may be discerned by comparing census records a decade apart, but the census is not in itself a political vehicle or statement - except in the important case of 1911.

The fight for universal suffrage was much more bloody and unpleasant than pretty Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins, flashing her garter to the outrage of the housemaid, would have us believe. Civil agitation in the form of shop-window smashing and stone-throwing soon led to horrifying acts of pointless vandalism (like Mary Raleigh Richardson's slashing of the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in 1914) and even a (possibly accidental) public suicide. Post boxes were set alight, golf courses dug up, arson committed and even small bombs planted. The aim was to show the Government that government was impossible without the will of the governed, half of whom were excluded from the process. In 1913, the Prisoners' Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act (known as the Cat and Mouse Act) allowed suffragette prisoners on hunger strike to be released on grounds of ill-health and returned to jail for the same offence once they had recovered.

Part of the process of reaching universal suffrage was the 1911 census. Civil disobedience was at its height and avoiding the census was something individual women could do. Emily Wilding Davison, who died in 1913 trying to pin flags to the bridle of the King's horse at Epsom Derby, famously spent census night (2 April 1911) hiding in the broom cupboard in the crypt of  the Houses of Parliament. She was eventually recorded twice, being both discovered by a cleaner and betrayed by her landlady, who recorded her as 'at home' even though she wasn't, but she managed to upset the record nonetheless.

There is no tally of the number of women missing from the 1911 census due to suffragism. Some stayed out all night so as not to be home, like the women who camped on Putney Heath (pretty chilly in early April, I should think); their later summons to the South Western Police Court, London to answer charges of driving on the turf (not evading the census) was reported in the Cheltenham Chronicle on 15 April. Louisa Burnham refused to fill in any details regarding herself, her sister and a maidservant and commented pithily "No Vote, No Census. If I am intelligent enough to fill in this Census Form, I can surely make an X on a Ballot Paper". Other women struck through the record filled in by their husbands, only for their husbands to reinstate it and observe that they did not approve, like poor Eleanora Maund. It is noticeable that her husband was more than 20 years her senior and may have been rather old-fashioned in his attitudes!

The women summonsed for their behaviour on Putney Heath made a statement to the court that "the offence would not occur again, as before the next census the suffragettes would have attained their object". Actually, it was almost time for the 1931 census before all adult women received the vote although women over 30 who met property qualifications received the vote in 1918. My grandmother, her three surviving sisters and their mother would first have voted in the General Election of October 1931, when she was just 21; and in the late 1940s she moved with her young family to Castle Camps in Cambridgeshire. Near the school was a house occupied by a stern single lady in her fifties, popularly rumoured among local children to be a witch. She was Mary Raleigh Richardson.