No Longer Upsetting the Apple Cart

By Laura Beers

In 1908 Ellen Wilkinson, a fiery adolescent from a working-class family in Manchester, was “the only girl who talks in school debates.” By midcentury, Wilkinson had helped found Britain’s Communist Party, earned a seat in Parliament, and become a renowned advocate for the poor and dispossessed at home and abroad. She was one of the first female delegates to the United Nations, and she played a central role in Britain’s postwar Labour government. In Laura Beers’s account of Wilkinson’s remarkable life, we have a richly detailed portrait of a time when Left-leaning British men and women from a range of backgrounds sought to reshape domestic, imperial, and international affairs.

During Wilkinson’s lifetime, many British radicals viewed themselves as members of an international socialist community, and some, like her, became involved in socialist, feminist, and pacifist movements that spanned the globe. By focusing on the extent to which Wilkinson’s activism transcended Britain’s borders, Red Ellen adjusts our perception of the British Left in the early twentieth century Here is a brief excerpt.

For Ellen, the general strike and ensuing political struggle over the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act had been a battle of class against class, in which she was a junior officer leading the troops on the front line of the economic war. Like Joan Craig, the heroine of her novel Clash, who is described at various points as a Joan of Arc or a Boadicea, Ellen’s sex was both an attribute, which allowed her to connect with and speak out for the wives of the striking miners, and a barrier that separated her from the club of male trade unionists in parliament. These men — rightly — suspected that Ellen’s loyalties would always remain divided. After the passage of the Trade Disputes Act, she redoubled her commitment to the party, throwing herself into the campaign to convert the country to Labour before the next general election.

But the class struggle was not the only fight that preoccupied Ellen in the late 1920s. Much of her time and energy were given over to the women’s movement and particularly to the campaign to equalize the franchise in Britain.

Midway through her tour of the coalfields with Kathleen Starr in the late spring of 1926, Ellen abandoned her friend for two days. Leaving Kathleen behind in Nottinghamshire, she returned by train to London, quickly packed an overnight case, and hopped on a flight to Paris to petition the French premier Aristide Briand to grant women the suffrage and to broadcast a speech on the women’s movement from Radio Tour Eiffel. The London-Paris route was one of the first to be opened to commercial air traffic after the First World War, followed shortly thereafter by regular flights to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Berlin. The growing ease of air travel in the interwar years shrank both the real and imagined distance between European nations, and helped Ellen to remain in close touch with fellow activists across the continent.

The deputation to Briand was arranged by the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which held its tenth conference in Paris that week. The IWSA, whose president was the irrepressible British Liberal activist Margery Corbett Ashby, was an umbrella organization linking national pro-suffrage groups. Its affiliated bodies included the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), as the National Union for Women’s Suffrage Societies became known after the passage of the 1918 reform act. The Alliance’s triennial conference brought together suffragists from over forty countries, including delegates from thirty-seven national auxiliaries as well as fraternal delegates from many other nations without national affiliated bodies. Women from every European country except Russia came together with women from the United States, Brazil, Peru, Egypt, India, Japan, and elsewhere to discuss the future of the women’s movement. The IWSA was also increasingly concerned with the question of international peace. Although Ellen’s allegiance remained with the more radical Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), she supported the IWSA’s aims and had promised Ashby months earlier that she would speak at the conference on the role of women in politics.

After a week touring the Notts and Somerset coalfields, the genteel environment of the women’s conference seemed another universe. All of a sudden, Ellen “found myself in a different world. An old French duchess, a princess or two, titles galore, with eager professional women, and the gay students of the Sorbonne!” Although some of her trade union colleagues may have resented her decision to leave behind her fundraising tour to give attention to the international suffrage campaign, Ellen saw the two causes as inextricably combined. In an article in the Plebs in 1929, she quoted a “good comrade” who had asked her, “Is there any reason why a socialist should be pleased when some woman breaks fresh ground?” and paraphrased the typical young socialist’s view of women’s advancement into parliament as, “What difference does it make apart from the party to which they belong?” Her response to both was to insist that “the most difficult lesson that the men have had to learn is that no class or nation can rise above the level of its women. While they are exploited and sweated, or, in a wealthier class, kept ignorant and irresponsible, the sons they raise bear the brand.” Although the franchise would not solve the problem of working-class poverty, if mothers and daughters in the coalfields were given a vote, their ability to influence their own lives and the lives of their families would be invaluably increased.

Ellen repeatedly reiterated her view, first expressed in her maiden speech in parliament, that franchise reform was as much a class as a gender issue. One month after the Eiffel Tower broadcast, she again drew herself away from her work on behalf of the miners to make the case for suffrage reform. On July 3, she participated in a mass demonstration in London representing forty women’s organizations demanding the equalization of the franchise. Thirty-five hundred women marched with flags and banners from the Embankment to Hyde Park as the female pilot Mrs. Elliott Lynn flew her plane over the procession. At the front of the parade was a golden banner bearing the inscription “Votes for the Women Left Out.” Although smaller than the mass demonstrations of the Edwardian era, the procession was in many ways reminiscent of the prewar campaigns, replete with pageantry. Ellen, walking with the Women’s Election Committee on the hot summer morning, did her bit to add to the colourful spectacle, dressing in a green Amelia Earhart-style satin “jumper jacket” and green shoes.

When they arrived in Hyde Park, leaders of the movement from across the generational and political divide spoke to their audience from fifteen different platforms. Both militant and constitutional suffragism were represented, in the persons of Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. NUSEC president Eleanor Rathbone was there, as was the editor of Time and Tide, Lady Rhondda. Although the platforms were dominated by Liberals, the two Labour MPs, Margaret Bondfield and Ellen Wilkinson, both took part. Ellen hammered home the economic bias of the current legislation, reiterating that it not only disfranchised young women workers, but, due to the property qualifications, meant that a woman over thirty could not vote unless she was in possession of “a husband or some other furniture,” a quip that elicited applause and laughter from the crowd.

The demonstration marked the beginning of a renewed campaign for franchise equalization, under the leadership of Margaret Rhondda. Ellen and Lady Rhondda shared a strong commitment to women’s rights, and the two would become increasingly close in the coming years. Margaret was the daughter of the Welsh “coal king” D. A. Thomas, and hence one of the largest mine owners in England. In 1929, Ellen would attempt a sympathetic portrayal of her in Clash, depicting Mary Maud Meddows, the character obviously based on the heiress, as a victim of a capitalist system larger than any one individual. In the summer of 1926, however, such perspective was impossible. Although Ellen worked with Rhondda’s committee, she felt compelled to issue a public statement that she had not attended a garden party for suffrage supporters at the house of the coal heiress.

Over the months and years that followed, the women’s organizations kept up an intense lobbying campaign, cajoling sympathetic MPs, threatening opponents, and keeping press attention on the issue. Given the promises made by Baldwin and Joynson-Hicks, the government accepted that some form of franchise reform would have to be introduced. Yet many Conservatives, including the prime minister himself, were wary of granting the vote to what some estimated could be more than five million additional women — a move that could increase the total electorate by over a quarter. The Marquess of Titchfield, Tory MP for Newark, said in the 1925 debate over franchise extension, “I do not think a woman of 21 has either enough intelligence of the world or enough knowledge of the ins and outs of politics to be given the responsibility of the vote These ladies of 21 would be rather like a moth attracted by a candle. They would undoubtedly be attracted by [glittering] prophecies, and I am afraid, like the moth, they would fly into that candle and burn their wings very badly . . . we have at the moment enough unenlightened people who have the vote.” However, his belief that young women’s mental capacities were inferior to those of young men was by no means universally held within his party. His view that too many uneducated people had already been granted the vote was much more widely shared.