Mud March (suffragists)

The band and lead banner at the Mud March, 9 February 1907

The Mud March of 9 February 1907 was a peaceful demonstration organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), in which more than three thousand women marched from Hyde Park Corner to the Strand in London in support of votes for women. It was the largest public demonstration supporting woman's suffrage seen up to that date, in which women from all classes participated. It acquired its name from the awful weather conditions on the day, in which incessant rain left the marchers drenched and mud-spattered.

The proponents of women's suffrage were divided between those who favoured constitutional methods through parliamentary action, and those who supported more aggressive, militant tactics. This split was formalised in 1903 when the militants broke away to form the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). The WSPU's activities gained considerable adverse press attention, while the much larger NUWSS's pursuit of orthodox legal methods went largely unnoticed. Accordingly, the NUWSS executive devised the march as a means of raising its public profile. The march attracted considerable interest and broadly sympathetic press coverage, both at home and abroad. One of its main objectives was to create momentum for a new suffrage bill in the House of Commons, but when such a bill was presented in the following month, it was "talked out" without a vote being taken.

While the march failed to influence the parliamentary process, it had a considerable impact on public awareness, and on the NUWSS's future tactics. Large peaceful public demonstrations, never previously attempted, became standard features of their campaign. The march, and its successors, showed the world that the fight for women's suffrage was not confined to the strident minority often caricatured in the press, but had the support of women in every stratum of society, who despite their social differences were capable of uniting and working together for a common cause.

Background

Historical perspective

Millicent Fawcett, co-founder in 1897 of the NUWSS

As early as the middle of the seventeenth century, the issue of women's suffrage in England had been considered, though never adopted as a principle, by the Levellers. Two centuries later, the cause was taken up by elements within the Chartists. Although women's suffrage was not a formal Chartist policy, one of the movement's leaders, R.J. Richardson, wrote a pamphlet from prison, "Rights for Women", in which he asked rhetorically: "Is there a man who can lay his hand upon his heart and say, 'women ought not to interfere in political affairs?' ". In 1851, after Chartism had largely withered with none of its aims secured, Harriet Taylor Mill wrote an article for the Westminster Review, entitled "Enfranchisement of Women". In it she stated:

With what truth or rationality could the suffrage be termed universal while half the human species remained excluded from it? To declare that a voice in the government is a right of all, and demand it for only a part – the part, namely to which the claimant himself belongs – is to renounce even the appearance of principle.

On 7 June 1866 John Stuart Mill, Harriet's husband, presented a petition to parliament, asking that the right to vote be extended to women on the same basis as men, that is, if they met the existing property qualification. More than 1,500 signatures were obtained, including those of many leading women educationists and social reformers, including Emily Davies, Josephine Butler and Elizabeth Garrett. However, in the following year Mill's attempt to the embody the petition's demands into the Second Reform Act 1867 failed; the act made no provision for women's suffrage. Thereupon, women began to organise, and formed suffrage societies in numerous parts of the country. These societies had some success in gaining votes for women in municipal elections, despite making no progress on the parliamentary front. In 1867 a co-ordinating body, the National Society for Women's Suffrage (NSWS) was formed, through the efforts of Lydia Becker. Among the early NSWS members was the 20-year-old Millicent Fawcett, who joined the London society and made her debut as a political speaker at a meeting held at the Architectural Society in London's Conduit Street in 1868. She would become a leading figure in the movement. In October 1897 she chaired a meeting at which the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was created, as a new umbrella organisation for all the various factions and regional societies; initially, seventeen groups affiliated to the new central body.

Constitutionalism versus militancy

Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the militant, "suffragette" wing of the movement

The NUWSS, like the NSWS before it, believed in seeking its objectives through constitutional means. After repeated parliamentary rebuffs, the lack of success was leading some members to advocate stronger, more militant methods. As early as 1888 the NSWS's Central Committee had split between "moderates" such as Fawcett and those such as Emmeline Pankhurst who argued for a more robust approach. This division was formalised in 1903, when Pankhurst and her followers left the NUWSS to form the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), with the motto "Deeds, not words". The press coined the term "suffragettes" to distinguish the militants from the constitutionally-minded "suffragists" of the NUWSS. The suffix "-ette" was originally used in the Daily Mail to belittle the militants by implying that they were not genuine suffragists, but the label was subsequently adopted by the militants as a badge of honour.

At first, the WSPU's militancy was expressed relatively peacefully, in the form of public meetings and demonstrations in streets and parks, largely confined to Lancashire. These activities garnered little publicity, but things changed in October 1905, when Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst interrupted a political meeting in the Manchester Free Trade Hall by repeatedly heckling the main speaker, Sir Edward Grey. They were thrown out of the meeting, and later charged with obstruction and fined. They refused to pay, and each received a brief prison sentence. These actions generated much publicity; henceforth, this form of aggressive direct action and intervention would become the hallmarks of the WSPU campaign.

The NUWSS, meanwhile, saw themselves as needing some equivalent demonstration, to show that they were as committed as the militants to the suffrage cause; their claim that moral force was superior to physical coercion was no longer sufficient and could, as Leslie Hume points out, be seen as an excuse for inaction. Accordingly, the executive committee decided to hold a series of mass processions, open to everyone, through the streets of London, the first of which was scheduled for Saturday 9 February 1907.

March

Organisation

Poster advertising the march and meeting, 9 February 1907

The task of organising the February event was delegated to Pippa Strachey, the secretary of the London Women's Suffrage Society. She was the fifth child of Sir Richard Strachey and his wife Jane Maria Strachey, née Grant; among her siblings was the essayist Lytton Strachey. Her mother, a friend of Fawcett, was a long-standing suffragist, but Pippa had showed little interest in the issue before a meeting with Emily Davies, who quickly converted her to the cause. She took on the organisation of the London march with no experience of doing anything similar, but carried out the task with such panache and skill that she was given responsibility for the planning of all future large processions of the NUWSS.

Regional suffrage societies and various other organisations were invited to bring delegations to the February march. The WPSU, however, was not invited; the Women's Liberal Federation vetoed the idea because of the WPSU's attacks on the Liberal government, and refused to participate in the march if the militants were included. The march would begin at Hyde Park Corner and progress via Piccadilly to the Exeter Hall, a large meeting venue in the Strand – a second, open-air meeting was scheduled for Trafalgar Square. Members of the Artists' Suffrage League produced posters and postcards, and designed and produced around eighty embroidered banners for the march. In all, around forty organisations from all over the country chose to participate, with representation from the northern urban conurbations particularly strong.

9 February

The march assembles in Hyde Park

All through the morning of 9 February, women converged on the march's starting point, the Achilles statue at Hyde Park Corner. Between three and four thousand women were assembled, from all ages and strata of society, in appalling weather with incessant rain and "mud, mud, mud" according to Millicent Fawcett's later account. They included Lady Frances Balfour, sister-in-law of Arthur Balfour, the former Conservative prime minister; the Countess of Carlisle of the Women's Liberal Federation; Eva Gore-Booth of the renowned Anglo-Irish family, and the veteran campaigner Emily Davies. Soon after 2.00 pm the march set off in the drenching rain, with a brass band leading and Fawcett, Lady Strachey and Frances Balfour at the head of the column, which extended for half a mile and was followed by a phalanx of carriages and motor-cars. Despite the weather, thousands of the public thronged the pavements to enjoy "the novelty of the spectacle ... respectable women marching in the streets" – women who, according to the writer Harold Smith, were to prepared to "risk their reputations, their employment, and ridicule from the crowd" in order to participate.

The suffragist Katharine Frye and her sister Agnes, from North Kensington, had been deterred by the weather from joining the march at Hyde Park Corner, and travelled by train to Charing Cross to meet the march at the Strand. When they found that it had not yet reached there, they walked to Piccadilly Circus where, Frye wrote in her diary, "in about two minutes we heard strains of a band and waited, anxious and expectant. The crowd began to gather and we were nearly swept away by the first part – a swarm of roughs with the band – but the procession itself came – passed along dignified and really impressive". The sisters found their local contingent and marched with them the rest of the way to Exeter House. They found the experience immensely exciting:

Entrance to Exeter Hall, the Strand

The crowds to see us – the man in the street – the men in the Clubs, the people standing outside the Carlton – interested – surprised for the most part – not much joking at our expense and no roughness. The policemen were splendid and all the traffic was stopped our way. We were an imposing spectacle all with badges – each section under its own banners. Ours got broken, poor thing, unfortunately, and caused remarks. I felt like a martyr of old and walked proudly along. I would not jest with the crowd – though we had some jokes with ourselves ... The mud was awful. Agnes and I wore galoshes so our feet were alright but we got dreadfully splashed.

The Exeter Hall meeting was chaired by the Liberal politician Walter McLaren whose wife, Eva McLaren was one of the scheduled speakers. Other due to speak included Israel Zangwill, the writer, playwright, Zionist and women's rights activist, and Keir Hardie, leader of the Labour Party. Frye was most impressed: "The meeting was splendid. Mr Walter McLaren in the Chair and Israel Zangwill as chief speaker – he was so splendid and most witty. Miss Gore Booth – Mrs Fawcett – Mrs Eva McLaren – Lady Strachey and several other ladies spoke and Keir Hardie made an excellent speech." Hardie's presence did not, however, find universal favour. His personal affiliation with the militants, in defiance of official Labour policy on the issue, was a source of friction in Liberal and Labour circles, and his speech was greeting with some organised hissing from Liberal women sharing the platform. He spoke strongly in support of the meeting's resolution, which was carried, that women be given the vote on the same basis of men, and demanded a bill in the current parliamentary session. At the Trafalgar Square meeting, Eva Gore-Booth pleaded for unity among the dissident factions, deploring the Labour Party's alienation from the constitutional struggle.

Press coverage

Lady Francis Balfour, Lady Strachey and Millicent Fawcett at the head of the march, shown in the Illustrated London News 16 February 1907

The march was widely reported, at home and abroad, mostly in sympathetic terms; newspapers and magazines in Europe and in the United States noted particularly the diversity represented in the march, with all classes of women united and working together. The Times thought the event "was remarkable as much for its representative character as for its size", a theme repeated in The Daily Mirror: "Never in the history of the suffragette movement has there been such a company as that which, representative of all classes, from a peeress to the humblest working woman, assembled to join in the procession".

According to The Manchester Guardian's reporter, "It requires some courage for a woman to step out of her drawing-room into the street to take her place in a mixed throng for a cause probably distasteful to many or most of her acquaintance, and to see herself pilloried in the newspapers next morning by name as one of the 'Suffragettes'." Other newspapers also noted the contrast between the march and the more typical militant suffragette demonstrations. The Observer reported: "There were no attempts to bash policemen's helmets, to tear down the park railings ... [it was] a thoroughly orderly, ladylike business, well organised, well executed, and excited far more sympathy than any amount of imprecation and gesticulation". Likewise, The Daily News compared the event favourably to the actions of suffragettes: "Such a demonstration is far more likely to prove the reality of the demand for a vote than the practice of breaking up meetings held by Liberal Associations". The pictorial journal The Sphere provided a montage of photographs from the march, under the headline "The Attack on Man's Supremacy". Such coverage gave the movement, according to one commentator, "more publicity in a week than it had enjoyed in the previous fifty years".

Aftermath and consequences

Willoughby Dickinson MP, sponsor of the failed 1907 suffrage bill

The march was quickly dubbed the "Mud March", in reference to the appalling weather conditions that the marchers had encountered. It was, up to this time, the largest-ever public demonstration in support of woman's suffrage. Immediately afterwards, the NUWSS executive met with its parliamentary committee to discuss the form in which a suffrage bill might be presented. As a result, on 26 February the Liberal MP for St Pancras North, Willoughby Dickinson published the text of a Private Member's Bill, which proposed that women should have the vote subject to the same property qualification that applied to men. This would, it was estimated, enfranchise at least two million women. Although the bill received strong backing from both wings of the suffragist movement it was viewed more equivocally in the House of Commons, particularly by some Labour members who thought it did not go far enough. Elsewhere, on the day the bill was published, the Cambridge Union passed by a small majority a motion "that this House would view with regret the extension of the franchise to women". On 8 March Dickinson introduced his bill to the House of Commons, with a plea that members should not be swayed by their distaste for militant actions. The debate that followed was inconclusive, and the bill was "talked out" without a vote being taken.

Although the Mud March brought little by way of immediate progress on the parliamentary front, its significance in the general suffrage campaign was considerable. By embracing activism the constitutionalists' tactics become closer to those of the WSPU, at least in relation to the latter's non-violent activities. The failure of Dickinson's bill brought about a further change in the NUWSS's strategy; it began to intervene directly in by-elections, on behalf of the candidate of any party who would publicly support women's suffrage. In 1907 the NUWSS supported the Conservatives in Hexham and Labour in Jarrow; where no suitable candidate was available they used the by-election to propagandise. This tactic met with sufficient success for the NUWSS to resolve that it would fight in all future by-elections.

In her account of the suffrage campaign of 1907–1914, Lisa Tickner observes: "The Mud March, modest and uncertain as it was by subsequent standards, established the precedent of large-scale processions, carefully ordered and publicised". The march contradicted the images in the public mind, popularised in parts of the press, of suffrage campaigners as strident, hysterical, fanatical women, and showed "that all sorts and conditions of women wanted the vote". According to Tickner, this social mix was a foretaste of the effect the suffrage movement would have on the future interactions between classes in society.

Katharine Frye's verdict on the 1907 Mud March and its immediate aftermath was one of mixed emotions:

It was altogether a wonderful and memorable afternoon – and felt we were making history – but after all I don't know, I am sure, what will come of it. The MPs seem to have cheated and thoroughly "had" us all over it. They wanted the Liberal Women's help to get into the House and now they don't care two straws or they are frightened of us.

In the years following, the NUWSS continued its programme of peaceful demonstrations in London and provincial cities; on 13 June 1908 more than 10,000 women took part in a London march. In the "Great Pilgrimage" of April 1913, women marched from all over the country to London for a mass rally in Hyde Park, where 50,000 attended. Their struggles were rewarded after the First World War, when women were partly enfranchised by the Representation of the People Act 1918 which granted the vote to women over 30; full enfranchisement of all women over 21 came ten years later, with the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act of 1928. The Mud March of 1907 is featured in the Dearsley stained-glass window No. 4, installed in St Stephen's Hall in 2002 as a memorial to the long and ultimately successful campaign for women's suffrage.

References

Sources

Books

• Abrams, Fran (2003). Freedom's Cause: Lives of the Suffragettes. London: Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-86197-425-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Crawford, Elizabeth (2003). The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928. London: UCL Press. ISBN 978-1-135-43402-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Crawford, Elizabeth (ed.) (2013). Campaigning for the vote: Kate Parry Frye's suffrage diary. London: Francis Boutle Publishers. ISBN 978-1-903-42775-0. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Fara, Patricia (2018). A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19879-498-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (1925). What I Remember. New York: Putnam. OCLC 917605074. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Foot, Paul (2012). The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined. London: Bookmark Publications. ISBN 978-1-909-02600-1. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hill, Leslie (2002). "Suffragettes Invented Performance Art". In de Gay, Jane; Goodman, Lizabeth (eds.). The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. London: Routledge. pp. 150–156. ISBN 978-1-134-68666-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hume, Leslie (2016). The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies 1897–1914. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-31721-327-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pankhurst, Sylvia (1911). The Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement. New York: Sturgis & Walton Company. OCLC 66118841. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pugh, Martin (2000). The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women's Suffrage, 1866–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820775-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Smith, Harold L. (2014). The British Women's Suffrage Campaign 1866-1928: Revised 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-86225-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Tickner, Lisa (1988). The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-22680-245-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Newspapers and journals

• "Enfranchisement of Women: The Bill "Talked Out"". The Manchester Guardian. 9 March 1907. p. 9. Retrieved 4 March 2018. (subscription required)
• Gardener, Deborah S (December 1989). "Review: The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 by Lisa Tickner". The Art Bulletin. 71 (4): 702. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• "Lady Day". The Observer. 10 February 1907. p. 6.
• "The Attack on Man's Supremacy". The Sphere: 138. 16 February 1907.
• "The Women's March". The Daily Mirror. 11 February 1907. p. 4.
• "The Women's March". The Daily News. 11 February 1907. p. 6.
• "Untitled". The Manchester Guardian. 11 February 1907. p. 6.
• "Women's Suffrage Demonstration". The Times. 11 February 1907. p. 11.
• "Women's Suffrage Bill: Opinion of Labour Members". The Manchester Guardian. 28 February 1907. p. 7. Retrieved 4 March 2018. (subscription required)
• "Women's Suffrage: Text of Mr Dickinson's Bill". The Manchester Guardian. 27 February 1907. p. 7. Retrieved 4 March 2018. (subscription required)