Militants
Jill Craigie
Separate Spheres Brian Harrison (Groom Helm £9.95) Women in British Trade Unions 1874-1976 Norbert C. Soldon (Gill and Macmillan; Rowman and Littlefield £12) When Virginia Woolf suggested that the history of men's opposition to women's emancipation might make a more amusing book than the story of that emancipation itself, she warned the student who might collect examples and deduce a theory that 'she would need thick gloves on her hands and bars to protect her of solid gold'. The story has now been told, not by a female student but by the well-respected historian Brian Harrison, and he has brought to the subject such a wealth of fresh material and so conscientious an attempt at objectivity that it is not he who stands in need of protection, but rather those who may presume to challenge a few of his assumptions.
He shows how the main body of strength on opposition to votes for women — the antis, as they were called — lay in the country houses, London clubs and on the old-boy network. Leading antis included such illustrious names as Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, John Bright, Labouchere and, once the antis were organised, the Lords Curzon and Cromer, Austin Chamberlain, F.E. Smith, Rudyard Kipling, Elgar, Winston Churchill and, of course, Asquith. Not that men only opposed woman suffrage. Women themselves, including some of the leading intellects of the day, were either hostile or indifferent to the cause. Suffragists regarded the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward as their most formidable opponent.
Sensible antis, if that is not a contradition in terms, considered women to be neither inferior nor superior to men but complementary, belonging to separate spheres. Consequently, arguments often turned on the supposed intellectual and psychological differences between the sexes. Harrison himself risks a strange assertion. He claims that there is, indeed, on scientific evidence, a difference in brain structure between the sexes and that therefore: 'The qualities — spatial and musical — in which men excel are apparently related to the efficiency of the right cerebral hemisphere, whereas the verbal qualities in which women excel are apparently related to the efficiency of the left cerebral hemisphere.' If this is not a phrenological fantasy, one of our leading composers, Elizabeth Lutyens, and one of our leading orators, Enoch Powell, must be freaks of nature.
Central to the theme of Separate Spheres is the contention that Asquith, so far from blotting the Liberal record by opposing women's enfranchisement, acted wisely. Harrison gives four main reasons for the supposition: suffragette violence retarded the cause, Asquith's opposition to woman suffrage rested on the consent of the silent majority, he had to keep his government intact and, above all, he wanted a more far-reaching democratic constitutional reform. But for nearly eighteen months during 1910 and 1911, rather than give the government an excuse for blocking the women's Conciliations Bills, which had passed their Second Readings with huge majorities, the suffragettes called a truce from militancy. Moreover, if politicians were not more responsible to pressure than to the supposed will of the silent majority, unpopular measures such as the abolition of capital punishment would not become law.
Although usually masked by the rule of collective responsibility, all governments are split on numerous issues, but Ministers do not resign lightly. Not that a resignation is necessarily disastrous, as often as not, one may come as a relief to the leader. In the case of Asquith, with two thirds of his Cabinet in favour of granting a limited number of women the vote, plus the majority of backbenchers, a majority of district and borough councils, the entire Liberal press and, not least, the Women's Liberal Federation, on whom the party depended for election work, he had everything to gain by allowing a woman's franchise Bill to pass through all its stages in the Commons. Nor did Asquith object in 1917, unlike other speakers in the debates, to the undemocratic enfranchisement of women only of thirty years old and over. Finally, Asquith himself had the grace to admit, on more than one occasion, that on the suffrage issue he had been mistaken.
One further puzzling question, and,' trust, not too impertinent a question: Is high scholarship imcompatible with a sense of humour? If the suffragette campaign was in itself a tragi-comedy, the postures taken up by Members of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage provide rich material for satire. 'Women must fight a women's movement,' one female anti declared, believing, at the same time, that the feminine role was essentially one to be performed in the background, out of the main hurly-burly of politics. Male antis would mount the platform and hold forth on the shortcomings of the opposite sex in such a way as to cause the utmost offence to female antis, thus creating the impression that the League was actually anti-woman an effective way, it would seem, of driving a female audience straight into the arms of Mrs Pankhurst. 'I am physically incapable of doing eternal battle to all these ram
paging women' Cromer lamented. 'With her ideas on the way to treat the male sex, Miss Lewis ought really to be a suffragist; it is a mere accident that she has drifted into our camp.' Surely Cromer and Miss Lewis are figures of fun, but Harrison chooses, deliberately it seems, to take their arguments seriously and thereby achieves the improbable feat of giving rational explanations for what was, in essence, an irrational prejudice. All the same, his account of a hitherto neglected aspect of the women's movement cannot fail to take its place among standard works on the subject.
The same can be said of Women in British Trade Unions 1874-1976 by Norbert C. Soldon. This is the first attempt to bring right up to date the long struggle fought by women, not only against employers but also the TUC to improve their working conditions. If only trade unions would call themselves, like pop groups, by more simple and vivid names. Trying to remember which organisations the various alphabetical permutations, such as the WTUA and the WTUPL, represent, to mention no more than two examples, sometimes present the reader with a puzzle akin to that of a game of scrabble.
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