LYNDSEY JENKINS
Biteback Publishing, 2015, 282 pages
When Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton was arrested, and went on
prison hunger-strike, in 1909, for demanding women’s right to vote, she was, to
prevent an embarrassing political fuss, released early so as to avoid one of
Britain’s best-connected aristocrats being subjected to the government’s policy
of force-feeding hunger-striking suffragettes.
When arrested again, but this time disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a poor,
unglamorous nobody, Lytton was treated exactly as were the rest of the
nameless, powerless, force-fed suffragette prisoners.
Lytton, says Lyndsey Jenkins in her biography of the rebel
aristocrat, was having none of the government’s class-based double
standards. She was a defector from her
class. By her own admission, she was one
of those privileged women of social status who lived ‘futile, superficial,
sordidly useless lives’, resigned to an uneventful life of routine domesticity
and tedious social rounds but who was quietly seething with frustration at the
hollowness of it all.
With the women’s suffrage campaign, however, Lytton connected
her personal dissatisfactions with the broader oppression of women and became politically
radicalised. At age 40 and with a sense
of purpose at last, Lytton discovered the world of political protest. The shy, awkward wallflower became
petition-taker, pamphleteer, public speaker, organiser and stone-thrower. The latter, and the arrests it deliberately courted,
was a tactic of the militant suffragettes in Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to dramatise women’s political exclusion
by ‘making Britain ungovernable’.
Although the WSPU had dismissed working class women as
agents of change and concentrated instead on the leisured class of women with wealth,
power and connections, Lytton (the WSPU’s biggest recruit, offering “celebrity
brand endorsement”) never lost sight of labouring women who, she said, ‘needed
a political voice much more than did women of my class’.
Although the autocratic and conservative Pankhursts had remained
permanently imprinted on a loyal Lytton since the moment of her political
awakening, she supported many of their dissident former colleagues, including
the youngest Pankhurst, and socialist, Sylvia.
When the WSPU suspended their suffrage campaign and fell into patriotic
line during World War 1, Lytton supported conscientious objectors and sent
money to German civilians in hardship.
Jenkins argues that the restricted female franchise (for
women over thirty and university graduates) which was granted in 1918 was the
result of the WSPU’s commitment to the war effort (recruiting, nursing, arms–making)
proving that women were ‘worthy of citizenship’. It is likely, however, that the voting reform
had more to do with the government not wanting to rekindle an old war at home
over women’s suffrage. The winning of
the women’s vote on the same terms as men eventually came in 1928 but not
before Lytton, never a healthy person, died in 1923, barely a decade after, and
hastened by, her torture by force-feeding.
Jenkins is prone to celebrating “heroic individuals”, thus reinforcing
the already elevated role of the privileged class rebel, but, as Jenkins also
notes, Lytton’s personal transformation, including her dramatic individual experiment
in class inequality, was also part of a broader political and social
transformation for women beyond just equality at the ballot-box.
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