MISS MURIEL MATTERS
ROBERT WAINWRIGHT
ABC Books, 2017, 376 pages
ABC Books, 2017, 376 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
In 1909, Miss Muriel Matters
planned to rain on the parade of King Edward V11 to the ceremonial opening of
parliament by dropping a shower of ‘Votes for Women’ leaflets on his head from
a chartered airship balloon trailing streamers in the white, gold and green of
the Women’s Freedom League (WFL).
As Robert Wainwright notes in
his biography of Matters, the Australian-born women’s suffrage activist, fickle
winds foiled the plan but, with megaphone in hand, Matters found her vocal mark
and got the message across loud and clear to the crowned dunce who had referred
to suffragists as ‘those dreadful women’.
Police had banned leafleting on
the streets, so the WFL had naturally taken to the skies. It was a typically imaginative leap that
characterised the WFL’s campaigning style.
The year before, Matters had delivered the first speech by a woman in
the British House of Commons after dramatically chaining herself to the metal
grille which kept the ‘Ladies Gallery’ observers separate from the political
menfolk (women could neither stand for election nor vote in Britain) at work on
the floor of the chamber.
The Honourable Member for
Holborn, a Mr James Remnant (the delightfully-named representative of a dying era
of male-only suffrage), was stopped mid-drone by Matters as her clarion call to
‘give women a voice in legislation which affects them as much as it affects
men’ rose above the angry tumult below, forcing the closure of parliament and
the removal of the hated grille, with Matters locked to it, as the only way to
stop her voice.
Born in Adelaide, Matters,
when aged 14, was given a copy of Henryk Ibsen’s proto-feminist play, The Doll’s House, whose heroine, Nora, leaves
her husband and children to discover her independence outside home and family. Matters often used Nora’s passages in her captivating
public recitations along with such fare as “the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth
Browning or marathon odes set to music by Richard Strauss”.
Like Nora, Matters insisted on
making her own life choices, often against her father’s will - she took up
acting, and scuppered her first romance to an Adelaide music celebrity when his
views on women turned out to be unenlightened.
In London, Matters became the
darling of the leisured class with invitations to shooting weekends on country
estates. But what was it all for, she asked herself, after a
searching encounter with the exiled Russian anarcho-communist, Peter
Kropotkin. When she looked behind “the
applause and the bouquets of Covent Garden … and the salons of Bloomsbury”, she
saw a city of women in poverty and deprived of equality. She had to choose – the salon or the slum,
wealthy women or working women.
Matters chose the reform of
society rather than to perform to ‘society’.
She would use her vocal talents on behalf of the voteless by campaigning
for women’s suffrage as a first step towards broader social reforms that
benefited women, including working conditions, housing, health, education,
prison reform and equality in marriage. Matters
was determined to make Britain follow the suffrage path blazed by New Zealand
and Australian women in the 1890s for the democratic right to make the laws
which governed their lives.
Her chosen vehicle, the WFL, stood
somewhere between the militant suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political
Union (WSPU) and the moderate suffragists of the National Union of Women’s
Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). The left-wing
WFL also went beyond the middle class WSPU and NUWSS by seeing women’s suffrage
as a means to wider rights and equality for all women, including working women
- “it was a feminist, not just a suffrage, movement”, says Wainwright.
What the smaller WFL lacked in
members and money, however, it made up for with creative stunts, and the
fearlessness of its leading activists like Matters who toured the country by
horse and cart, organising, recruiting and fund-raising, and facing down, with
wit and composure, the leering hecklers and violent yobs with their arsenal of
eggs, flour, tomatoes and stink bombs.
Their biggest obstacle,
however, was the Liberal government of Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, a man
of primitive sexist prejudice (women were ‘hopelessly ignorant of politics’, ‘flickering
with gusts of sentiment’, he said) but also coldly calculating that his party, wedged
between wealth (and its party – the Conservatives) and the working class (and its
party - Labour), would lose the votes of enfranchised women to both.
It took post-world-war political
expediency to act as the catalyst for change. Forty per cent of British men were still disenfranchised
by property restrictions. This included
most of the soldiers on the hellish WW1 battlefields. All political parties had electoral skin in
the militarist game of khaki patriotism and they competed to reward working
class men for their service to empire by giving them the vote. As the men would, however, favour Labour, it
was necessary to enfranchise only the ‘right’ (middle and upper class) kind of
women as a counterbalance.
Property, wealth, age and educational
restrictions were the class strings attached to the partial women’s suffrage
law of 1918 which enfranchised only a quarter of British women. Nevertheless, the suffrage levee had been
breached and the right to vote spread to all British women over the next decade.
Matters died in 1969, aged 92,
having put in many solid decades of bread-and-butter, left-wing, feminist
activism, some as a Labour Party candidate, but it was those early toppings (the
first woman to make a speech in the British parliament, and the world’s first aerial
protest) that were memorable – and justly historic.
