Tag: laughadefiance

 

My great-great-great aunt Hilda Burkitt was a militant member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. In the seven years she spent involved in the WSPU’s campaign, Hilda was caught up in a steadily increasing whirlwind of activity – selling newspapers, organising, speaking, and finally arson. She was the first of the first suffragettes to be forcibly fed at Winson Green in Birmingham. She was a co-perpetrator, five years later, of ‘one of the most spectacular fires to be attributed to the suffragettes’. (1) This arson attack was also one of the last. Indeed, Burkitt was one of the last women to be released from prison, and thus one of the last to be forcibly fed. Her militant career possesses an eery symmetry – she was there until the bitter end.

Hilda is mentioned once in Sylvia Pankhurst’s and once in Christabel’s respective memoirs of the WSPU movement. (2) She is not mentioned in Emmeline Pankhurst’s at all. Indeed, Mrs Pankhurst, either purposefully, with poetic license, or unintentionally, designated Mary Leigh as the first suffragette to be forcibly fed. (3) This myth has echoed through the historiography. Yet Mary Leigh was on remand and did not set foot in Winson Green Prison until the day after the prison doctors began to forcibly feed Hilda. After being released from Winson Green, Hilda gave a number of talks to different WSPU branches about her time in prison and was marketed as ‘the first suffragette to be forcibly fed’. She included it in her own mini autobiography in the Suffrage Who’s Who of 1913. (4) It was included in her obituary in 1955, likely written by a close family member for the local newspaper.

Why then, has Hilda Burkitt been mentioned so little?

It is not surprising. Much of the current historiography on the WSPU has been drawn from sources that were carefully curated by the Union themselves, after the campaign was finished. In these sources, Burkitt also only features occasionally. As Mayhall and Riddell have observed, a sanitised ‘Suffragette Spirit’ was created, one which carefully swept the ash of burnt buildings and postboxes under the rug. (5) In the words of Edith Mansell-Moullin in a letter to Edith Howe-Martin discussing a potential memoir of Emily Wilding Davison, should she ‘leave out the bombs?’ In her study of the forgotten suffragette Kitty Marion, Fern Riddell points out how Marion was one of many ‘extreme’ militants, ‘yet we know so little about them. They have been erased from the record, deleted by a process of PR and simplified storytelling’. (6)

Burkitt had been a prolific organiser and was frequently mentioned in the regional listings of the WSPU newspapers (Votes for Women and subsequently The Suffragette), either giving meetings or reporting from areas she held temporary responsibility for. She was paid by the WSPU for her services from 1909. In 1913, living in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, she arranged jumble sales, put on plays and coordinated newspaper sellers in unpleasant weather. She was one of many rank-and-file members who devoted their lives to the cause, and yet these women have also been forgotten. Those who were not included in the suffragette iconography, whose pictures were not sold on postcards to adoring followers, who did not publish autobiographies, have missed the attention of many modern historians. As Jill Liddington has termed it, with ‘celebrity suffrage’, there is a historiographical bias towards well-known figures in the WSPU hierarchy. (7) Whilst Hilda’s contribution has been acknowledged in the extensive research into lesser-known suffragettes conducted by Elizabeth Crawford, the details of her militant career are only now coming to light. (8) Nicola Gauld’s local study into the wider suffrage campaign in Birmingham and the West Midlands has also brought Hilda to the centre stage. (9)

With 100 years since the granting of the vote to the first swathes of women in 1918, interest in the WSPU has boomed. Sources that have previously remained slightly inaccessible have been digitised. (10) The 100 year rule that has classified documentation about individual suffragettes, such as the medical records of their forcible feeding, has lifted. Contemporary historians are in a unique position to expand to a more comprehensive pool of previously unavailable source material.

As Morley and Stanley comment in their work on Emily Wilding Davison, an important facet of reconstructing a subject’s biography is the process of researching the individual, drawing sources together from various archives and libraries. One must ‘assess “the evidence” by assembling it into different patterns, to try and make connections, to look out for and see (sometimes without really knowing what it was that we were looking for) new evidence, new leads’. (11)

Yet Emily Wilding Davison is by no means a forgotten suffragette – she has, inadvertently, become one of the modern-day suffragette memories, alongside women chaining themselves to railings. Much of ‘her archive’ is collected together, in specific places. Autobiographical writing and letters remain for the historian to consider. Hilda Burkitt, however, is scattered through contemporary documents. The only ‘archive’ of her, explicitly, is the dossier kept on her by the Home Office, which includes the daily reports of her three and a half month prison time and forcible feeding in 1914, and snippets of her previous actions (12). Finding her has proven a challenge. The jigsaw pieces of her career have not come in a box at all, they have had to be found first.

Of course, ‘Hilda Burkitt the suffragette’ will be in many ways a creation, a particular assembly of facts gleaned from archival and historical records. However, her voice can be found in primary source material. Her most strident, and historically most poignant, words come from the hand-written petitions she submitted to the Home Office from her prison cells. In her first, she states that she is ‘willing to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex’. Her statements in trials project the image of a fierce and determined suffragette, one who demands ‘liberty or death’ from the government. Equally, the brief reports that she wrote from organising positions reveal a self-assured and confident manner.

Hilda Burkitt’s archive is also a family one. I have had the opportunity to connect with distant family members who have inherited, through Hilda’s sister, more personal material. She also appears in my own, paternal grandfather’s archive. Hilda’s face smiles out of a number of candid, relaxed photographs. She sits with a rose on a postcard she sent to my great-great-grandmother, with measurements for a dress. She smiles with her nephew and niece at the seaside. She poses regally in a large elaborate hat.

Finding Hilda has been a slow, at times laborious, at times incredibly exciting detective puzzle. Combing local newspapers, suffragette newspapers and contemporary records has yielded so much and there is still so much yet to trawl. Whilst she will always be my great-great-great aunt, she is also a significant figure in a fractious and violent political movement. Her biography provides a lens through which to view a variety of sides of the WSPU. She also remains a fascinating character – a single, independent woman who supported herself financially and was part of an explosive and brutal early feminism.

Sources
1 – Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (London: Routledge, 2008) 87.
2 – E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement – An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals.
– Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of how We Won the Vote.
3 – Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (London: Hesperus Press, 2015) 146
4 – Various, The Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who (London: Hanley Paul & co., 1913).
5 – Laura Nym Mayhall, “Creating the ‘suffragette spirit’: British feminism and the historical imagination”, Women’s History Review Vol. 4 Issue 3: 1995.
6 – Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018) 298-299.
7 – Jill Liddington, Rebel Girls (London: Little, Brown, 2006).
8 – Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (London: Routledge, 2003) 87-88.
9 – Nicola Gauld, Deeds Not Words (Birmingham: History West Midlands, 2018).
10 – See The British Newspaper Archive and The Suffragette Collection on Find My Past  
11 – Ann Morley with Liz Stanley, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1988) 69.
12 – The National Archives, HO 144/1205/222030.