vote100 – Laugh a Defiance

14th December 2018

December 14, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

There’s something strange about centenaries, anniversaries, ‘#onthisday’s. It feels arbitrary and yet, there is something about the temporal closeness that makes them feel a little more significant than usual. Today, 100 years ago, the first wave of women were able to vote alongside men. Not all women, of course – it would be 10 years until that milestone was reached. But nevertheless, 100 years ago today, Hilda Burkitt would have woken up, gone about her morning business and then, at some point, did what she had given 7 years of her mind, body and soul to gain the right to do.

I can’t imagine how it must have felt as she walked into the polling booth, filled out her ballot and left, having exercised her newly gained democratic right. Only four and a half years previously, she had spent three and a half months in prison, a tube down her throat three or four times a day as she maintained a continuous, unfaltering hunger strike. She had broken into empty buildings and left them in flames, she had broken windows, in- and outside of prison, all while shouting, screaming or leaving in written form “Votes for Women!”

She had also spent days, months, years really, patrolling the streets of Midlands towns and cities, spreading the word for the cause she held so dear. Newspapers in one hand, she climbed up onto chairs or boxes and took a breath before regaling the sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, sometimes both, crowds of the need for the female vote.

An admittedly infrequent, but still common, response to the commemoration of any suffragette or the WSPU usually invites a number of prickly responses:

But what about the suffraGISTs?

We should remember the suffragists, and many historians have been doing very valuable work into the many alternate forms of suffrage activism and how they overlapped with each other. History does not need to be a competition for attention. Commemorate more women! Commemorate them all!

The suffragettes actually harmed the suffrage movement’s efforts!

I tend to shy away from assessment of (in-)efficacy – is it even really relevant now? The suffragettes did what they did, forming their own microcosm of deeds and words, and that is something that is very interesting.

They were what we would call terrorists now!

Indeed. They were what one might call terrorists then. Indeed, in a 1913 editorial by Christabel Pankhurst in The Suffragette, she even uses the verb.

“Very obvious are the replies to these two points. In the first place, the Suffragettes not only “think”, they know that Parliament can be terrorised into granting reform. They also know that Parliament never grants reform unless it is terrorised. The men terrorised Parliament into giving them the Vote. The Catholics terrorised Parliament into giving them emancipation. The Nationalists (by their votes in the House of Commons) are terrorising Parliament into proceeding with the Home Rule Bill.
Terrorism is, in fact, the only argument that Parliament understands!
– 27 June 1913

It is of course, very reductive to employ that ‘terrorism’ as we understand it now is the same as ‘terrorism’ as utilised in 1913. However, there is a case to be made for the fact that the WSPU was an early form of ‘reform terrorism’ in terms of rhetoric and action.(*) . The fact that the only life lost came from their number does not absolve them of some at times very dubious deeds. However, History is full of flawed, dubious ethics. That’s what makes it so interesting. Terrorists or no, the WSPU are a fascinating entity, and much of the history of this particular union and its membership remains to be explored.

I am of course, biased in my interest in Hilda Burkitt, and will always seek to justify it. Even if sometimes our relation to each other seems far too distant to be anything but nominal, I still feel a connection to her – especially when I catch a glimpse of my mother next to her photograph and see traces of similar facial features, when I see my grandfather in photographs of Hilda’s brother. Similar interests have made their way down the family tree; both the past and present lots have talented saxophonists, accomplished long-distance runners, love for textile arts amongst them. When I saw the photograph of Hilda sitting in the garden for the first time I was taken aback; she poses with a cat on her lap and a Jack Russell at her feet, the same two types of pet that have been part of my family since my early teens.

But regardless, Hilda is fascinating as a historical actor, and I will think about her and her cause a lot today. Her actions went beyond the pale, but then so did those of the government who force-fed her, the crowds who mauled her, the Press who defamed her. Her story is complex, her doings even more so – all the more reason to try and piece it back together, as should be the case for the many other figures across the suffrage movement, whether militant, semi-militant or not militant at all.

The vote was not the final victory – 1918 wasn’t even a full victory. As time has passed, old issues have persisted, new ones have arisen. The fight goes on. But today, and in the future, we can at least take the stories of the suffragettes and draw something from them. Hilda’s shows us that courage, persistence and commitment exist in many forms, usually not entirely morally faultless. If anything, she reminds us, as does the WSPU anthem The March of the Women, that ‘naught can ye win but by faith and daring!’

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(*) See The Transfiguring Sword – Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp

27/11/18: Suffragette Rhetoric

November 27, 2018November 27, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

As part of their Suffragette Stories project, the University of East Anglia has been digitising items from the Annie Kenney archive. I was struck by this letter to Annie by Constance Lytton, written as it emerged that WSPU prisoners, including Hilda Burkitt, were being forcibly fed.

Whilst Lytton describes it as ‘harrowing’, adding that the Mrs Pankhurst and Lawrence ‘are both ill with it’, she ends with a statement that neatly encapsulates contemporary suffragette rhetoric.

“But as soon as the public realise it and the ‘laughter’ it has caused in the House, it will, as usual, move on the tide immensely. These heroic women will be only too glad, one knows they are only proud to have been pioneers in this receiving of the Government’s new violence.”

As WSPU militancy escalated, the movement developed a rhetoric that allowed the members to justify their actions through asserting themselves as “just warriors”, part of a wider, unstoppable force that would secure the emancipation of women. (1) The ‘tide’ of women’s liberation was a frequent image in suffragette propaganda. Similarly, the women were ‘heroines’ in the tradition of historic militants such as Joan of Arc. In the letter above, Lytton draws on both iconographical elements. The idea of the women in Winson Green taking pride in the medical abuse they suffered is slightly jarring, but it is not surprising. Imprisonment, hunger-strike and forcible feeding would later become emblematic of the Suffragette’s tortured martyrdom for the Cause.

But what of the women inside Winson Green? Outside, Lytton could muse to Kenney, Votes for Women could run on their front page that ‘these women deserve well of womanhood and of the country of their birth; they are setting up a standard of heroism which will be remembered and honoured so long as the annals of human society are preserved’. [Votes for Women, 01/10/09] But how did the women inside Winson Green express themselves? What did they think about it?

In 1914, Hilda Burkitt’s closing speech at her and Florence Tunks’s trial for arson is deeply imbued with the suffragette rhetoric that had evolved from that mentioned above.

“Whatever sentence you impose I shall not serve, because I have made up my mind that I will not take any food or drink while I am in prison. I cannot stand the torture of the feeding for a great length of time, flesh and blood can’t stand it; and if Mr McKenna does not release me I shall die in prison, in which I case I shall then be the victor, because I shall not have served the sentence. You can give me liberty or death.”
[The Suffragette, 05/06/1914]

I had always naively assumed that Hilda’s political statements would have become more ‘extreme’ as the movement progressed. 1909 Burkitt as opposed to 1914’s fully-fledged arsonist and prison veteran seemed quieter, more subdued. I was wrong to assume this.

[excerpt of hand-written petition submitted to Home Office in 1909]

Hilda, in 1909, left no uncertainty around her intent as she declared hunger-strike in a hand-written petition.

‘so, will you reply to my Petition at once, as if I should [succumb crossed out] die through my fasting my death will lie at your door, but I am ready to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex.
Evelyn Hilda Burkitt.
Women’s Social and Political Union.
[HO 45/10418/183577]

What always strikes me about this document is the trace of Hilda’s thought-process as she wrote, crossing-out the more euphemistic, weaker ‘succumb’ for the far clearer ‘die’. Her self-portrayal as a willing martyr for the Cause makes her seem very much one of the ‘heroic’ ‘pioneers’ that Lytton related to Kenney from outside Winson Green. This self-representation would continue throughout her career. She would also draw on her ‘credibility’ as the first suffragette to be forcibly fed to draw people to drawing room and street meetings. She wore her ‘prison badge’, and likely the hunger-strike medal, presented to her by Christabel Pankhurst at Birmingham Town Hall in November 1909, with pride.

Reuben 1907.jpg — Photograph of Reuben Burkitt in 1907, taken by his daughter Lillian Burkitt.

These sources show Hilda Burkitt as she wished to present herself to hostile onlookers and the government. She states her political motives clearly, she is committed to the death. However, Hilda also used similar language in communication with her family. In 1914, she wrote to her father from prison to inform him of her arrest. As she was trying to keep her identity secret from the police, the letter is vague, and sent via her brother-in-law Fred. However Hilda also states that she was

‘not taking food or water, what will be the result I do not know. I am quite prepared to give my life if need be, but I suppose McKenna will desire that’.
[HO 144/1205/22030]

Of course, Hilda was obviously aware that the letter would be read, and could have been using this as a further outlet of political self-expression. That said, she obviously did not mind her father reading it after receiving it unexpectedly.

Reuben Burkitt was also present in 1909. As the facts of forcible feeding emerged, he wrote to Keir Hardie. Hardie secured him a Home Office permit to visit Hilda in Winson Green, ending his reply hoping Reuben ‘will find your daughter bearing up bravely’. As he left the prison, Reuben was interviewed by a local journalist and described how Hilda had related the entire process to him, including rough handling by doctors. She had asserted its illegality. Sounding slightly resigned, he is apparently quoted as saying ‘ “She is more reconciled now, although she evidently seems to have given more trouble to the officials than all the other Suffragists.” ‘ Burkitt was, according to the Birmingham Daily Gazette ‘in favour of the Parliamentary franchise being given to women […] but he regrets the militant movement in its present form.’ [Birmingham Daily Gazette, 11/10/09]

Reuben was also present, a week later, after Hilda’s release as she gave an interview to the Birmingham correspondent for the London Daily News. She spoke lying on a couch in her home in Sparkbrook. Her father related that she had just been examined by a doctor and her heart was weak. Hilda described how inside prison, the suffragettes were able to ‘cheer one another up by their “tattoo.” “We call our battle-cry our tattoo, you know – ” “Are we down-hearted? No surrender” Miss Burkitt explained’. She also stated that ‘she still justified violence as the only method of agitation open to the Suffragists’. [London Daily News, 18/10/09]

This web of source material is of course limited; it merely provides snapshots of particular moments and statements. However, throughout, we can see echoes of the same images and rhetorical devices that would shape WSPU self-representation. What is more, we see how the suffragettes used this imagery in their own communications to each other, either by letter as with Lytton and Kenney, or through prison cell walls. In the case of Hilda Burkitt, this was extended to their own family, as her father witnessed, either first-hand or by letter, his daughter’s hunger strikes.

Additional sources

1 – Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Womens Social and Political Union (University of Alabama Press, 1997).
See also: Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women (University of Chicago Press, 1988).

The Face of Suffrage

November 15, 2018November 15, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

Whenever the train pulls in or out of New Street station, I can’t help but think of Hilda. I imagine the adrenaline that pushed her through the hordes of people congregated to wave off their Prime Minister’s train. How did it feel, the moment her hand closed around the stone in her pocket before she sent it flying through the air? ‘Votes for Women!’, the sound of shattering glass, then the angry crowd descends. Three days later, she is being restrained in a hospital kitchen, having stared the government down as she wrote her petition from her prison cell. If they did not recognise the political motive behind her actions, she would hunger strike, and ‘if I should die through my fasting, my death will lie at your door, but I am ready to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex’.

Today, as I left New Street, I wasn’t the only person thinking of Hilda Burkitt. Her face is currently emblazoned across the concourse floor, 200 square metres huge. The portrait, that has always been my main mental image of her, has been reproduced out of thousands of crowd-sourced pictures of women and girls, past and present. Thousands of people will pass her for the next four weeks. As they stop to check for their train, they will see her half-smile between the departure screens.

[The departure screens in New St Station. In between them is a banner with a photograph of Hilda Burkitt.]

Trite as it is, I don’t have the words for the feeling as I travelled up the escalator to see the installation from above. Gradually the individual faces blurred, and Hilda appeared. Hilda, aged 25, the same age as me now. Hilda before it all began. She looks gently at her sister, who was behind the camera. Over a century later, I now read a look of coy knowing into her expression. ‘You don’t know the half of it’.

People asked what Hilda would have thought. I don’t know. Perhaps she would have blanched, hated the limelight cast on what turned into a traumatic chain of suffering. Perhaps she would have been delighted. All we have is her calm, fixed stare looking back at us. I would like to think that Hilda Burkitt the Suffragette, charging across New St Station with such firm literal and figurative aim, might see the funny side to the stage of her ‘outrage’ becoming a site for her commemoration.

My mother and I stood for a second in awe, and watched as people beneath moved slowly across, looking for themselves in the mass of faces. Later, we joined them. Pausing to point out Hilda’s father, brother and grandfather, her sisters, her nieces and nephews and the great times however many ones that came after. I submitted a photograph taken on my first day of university. I felt it was fitting, given all that the women’s movement has done and will do to break down the doors of institutions that previously remained firmly closed.

The crowds of New St no longer look at Hilda with hostility, but with curiosity and interest. She could never have known, when she posed for that portrait so long ago, that this would be where it would end up. That her face would gaze out from the faces of so many others. That she would, as artist Helen Marshall described it, be part of ‘the coming together of women past and present […] a bridge to express their story.’

Finding Hilda Burkitt

November 13, 2018November 14, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

Hilda 1905 (contrast edited).jpg — Hilda Burkitt, sitting at her elder sister’s photography studio in 1905. [Overexposed black and white portrait of a 29 year old woman, she wears white, a pearl necklace and holds a rose. She looks away from the camera.]

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.

Hilda Burkitt in 1901. Image credit [Black and white portrait of 25 year old woman. She is wearing a white blouse, a large hat and a chain necklace. She smiles slightly at the camera]

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.