When
Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were sent to prison in 1905 after interrupting
a Liberal politicians’ meeting in Manchester, one of the victories they claimed
was that for the first time in years the press had taken notice of the women’s suffrage
movement. The point of the protest – and of much of the militancy over the next
few years – was to get noticed, and according to Christabel Pankhurst, it
worked. She and Annie “had certainly broken the Press silence on votes for
women.”[1]
She also
referred to stories that pressmen actually got together and agreed amongst
themselves that they would ignore women’s suffrage, adding that these “rumours
were false or else the agreements broke down”.[2] But after 1905 she said,
referring to a meeting she and her mother had had with the representative of an
unidentified newspaper, “Never again was the cause ignored by that or any other
newspaper”. Mrs Pankhurst reiterated in 1909 that the WSPU had “broken down the
press boycott”.[3]
In
1909 Frederick Pethick Lawrence wrote an article in Votes for Women
entitled 'Is There a Press Boycott of Woman Suffrage?'[4] He concluded that there
was no boycott in the London Press, and he challenged the rumour that editors
and owners deliberately sought to sabotage the suffrage movement. Oddly, given
the WSPU line that militancy was intended to gain attention, he then claimed
that the issue was not that there was a boycott, but that the press preferred
militancy to meetings. Militancy sold newspapers; reports of speeches did not,
with the result that people were given the impression that militancy was all
that the suffragettes did. Even the London press, he complained, ignored the
“educational side” of the WSPU’s work. It was a somewhat disingenuous protest,
but having made it, there was a clear solution: anyone who wanted to know the
facts should buy the WSPU newspaper, Votes for Women (The Suffragette
from 1912).
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| Advertising Votes for Women | | |
On
the one hand, then, the issue seemed to be that the press boycott of the
women’s suffrage movement was ended (thanks to militancy), but the press was
not reporting it in an appropriate manner (because of militancy). As if this
was not contradictory enough, the WSPU continued to raise the spectre of the
press boycott throughout the campaign. There were frequent complaints about
unreported meetings, such as the Albert Hall meeting on 23 March 1911 when
Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein addressed an audience of 10,000, which received
very little attention in the press.[5] In addition, newspapers
failed to report the brutal treatment meted out to women at deputations and on
other occasions, and misrepresented what the women had done or said. Worse
still, they refused to publish WSPU letters or statements sent with the aim of
setting the record straight. In 1910, the WSPU was enraged when The Times
would not publish Hertha Ayrton’s
statement about deputations on 18 November (Black Friday) and 22
November, when she had been assaulted by the police.[6]
Mrs
Pankhurst even went so far as to blame the press for the delay in women
obtaining the vote. Had they “taken up our question as they have taken up men’s
questions…the women of this country would have won their Parliamentary vote long
ago”.[7]
So
convinced was the WSPU about the existence of the Press Boycott, they
frequently gave their supporters advice on how to overcome it. “The truth about
the movement,” said Frederick Pethick Lawrence, “was to be found only in Votes
for Women”[8], though the editors of the NUWSS’s Common Cause or the Women’s Freedom
League’s The Vote might have begged to differ. As well as buying the
WSPU newspaper as he suggested, other ways members could help to “circumvent”
the press boycott included finding subscribers or selling the paper in the
street.[9]
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| Selling Votes for Women |
Later
historians have echoed the WSPU’s perception of a boycott, bordering on
conspiracy. Clare Wright states in You Daughters of Freedom that when
Vida Goldstein came to England in 1911, “For months now, the general press had
been maintaining a boycott of any news or information related to suffrage
activities”.[10]
She also suggests that the press boycott was one of the challenges the organisers
of the 1911 Women’s Coronation Procession faced when they were attempting to
publicise the procession: “with the continuing press boycott ruling out
mainstream media coverage, grass-roots PR was the only option”.[11] But was the attitude of
the press any worse in 1911 than it had been previously?
I
was so intrigued by the question that I decided to try and take a closer look
at the press coverage of the militant campaign. But how was I going to identify
press articles about the suffragettes given all the possible search terms I
could use (vote, votes for women, WSPU, Women’s Social and Political Union,
franchise, suffrage…)? In the end I decided to use the search term “Pankhurst”
on the grounds that while it would by no means reveal all the available articles
about the WSPU, it would at least produce some figures I could use for
comparison, especially given that the Pankhurst name was the one most likely to
garner such press coverage as there was. A key word here, too, is available: I
used the British Newspaper Archive which doesn’t, of course, cover every single
local British newspaper published over the period.
Consulting
the British Newspaper Archive then, I used the search term “Pankhurst”,
Publication Place – All, and Publication Title – All. I then extracted results
for the total number of articles by year, excluding advertisements, family
notices and “miscellaneous” articles. I arrived at the total number of articles
by adding together the categories “articles” and “illustrated articles”. I then
subtracted the articles published in the WSPU’s own newspapers, Votes for Women
and The Suffragette. You can see a summary of the figures I came up with below.
PRESS COVERAGE "PANKHURST"
1908 5700
1909 3616
1910 1898
1911 1169
1912 3701
1913 9436
1914* 4008
* To 12 August.
I discovered that there was a dip in the number of articles published in 1911
(and 1910), but of course that doesn’t prove that there was a “boycott”. There
are other explanations. These were years when there was a truce in WSPU militancy
during the negotiations for the Conciliation Bill so, given the press’s predilection
for militancy rather than meetings, there was from the media’s point of view
little to report. This seems plausible given the spike in coverage from 1912,
when militancy was resumed, to the first half of 1914 (which I searched to 12
August 1914, the date that the WSPU ceased to operate as a suffrage
organisation with the suspension of militancy at the start of the First World
War), with a huge leap in 1913 when militancy was at its height. It also seemed
to me that if the press had truly wanted to stifle the women’s campaign, a
boycott during this period would have made most sense by rendering the militant
campaign ineffective. It was, after all, a campaign that thrived on publicity.
There’s
also a drop from 5700 in 1908 to 3616 in 1909. Boycott – or simply that by 1909
some of the novelty had worn off? The WSPU themselves were aware of the need to
constantly introduce new tactics in order to keep the public’s attention. Overall, though, if there was a boycott it wasn't a very effective one as there were articles published in every year between 1908 and 1914.
I
also used the same search term – Pankhurst – to look at coverage in The
Times (which was not sympathetic to the WSPU) and The Guardian
(which was). As I’d expected, The Guardian search produced a
higher total for the period (1187 to The Times’s 813). Both
newspapers show a “dip” in 1911, with The Times search coming up with
only 47 articles. In fact, the pattern of highs and lows seems broadly the same
across the three searches, with 1908 being fairly high, 1909 showing a drop,
the Conciliation Bill years 1910 and 1911 showing a greater drop, and the militant
years 1912-1914 showing a spike, with the maximum coverage in 1913.
You
can see these figures below.
So
was there a press boycott or not? Perhaps it’s not so much a question of quantity
as quality. The issue was not so much that the press ignored the suffrage
movement, though they gave it much less attention than they gave men’s issues,
but that they misrepresented and misreported it. The American suffragist Mary
Winsor visited London in 1913 and 1914 to investigate the militant British suffrage
movement. She concluded that the opposition of the English newspapers was “one
of the greatest obstacles which the suffrage movement has encountered”.[12]
She
found that the insular English press had failed to “grasp the significance and
extent of the [world-wide] woman suffrage movement”. English papers were “men’s
newspapers, got up by men for men, and largely devoted to party politics. The
space given to women’s affairs is meagre, and the general tone towards women is
hasty and contemptuous, or else of a deliberate and unctuous silliness”.
Journalists failed to report major meetings and events, over-emphasised militancy
without explaining the issues that lay behind it, ignored not only the
law-abiding campaign but the “vast constitutional propaganda of the militants
themselves”, failed to report police violence against women protesters,
exaggerated public opposition to the campaign, and “embroidered” accounts of
suffragette violence. Winsor even accused some newspapers of inciting mob
violence – “lynch law” – against women.
I
stress, of course, that I don’t claim what I’ve done is definitive by any
means. One limited search does not make for cast-iron conclusions! And when it
comes to interpreting the results, there are numerous other factors to take
into account, eg dates of elections and by elections, the extent of local
suffrage activity and press coverage. To really understand what was going on it
would be necessary to analyse the articles in more detail to see what was being
covered and when, and to extend the years searched. And that’s without even beginning to look at how the press
treated the non-militant suffrage campaign.
Still,
for all its shortcomings it was an interesting exercise and threw up lots of
questions I’d love to explore further. But to truly do justice to the subject,
much more serious and time-consuming research is needed – and I simply don’t have
the time at the moment to take it any further. So this is really just a very
tentative – possibly even a false! – start. One thing that does seem clear is
that the WSPU’s claim that there was a press boycott could certainly stand
further investigation.
The
Bristol Suffragettes
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The Road to Representation: Essays on the Women's Suffrage Campaign
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[1] Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled:
The Story of How We Won the Vote, (London: Hutchinson, 1959), p. 55.
[3] Mrs Pankhurst speaking at a
meeting in Torquay, reported in Votes for Women, 18 February 1909.
[4] Votes for Women, 25 June
1909.
[5] Votes for Women, 28 April
1911.
[6] Votes for Women, 9 December
1910.
[7] Mrs Pankhurst speaking at Kingsway
Hall on 5 August 1913, Votes for Women, 8 August 1913.
[8] Votes for Women, 23
December 1910.
[9] ‘Circumventing the Press Boycott’,
Votes for Women, 17 April 1914.
[10] Clare Wright, You Daughters of Freedom,
(Melbourne, Text Publishing 2018), p. 404.
[11] You Daughters of Freedom,
p. 431.
[12] Mary Winsor, ‘The Militant
Suffrage Movement’, (The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, Vol. 56, Women in Public Life (Nov. 1914, pp.
134-142). Winsor was chair of the Pennsylvania
Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and
President of the Pennsylvania Limited Equal Suffrage League.
