On 20th November 1908, the future Dame Millicent Fawcett (11th June 1847 – 5th August 1929) became the first woman to speak at the Oxford Union Society. The motion was ‘that in the opinion of this house the time has come when the Government should be urged to remove the electoral disabilities of women.’[1] This was unsurprising given Fawcett’s already formidable reputation as leader of the constitutional suffragist movement and the Union’s tradition of debating controversial issues in current affairs. The report of the debate is held in the Union Society Archive and is corroborated by Fawcett’s own recollections.[2] This account of Fawcett’s speech at the Union will consist of two parts: a brief look at the social and political background of the event, and an discussion of the debate itself.
[1] Oxford Union Society Library, Stack L 378.425 74 OUS DEB 1908-1931.
[2] See Fawcett (1924) 196-7.
Part 1: Social and political background
Although collective action for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenth century, the place to begin for our purposes is the formation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897. The NUWSS was a federation of seventeen of the largest women’s suffrage societies and represented a unification of the suffrage movement. Millicent Fawcett – who was already a well-known and influential suffragist by this time – presided over the meeting at which the group’s formation had been agreed.[1] The NUWSS was a constitutional suffragist organisation: its sole purpose was to gain votes for women on equal terms with men through democratic means, regardless of its members’ political affiliation. In its early years, the NUWSS functioned as a kind of liaison committee between women’s suffrage societies and parliament. However, while the 1897 Women’s Suffrage Bill had done well in parliament, passing its second reading with a seventy-one-vote majority in favour, a lack of substantial progress in enacting legislation led some suffragists to explore more militant methods of direct action. This led to the birth in 1903 of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), known popularly as the ‘suffragettes’ since the publication of the term in a Daily Mail article in 1906[2]. The WSPU was a militant activist group tightly and indeed undemocratically controlled by Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst. Unlike the NUWSS, whose activities principally involved organising marches and campaigning on behalf of parliamentary candidates who supported women’s suffrage, the WSPU and its offshoots engaged in an escalating campaign of civil disobedience and occasional violence. While the two groups took very different approaches to collective action, however, it is important not to overexaggerate their opposition to each other in the first half of the decade. Indeed, when eleven suffragettes were jailed in October 1906 following a protest in the House of Commons lobby, Fawcett remarked that ‘far from having injured the movement, they have done more during the last twelve months to bring it [suffrage] within the region of practical politics than we have been able to accomplish in the same number of years.’[3]
Fawcett’s comment indicates the extent to which suffragette activities forced the issue of women’s suffrage onto front page news but does not imply that the NUWSS had been idle. On the contrary, between 1902 and 1906 the society saw a significant rise in membership and nearly doubled the number of suffrage societies affiliated with it. By the 1906 general election was powerful enough to question all the parliamentary candidates about their position on women’s suffrage and to canvass on behalf of those candidates who supported the movement. When the Liberal party won the election with a majority of MPs pledged to the cause, the NUWSS was optimistic that the party would pass legislation to enfranchise women as an extension of its liberal principles. However, party divides and issues of electoral strategy prevented any reform from taking place, because the NUWSS’s apolitical demand for equal suffrage rights for all women would of course enfranchise many women who could vote for the Conservatives. The Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, refused to make any promises regarding the issue. In view of this lack of success – and keen to maintain relevance in the face of the publicity generated by WSPU militancy – the NUWSS intensified its activities and reformed its organisational structure. In order to demonstrate mass support for the issue, it organised a number of open-air marches (including the famous ‘Mud March’ on 9th February 1907) and adopted a new constitution which provided for the election of a president. The first president and mouthpiece of the largest suffragist organisation in the country was Millicent Fawcett, and it was in this position that Fawcett was invited to speak at the Oxford Union Society on 20th November 1908.[4]
Between February 1907 and November 1908, further social and political developments took place which make up the immediate background of the debate. Firstly, increasingly violent suffragette militancy had begun to drive a wedge between the WSPU and NUWSS.[5] On 12th February 1907, just three days after the peaceful ‘Mud March’, around sixty suffragettes were arrested after marching on the Houses of Parliament in protest at the omission of women’s suffrage from the King’s Speech; a similar occurrence took place a month later. After a major WSPU-organised rally on 21st June 1908 was ignored by the Liberal Prime Minister (now Herbert Henry Asquith), suffragettes escalated their tactics by smashing windows in Downing Street, and on 11th October 1908 Emmeline Pankhurst was jailed after urging an audience in Trafalgar Square to storm the House of Commons. On 28th October, three members of the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) – a breakaway group from the WSPU – unfurled a banner and chained themselves to a grille in the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons. Alarmed by these tactics, the NUWSS officially dedicated itself only to ‘constitutional’ agitation, affirming the constitutional suffragist ideology against militant suffragism:[6]
Two years ago I came forward in defence of what have since become known as ‘Suffragette’ tactics, and said I thought it was the duty of the old Suffragists to stand by the women, then in prison, who were at the moment the objects of very severe criticism from the press and the public. I do not go back from what I then said… Since that time, however, many circumstances have changed: the methods of violence have become more violent, their popularity has increased; and I feel now that the Societies standing for lawful and constitutional methods of agitation only should definitely and deliberately say so. We do not sit in judgment on the motives of those who believe that injustice can best be met by violence. We acknowledge – I have constantly and publicly acknowledged – their courage and self-sacrifice; but when they adopt methods which we believe to be wrong in themselves, we are compelled to dissociate ourselves from them.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Women’s Franchise magazine, 19th November 1908
three women on the right. Source: Illustrated London News, 16th February 1907.
Secondly, changes in government once again put on the cards – and again ultimately frustrated – the real possibility of legislative action towards women’s suffrage. In early 1908, a bill on women’s suffrage introduced by Liberal MP Henry Stanger passed its second reading with a majority of 179 votes. Although it then proceeded no further, this was now the second time that such a bill had received parliamentary support. The NUWSS once again optimistically assumed that their natural political allies in the Liberal Party would accede to their demands if they won the upcoming general election in April 1908. However, despite the influence and popularity of the suffragists, the new Prime Minister Asquith was himself a stalwart anti-suffragist and – much like his predecessor – conceded that he did not expect suffrage legislation during his tenure.[7] Suffragist hopes were once again dashed:
We appeal now, as we have appealed in the past, to reason, justice and experience; the result of this appeal has been the gradual conversion of large numbers of men and women to our cause, so that at the General Election more than half of the House of Commons, including two-thirds of the present Government, were returned as pledged supporters of Women’s Enfranchisement. We are unwilling to believe that arguments thus accepted and pledges thus given will be cast aside because other methods have been adopted by what are known as the ‘militant’ societies. The justice and expediency of any cause is not affected by the unwisdom of some of its advocates; nor should the steady, argumentative agitation of forty years be now ignored because in the disappointment of long deferred hopes, methods of anger and impatience, and even of violence, have been resorted to. While, therefore, we feel assured that Members will not change their opinions, nor abstain from voting because of the disorder that has occurred, we should not be candid if we did not state that the deepest disappointment exists in our Union at the long delay which has occurred in placing a measure for the extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to women upon the Statute Book.
Millicent Fawcett, in a letter from the Executive Committee of the NUWSS to the House of Commons, printed in Women’s Franchise magazine, 19th November 1908.
When Millicent Fawcett spoke at the Union Society on 20th November 1908, therefore, she was speaking as the president of a powerful and influential social and political organisation which had clearly-defined aims, principles and strategies; one that was increasing in popularity both among politicians and among the general public; and one that had been continually frustrated by a lack of action from politicians. The decision to invite Fawcett to speak reflects a recognition of both her own and the NUWSS’s status and influence throughout the first decade of the 1900s, as well as the immediate topicality and controversy of the issue in contemporary social and political life in the face of constitutional lobbying from the NUWSS and ever more extreme militancy by the WSPU.
[1] Crawford (2001) 214-15; Smith (2007) 19-20.
[2] Daily Mail (1906) 5.
[3] Fawcett (1906a) 8; Smith (2007) 19-21; Crawford & Terras (2022) 232.
[4] Smith (2007) 21-3.
[5] Fawcett (1924) 185, 192.
[6] Smith (2007) 25-6; Crawford & Terras (2022) 256-7.
[7] Smith (2007) 26-27; cf. Fawcett (1924) 192.
Bibliography
Crawford, E. & Terras, M. (eds.) (2022). Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings. London.
Crawford, E. (2001). The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a Reference Guide. London.
Daily Mail (1906). ‘Mr Balfour and the “suffragettes”. Hecklers disarmed by the ex-premier’s patience’. From our Special Correspondent. Wednesday, 10 January 1906: 5.
Fawcett, M. G. (1906a). ‘The Imprisoned Suffragists’. Times, London. Saturday, 27 October 1906: 8.
Fawcett, M. G. (1924). What I Remember. London.
Fawcett, M. G. 1906b. ‘Why We Women Want Votes’. Daily Mail. Tuesday, 20 November 1906: 6.
Smith, H. L. (2007). British Women’s Suffrage Campaign, 1866-1928. London.