My own story
much to establish the right of free speech for English men. English
women are still contending for that right.
In 1890 my last child was born in London. I now had a family of five
young children, and for a time I was less active in public work. On the
retirement of Mrs. Annie Besant from the London School Board I had been
asked to stand as candidate for the vacancy, but although I should have
enjoyed the work, I decided not to accept this invitation. The next
year, however, a new suffrage association, the Women's Franchise League,
was formed, and I felt it my duty to become affiliated with it The
League was preparing a new suffrage bill, the provisions of which I
could not possibly approve, and I joined with old friends, among whom
were Mrs. Jacob Bright, Mrs. Wolstentholm-Elmy, who was a member of the
London School Board, and Mrs. Stanton Blatch, then resident in England,
in an effort to substitute the original bill drafted by Dr. Pankhurst.
As a matter of fact, neither of the bills was introduced into Parliament
that year. Mr. (now Lord) Haldane, who had the measure in charge,
introduced one of his own drafting. It was a truly startling bill,
royally inclusive in its terms. It not only enfranchised all women,
married and unmarried, of the householding classes, but it made them
eligible to all offices under the Crown. The bill was never taken
seriously by the Government, and indeed it was never intended that it
should be, as we were later made to understand. I remember going with
Mrs. Stanton Blatch to the law courts to see Mr. Haldane, and to protest
against the introduction of a measure that had not the remotest chance
of passing.
"All, that bill," said Haldane, "is for the future."
All their woman suffrage bills are intended for the future, a future so
remote as to be imperceptible. We were beginning to understand this even
in 1891. However, as long as there was a bill, we determined to support
it. Accordingly, we canvassed the members, distributed a great deal of
literature, and organised and addressed meetings. We not only made
speeches ourselves, but we induced friendly members of Parliament to go
on our platforms. One of these meetings, held in an East End Radical
club, was addressed by Mr. Haldane and a young man who accompanied him.
This young man, Sir Edward Grey, then in the beginning of his career,
made an eloquent plea for woman's suffrage. That Sir Edward Grey should,
later in life, become a bitter foe of woman's suffrage need astonish no
one. I have known many young Englishmen who began their political life
as suffrage speakers and who later became anti-suffragists or traitorous
"friends" of the cause. These young and aspiring statesmen have to
attract attention in some fashion, and the espousal of advanced causes,
such as labour or women's suffrage, seems an easy way to accomplish that
end.
Well, our speeches and our agitation did nothing at all to assist Mr.
Haldane's impossible bill. It never advanced beyond the first reading.
Our London residence came to an end in 1893. In that year we returned to
our Manchester home, and I again took up the work of the Suffrage
Society. At my suggestion the members began to organise their first
out-of-door meetings, and we continued these until we succeeded in
working up a great meeting that filled Free Trade Hall, and overflowed
into and crowded a smaller hall near at hand. This marked the beginning
of a campaign of propaganda among working people, an object which I had
long desired to bring about.
And now began a new and, as I look back on it, an absorbingly
interesting stage of my career. I have told how our leaders in the
Liberal Party had advised the women to prove their fitness for the
Parliamentary franchise by serving in municipal offices, especially the
unsalaried offices. A large number of women had availed themselves of
this advice, and were serving on Boards of Guardians, on school boards,
and in other capacities. My children now being old enough for me to
leave them with competent nurses, I was free to join these ranks. A year
after my return to Manchester I became a candidate for the Board of Poor
Law Guardians. Several weeks before, I had contested unsuccessfully for
a place on the school board. This time, however, I was elected, heading
the poll by a very large majority.
For the benefit of American readers I shall explain something of the
operation of our English Poor Law. The duty of the law is to administer
an act of Queen Elizabeth, one of the greatest reforms effected by that
wise and humane monarch. When Elizabeth came to the throne she found
England, the Merrie England of contemporary poets, in a state of
appalling poverty. Hordes of people were literally starving to death, in
wretched hovels, in the streets, and at the very gates of the palace.
The cause of all this misery was the religious reformation under Henry
VIII, and the secession from Rome of the English Church. King Henry, it
is known, seized all the Church lands, the abbeys and the convents, and
gave them as rewards to those nobles and favourites who had supported
his policies. But in taking over the Church's property the Protestant
nobles by no means assumed the Church's ancient responsibilities of
lodging wayfarers, giving alms, nursing the sick, educating youths, and
caring for the young and the superannuated. When the monks and the nuns
were turned out of their convents these duties devolved on no one. The
result, after the brief reign of Edward VI and the bloody one of Queen
Mary, was the social anarchy inherited by Elizabeth.
This great queen and great woman, perceiving that the responsibility for
the poor and the helpless rightfully rests on the community, caused an
act to be passed creating in the parishes public bodies to deal with
local conditions of poverty. The Board of Poor Law Guardians disburses
for the poor the money coming from the Poor Rates (taxes), and some
additional moneys allowed by the local government board, the president
of which is a cabinet minister. Mr. John Burns is the present incumbent
of the office. The Board of Guardians has control of the institution we
call the workhouse. You have, I believe, almshouses, or poorhouses, but
they are not quite so extensive as our workhouses, which are all kinds
of institutions in one. We had, in my workhouse, a hospital with nine
hundred beds, a school with several hundred children, a farm, and many
workshops.
When I came into office I found that the law in our district, Chorlton,
was being very harshly administered. The old board had been made up of
the kind of men who are known as rate savers. They were guardians, not
of the poor but of the rates, and, as I soon discovered, not very astute
guardians even of money. For instance, although the inmates were being
very poorly fed, a frightful waste of food was apparent. Each inmate was
given each day a certain weight of food, and bread formed so much of the
ration that hardly anyone consumed all of his portion. In the farm
department pigs were kept on purpose to consume this surplus of bread,
and as pigs do not thrive on a solid diet of stale bread the animals
fetched in the market a much lower price than properly fed farm pigs. I
suggested that, instead of giving a solid weight of bread in one lump,
the loaf be cut in slices and buttered with margarine, each person being
allowed all that he cared to eat. The rest of the board objected, saying
that our poor charges were very jealous of their rights, and would
suspect in such an innovation an attempt to deprive them of a part of
their ration. This was easily overcome by the suggestion that we consult
the inmates before we made the change. Of course the poor people
consented, and with the bread that we saved we made puddings with milk
and currants, to be fed to the old people of the workhouse. These old
folks I found sitting on backless forms, or benches. They had no
privacy, no possessions, not even a locker. The old women were without
pockets in their gowns, so they were obliged to keep any poor little
treasures they had in their bosoms. Soon after I took office we gave the
old people comfortable Windsor chairs to sit in, and in a number of ways
we managed to make their existence more endurable.
These, after all, were minor benefits. But it does gratify me when I
look back and remember what we were able to do for the children of the
Manchester workhouse. The first time I went into the place I was
horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees
scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors. These little girls were
clad, summer and winter, in thin cotton frocks, low in the neck and
short sleeved. At night they wore nothing at all, night dresses being
considered too good for paupers. The fact that bronchitis was epidemic
among them most of the time had not suggested to the guardians any
change in the fashion of their clothes. There was a school for the
children, but the teaching was of the poorest order. They were forlorn
enough, these poor innocents, when I first met them. In five years' time
we had changed the face of the earth for them. We had bought land in the
country and had built a cottage system home for the children, and we had
established for them a modern school with trained teachers. We had even
secured for them a gymnasium and a swimming-bath. I may say that I was
on the building committee of the board, the only woman member.
Whatever may be urged against the English Poor Law system, I maintain
that under it no stigma of pauperism need be applied to workhouse
children. If they are treated like paupers of course they will be
paupers, and they will grow up paupers, permanent burdens on society;
but if they are regarded merely as children under the guardianship of
the state, they assume quite another character. Rich children are not
pauperized by being sent to one or another of the free public schools
with which England is blest. Yet a great many of those schools, now
exclusively used for the education of upper middle-class boys, were
founded by legacies left to educate the poor--girls as well as boys. The
English Poor Law, properly administered, ought to give back to the
children of the destitute what the upper classes have taken from them, a
good education on a self-respecting basis.
The trouble is, as I soon perceived after taking office, the law cannot,
in existing circumstances, do all the work, even for children, that it
was intended to do. We shall have to have new laws, and it soon became
apparent to me that we can never hope to get them until women have the
vote. During the time I served on the board, and for years since then,
women guardians all over the country have striven in vain to have the
law reformed in order to ameliorate conditions which break the hearts of
women to see, but which apparently affect men very little. I have spoken
of the little girls I found scrubbing the workhouse floors. There were
others at the hateful labour who aroused my keenest pity. I found that
there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the
hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world.
Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These
poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for
a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the
workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work, in
which case they were separated from their babies; or of taking their
discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave--leave
with a two-weeks-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home,
without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and
what became of their hapless infants? That question was at the basis of