Up the Women!

Title card from the BBC's votes for women sitcom Up the Women!

It won’t have escaped your notice that this week marks 100 years since some women were enfranchised to vote in general elections. They had to be property holders and over 30 years old, the existing criteria for women voting in local elections. There were 8.5 million women this applied to, representing 40% of women. This act of Parliament also abolished the property clause for men, allowing any man aged 21 or over to vote, or 19 and over for those serving in the armed forces. This act increased the electorate from 8 million to 21 million people.

It had been a long fight for women, the issue first being raised in the 1800s. The fight abated in somewhat during the war years, though the fact that women took on traditionally male jobs was carrying on the cause in a different way.

A meeting on women and the vote was held in Durham, and reported on by the Durham advertiser in their edition of 23 February 1912. Representatives from the Durham Society of Women’s Suffrage and the Durham Constitutional Association were in attendance. Mr JW Hills, MP for Durham City (and a captain with 4th Battalion, Durham Light infantry during the war) said that women ‘had got to prove that it was to the advantage of the country that women should have the vote’. Hills claimed that he did not want to imply women were inferior, but the paper reports him saying, ‘If they gave the vote to women, they gave them control of the country. Women were different to men, and he said outright that the Government of the country ought to be committed to men and not women'.

After Hills’ speech, Miss Cicely Corbett of London made her rebuttal. Corbett is reported as saying, ‘Women had been brought more and more into public life, and this was only one more step in the emancipation of women. Men had had the courage and sense of justice to trust women in municipal matters, and there was no particular reason why they should not trust women in Parliamentary matters’. She continued, ‘Mr Hills had suggested that as men had to fight for their country, therefore, they should be governors of their country and exclude women. But fighting [is] not the only physical force for the upkeep of a great nation’. Towards the close of her speech, Corbett stated, ‘There would be no great revolution, but there would be justice when they got the opinion of women upon the business of the country – not as a matter of courtesy, not as a matter of charity, but just simply as a matter of business’.

The case for women’s suffrage was not always made in such a civil manner. Some women felt that their voices were not being heard, and a stronger statement was needed. Connie Ellis (later Lewcock) and Janet Boyd were two such women.

Janet Boyd, originally from London and whose husband had died in 1909, lived in Moor House at Leamside, West Rainton. On the 1911 census however, the only people named are the gardener and his son. Underneath is written, '14 females passed the night here. As women are not counted as voters, neither should they be counted on this census'.

In 1912, a newspaper article in the Northern Daily Mail of 25 June, reported on hunger strikes by imprisoned suffragettes. Later in the piece, it gives the names of some prisoners who were released from Holloway, one of whom is a Janet Boyd. An article published the following day in the Nottingham Evening Post gave further information, including her full name, Janet Augusta Boyd, which matches other records for the lady at Leamside. The article says:

‘Mr O’Brien having asked the Home Secretary whether his attention had been called to the case of an aged lady, Mrs Janet Augusta Boyd imprisoned in Holloway Gaol for participation in a suffragist disturbance; whether he was aware that the old lady’s health was suffering owing to the effects of an injury to her back sustained some years ago; and whether, in view of the fact that she had already suffered three moths’ imprisonment, of her age, and of her state of health, he would consider it a case for extending the clemency of the Crown’.

Mr McKenna, replying in yesterday’s Parliamentary papers, says: Mrs Boyd has enjoyed fairly good health during her imprisonment, but she has been refusing her food for several days, and, on the advice of the medical officer, she was discharged on Sunday.

I could not find a report in the Durham newspapers, nor any report at all on the disturbance and sentencing. The Durham advertiser of 30 May 1913 does report on ‘Mrs Boyd’s annual “votes for women” protest…The protest takes the form of the refusal to pay Government taxes demanded and the consequent execution of a distress warrant upon Mrs Boyd’s goods’. So an auction was held, attended by friends and supporters, and the tax collector. ‘One article, an Italian necklace, was put up for auction, and this was knocked down to Mrs Atkinson for the sum of £26, an amount sufficient to meet the demand and expenses’.

Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst, public domain photograph 

Connie Ellis, as she was at the time, became interested in women’s suffrage at the age of 14. Born in Lincolnshire, she came to the north east to teach at a school in Esh Winning in 1912. In 1913, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, and started attending meeting of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). 

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that Ellis was ‘involved in an unsuccessful attempt to set fire to a pier of Durham Cathedral’. However, she did have success in setting fire to a wooden railway building at Esh Winning, something that she only admitted to later in life in an oral history interview (catalogue entry: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/565949ae-b4bb-4976-845a-808323325406). Describing it as a perfect crime, she had an accomplice set the fire whilst she attended a meeting elsewhere. Her accomplice, Joss Craddock, left some hairpins and a handkerchief monogrammed ‘C’ at the scene at her request.

At an ILP meeting in May 1914, Ellis met William Best Lewcock and they later married in 1918. During the war, William was a conscientious objector, and Connie became disillusioned with the suffragette movement under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst. They found themselves increasingly drawn to the labour movement. Connie underwent training with the Federation of Women Workers. After the war, William struggled to find work due to being an objector, so he became a Labour Party Agent, then a regional organiser which moved the family around the country. In the 1950s, they returned to the north east. William served as a city councillor in Newcastle from 1956 to his dead in 1960. Connie was also involved, having previously been a councillor in Monmouth, she represented Benwell from 1960 to 1971, and served as the chairman and vice chairman on various committees. In 1966 she received an OBE for her public service.

The first general election in which women were able to vote took place on 14 December 1918, the Sunderland Echo of the same day reported:

‘One had only to stand awhile outside one of the places, schoolrooms, chapels, houses and the like, to realise that the women were fully determined to use the privilege which had been won for them. In they went, sometimes singly, sometimes- and this was the general rule- in couples and occasionally in laughing bunches. But as a rule they didn’t laugh. One could see that the vote was a serious matter to them, one could see the half-timid, half- defiant way in which they sidled up to the polling stations, the glance round half proudly, to see who observed them…’

http://www.durhamatwar.org.uk/story/13680/

It would be another ten years before women reached parity with men on voting rights.

Durham County Record Office offers key stage 3 education sessions on suffragettes, please contact them for further information: 

http://www.durhamrecordoffice.org.uk/article/10509/Contact-us