Alice Paul and Amelia Brown of the militant suffrage Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) appeared in court on 10 November 1909 for breaking windows during the Mayor of London’s banquet at the Guildhall. Alderman Johnston, the magistrate, was puzzled by these “hysterical creatures”. “You are supposed to be educated, and you ought to know a great deal better,” he scolded.
Alice Paul was indeed educated. (Unfortunately I can find no information about Amelia Brown.) An American Quaker, Paul (1885-1977) went to the University of Pennsylvania and then came to England where she studied at Birmingham University and the London School of Economics. Like Paul, many WSPU members were highly educated, as was clear from the large numbers of women graduates on suffragette rallies. At the demonstration in London on 18 June 1910, theirs “was the largest and most imposing of the sections” according to The Times, 20 June 1910.
What the magistrate overlooked was the fact that women had to overcome enormous difficulties in order to obtain an education, and that even when they had managed to do so there might be little scope for them to put their learning to good use. For some it was this very issue that brought them to the WSPU. Bristol suffragette Victoria Lidiard recalled that the main reason she joined was that “the education of women – of girls rather – was considered of absolute unimportance, and the boys – I had three brothers – the money was spent on them”.
The experience of suffragette and scientist Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923), who marched in the university contingent in June 1910, was in many ways typical. She was one of eight children, six of them boys. Her father’s earnings were small and from an early age she had to contribute to the family income. At six years old she was making her youngest brother’s clothes, freeing her mother to take in sewing. Her responsibilities increased after Mr Marks’s death, when she became responsible for looking after her siblings, especially her invalid sister Lavinia.
That she got any education at all was a matter of luck and charity. When she was nine her aunt offered to teach her at a school she ran in London. When Hertha left the school at sixteen there was little choice of career open to her: she became a governess. She left this uncongenial employment to move to lodgings and took daily pupils. She worked full time for the next six years, sending money home and economising by making her own clothes.
With the encouragement of friends, Hertha applied to Girton, the University of Cambridge women’s college founded in 1869. Family responsibilities intervened when her sister Lavinia came to live with her in London. Hertha had to give up work to look after her, and made a scant living from embroidery. It was two years before she was able to take her place at Girton in 1877. Her studies were made possible only by donations and loans which she continued repaying after her marriage.
Hertha read Mathematics, but she did not take a degree since women were unable to do so. When she returned to London, teaching and needlework remained her only means of earning a living. She married Professor William Ayrton in 1885. For her innovative work on the electric arc she was elected a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the only woman member until 1958. She worked on wave theory, developed anti-aircraft searchlights,and invented the Ayrton fan to dispel poison gas from First World War trenches. Although she received the Royal Society’s gold medal for original research, she was ineligible for Society membership. Professor Ayrton was an FRS, however, and Hertha’s work was often attributed to her husband, an experience shared by her friend Madame Curie.
Hertha’s experiences – the struggle against poverty and family responsibility, the limitations on her education, and the blocks to her career development– were shared by other WSPU women. Florence Macauley was forced to leave Somerville College, Oxford when her father died because she could not live on her scholarship. Emily Wilding Davison gave up her studies at Holloway College when her father died and the money ran out. Teresa Billington-Greig had to leave school at thirteen to work. She later trained as a teacher, taking her BA through extension studies.
Like Hertha, Olive Beamish studied Mathematics (with Economics) at Girton but could not take a degree. It was the same for women at Oxford, though many of the new universities which opened in the 1900s, such as Bristol and Leeds, did offer women an education equal to men’s. Even so, having graduated women could still find their career options limited. Christabel Pankhurst took a law degree at Owens College, Manchester, but could not practise law.
Given the struggles women had to get an education, it is remarkable that so many of them gave up their studies to devote themselves to suffrage work. Hertha’s daughter Barbara left her post-graduate studies to fit in working for the WSPU and helping her mother nurse her sick father. Rachel Barrett also gave up post-graduate studies to become an organiser. Dora Marsden and Rona Robinson, who had a first-class science degree from Manchester University, both trained as teachers through the arduous pupil-teacher system, but gave up their hard-won posts. Perhaps if Alderman Johnston had given any thought to women’s experience of education, he might have better understood the actions of Alice Paul and Amelia Brown.
Lucienne Boyce is a novelist and local historian who is currently working on a short history of the suffrage campaign in Bristol. She is planning a book about women with a Bristol, Bath or West Country connection who worked for – or against! – the female franchise. www.lucienneboyce.com