To celebrate Women's History Month and International Women's Day, placement student Izzy Mountford explores how, even as a rural county, Shropshire played a role in the women’s suffrage movement.
Despite being a rural county that doesn’t contain a city, Shropshire managed to play a role in the midst of the women’s suffrage movement. Shrewsbury was the county’s centre of action for suffrage and was active from very early in the movement. In 1866, four women from Shrewsbury were among those who signed a petition delivered to parliament by John Stuart Mill. These women were Louisa McKee, her daughter Ellen McKee, Catherine Bowman and Sarah Howarth. This was the first mass women’s suffrage petition and is often considered to be the first act of a formal, organised women’s suffrage movement. Further petitions were signed by women living in Shrewsbury throughout the late nineteenth century and for a time a suffrage committee existed there before disbanding.
The early twentieth century saw the establishment of a Shropshire branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1908. The NUWSS was originally founded in 1897 and sought to achieve women’s suffrage by peaceful, democratic means. This would eventually bring them into conflict with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903, who employed increasingly radical tactics to try and win votes for women.
These two groups became known as the suffragists and the suffragettes, respectively. The WSPU were less active in Shropshire than the NUWSS, but they weren’t entirely absent. Charlotte Despard, a prominent WSPU member, was actually in attendance at the 1908 inaugural meeting of the NUWSS in Shrewsbury that was being led by her sister Katherine Harley. Despard’s conduct and eloquence was reflected upon favourably in The Wellington Journal. There was even a recorded instance of suffragette militancy in Shropshire in 1913 when a woman named Elsie Helsby was sentenced to a month of hard labour in Shrewsbury prison for smashing the windows of a Ludlow post office to protest against force feeding suffragettes on hunger strike.
Wellington Journal – Saturday 31 October 1908
Flyer for the Watling Street Route of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies' pilgrimage, giving dates of meetings at towns along the route. © LSE Library
Mrs Harley addressing a meeting at Olton, West Midlands during the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) Pilgrimage to London. © LSE Library
A few years after their inaugural meeting, Katherine Harley was made the president of the Shropshire branch of the NUWSS in 1913 and would become perhaps Shropshire’s most significant campaigner for women’s suffrage. Described by Millicent Fawcett as “the life and soul of the suffrage movement in Shrewsbury and the neighbourhood”, Harley brought a militaristic degree of organisation to the local movement.
In 1913, Harley pioneered the ‘Great Pilgrimage’ in which women travelled from all over the country to convene in London for a demonstration in Hyde Park, London. Many women could only join for a small section of the journey because they had children to care for and responsibilities in the home. However, the final London demonstration still numbered almost 50,000 women.
These suffragist pilgrims travelled to London by set routes, one of which led them through the West Midlands where they received a mixed reception. In Newcastle-under-Lyme a group of pilgrims were attacked with a spade and had coal thrown at them by local women and children, and near Stoke-on-Trent one of their carriages was seriously vandalised. Local newspaper reports chose to downplay any unrest that occurred as the pilgrimage passed through the Midlands. The Staffordshire Weekly Sentinel ignored the uproar near Stoke-on-Trent and chose instead to comment that the suffragists should be grateful to local heroes Thomas Telford and John McAdam for giving them such good quality roads to travel upon.
However, local people in the West Midlands also stepped in to help the women resupply and continue onwards in the aftermath of these setbacks. The suffragists were much more favourably received in Shrewsbury where women joined them with their babies dressed in ribbons in the NUWSS colours and marched with them as far as Wolverhampton. The atmosphere in Birmingham was similarly welcoming.
L-R: Mrs Katherine Mary Harley and Dr. Isabel Hutton (Girton and Newnham unit, Scottish Women's Hospital), Captain Tyler R.N. (H.M.S. AGAMEMNON), Lieutenant General Sir Bryan Mahon. April 1916. © IWM
The march was a success in persuading Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to receive a deputation on women’s suffrage for the first time since 1911. However, no change to government policy came following this meeting. Almost a year to the day after the demonstration in Hyde Park, World War One would officially begin and temporarily eclipse the women’s suffrage movement. The NUWSS continued lobbying peacefully but became more focussed on the war effort and the WSPU ceased their militant action during war time.
Katherine Harley, who came from a military background, threw herself into the war effort. She offered a personal message to the women of Shropshire requesting that they please take up jobs traditionally performed by men to allow more men to become soldiers. Harley turned her organisational skills to wartime nursing, helping to found the Women’s Emergency Corps and eventually being killed by an artillery shell whilst working with orphans and the poor in Serbia in 1917.
Women would ultimately win the right to vote in 1918 during the aftermath of the First World War, a period which had seen their role in society shift dramatically. The work of the women’s suffrage movement had finally paid off. Many women, however, remained disenfranchised. Conditions placed upon voting meant that only women over the age of thirty who met a property requirement could vote. This excluded many working-class women, such as those employed in the iron and ceramics industries around Ironbridge. 37 of the women employed there gained the right to vote in 1918 but more than 120 of their peers did not. They would have had to wait until 1928 when voting equality between men and women was finally achieved.
This post has been written by Izzy Mountford who has undertaking her student placement with the Collections team at IGMT since February. She is currently completing a masters in International Heritage Management at the University of Birmingham.
