Suffragette Humbug. (1908)

From the June 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not long ago the hoardings of London startled the man in the street with ugly black and white posters asserting that women were poor, that women were sweated, that women walked the streets, and that misery and vice stalked in our midst, all because women had not the vote. Those statements, issued by the Suffragettes, were and are unblushing falsehoods, unsustained and unsustainable by any shred of evidence.

The Socialist is in no quandary as to why the many are poor. It is not because propertied women have not the vote, nor even because women in general are not electors—it is because the many are robbed. And the stopping of this robbery depends not upon a mere all round increase in the number of votes, but upon the intelligence of the workers and the correct use of the vote in their hands.

Democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to an end; and for us that end is Socialism. And were the workers to understand rightly their position and their policy, the political freedom they now possess would enable them to achieve their emancipation irrespective of sex. 

It is, moreover, not a sex war that  exists in Society but a class war, but the Suffragettes endeavour to blur this class issue by screeching qualifications.

What are the facts regarding the Suffragettes? Under the pretence of sex equality they are buttressing class privilege. Under the guise of democracy they are endeavouring to strengthen the political power of property. They plausibly propose that women be admitted to the franchise on the same terms as men, and since all Socialists want sex equality this looks attractive. But wait. What does it really mean? Men vote at present under the £10 franchise. The suffrage is thus upon a property basis with plural voting for the wealthy. Therefore, according to the proposals of the women Suffragists, only those women having the necessary property qualifications are to be allowed to vote. This excludes not only all those single working women unable to qualify because of their poverty, but it also bars practically the whole of the married women of the working class who have no property qualifications apart from their husbands’. Further, it increases enormously the voting power of the well-to-do, since the head of the wealthy household can always impart the necessary qualifications to all the women of his house, while the working-man, through his poverty, is entirely unable to do so.

The limited suffrage movement is consequently only a means of providing votes for the propertied women of the middle class, and faggot votes for the wealthy; possibly tipping the balance of votes against the workers—men and women. Yet the Suffragettes pretend that this is a movement for the benefit of working women! The huge sums spent in this agitation prove that it is not a workers’ movement. It is a movement by women of the wealthy and middle class to open up for themselves more fully careers of exploitation, and to share in the flesh-pots of political office, to get sinecures, position and emoluments among the governing caste.

In their cry for “equality” do not their methods betray them? Every move on their part is an appeal not to sex equality but to sex fetishism. Their tactics rely upon and appeal to the worship of sex. They know that their sex gives them privileges before the magistrate and protects them from the usual police brutality, and that any strong measures against them would immediately raise a storm in their favour amongst the sex worshippers. Hence their peculiar tactics, which have no other explanation. Let anyone compare mentally the treatment that would be meted out to working men did they pursue a similar policy to these Suffragettes. Let them compare the way the suffragist invasions of Downing Street or the House of Commons were dealt with, with that which would follow persistent forcible entries of the Commons by bands of unemployed. Broken heads, bullets, and long terms of imprisonment—and not in the second division—would be their lot, and instead of hysteric sympathy being created for the ill-treated unemployed, horror at their audacity and a determination to repress them brutally would take its place. And the middle class examples of sex arrogance rely upon this very woman worship and sex inequality to further their demands.

The Suffragette movement is upon all counts but a bulwark of capitalism. It is directly opposed to the interests of the working class—women as well as men, and the Independent Labour Party shows its capitalistic nature when it supports that movement in strengthening the political power of the propertied against the propertyless.

Both sexes of the workers are exploited and suffer. Both are  victims of those who live by the ownership of the means of life. Therefore the salvation of working class women lies in the emancipation of their class from this wage-slavery. Their interests are identical with those of working men, and the women of the middle class do but attempt to lure them with false phrases to desert their fellows and to aid the propertied enemies of their class.

The duty of working women is to refuse to allow themselves to be used as catspaws of the wealthy, and to join with their fellows in The Socialist Party, the organisation of their class; thus working for the emancipation of the toilers as a whole, irrespective of sex. Sex-equality cannot be the fruit of the Suffragette humbug, it can only come through economic equality—and economic equality is impossible except through Socialism.

F. C. Watts

Capitalism and the Illusion of Freedom (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right to vote may be taken for granted by many workers today but it should never be forgotten that we had to struggle for it in the past

In Britain ideas concerning freedom, liberty and democracy can be traced all back to the 17th century. Between the 1640s and 1688 the propertied classes struggled to free themselves from the economic constraints imposed upon them by an absolutist monarchy.

The English Civil War was a class war and despite the rhetoric of the leaders of the parliamentary army that they were fighting for the liberty of the individual against an unjust government their major purpose was to establish a measure of self-government for the propertied classes. It was the men of property who gained new freedoms in the 17th century . Christopher Hill states what these freedoms were and who most of them were at the expense of:

“The men of property won freedom freedom from arbitrary taxation and arbitrary arrest, freedom from religious prosecution, freedom to control the destinies of their country through their elected representatives, freedom to buy and sell. They also won freedom to evict copyholders and cottagers, to tyrannise over their villages, to hire unprotected labour in the open market ” (The Century of Restoration 1603-1714, p. 265).

The mass of the population failed to make any gains either political or economic. The Duke of Albermarle is quoted as saying that “the poorer and meaner people have not interest in the commonweal but the use of breath".

The capitalist class, their representatives and spokesmen in the 17th and 18th centuries at least made no pretence of applying liberty, freedom and the right to elect governments to the mass of the population. These rights were restricted to property-owners and a conscious link was recognised between property and the role of government. John Locke, for example, argued that the executive would forfeit its rights if it endangered the stability of property, for its very existence rested on its role to maintain property.

Glorious for some

The reforming political grouping of the late 17th and early 18th centuries was the Whigs, in opposition to the Tory ideology which argued for a monarchy standing above the law. The Whigs wanted government under the Rule of Law by a parliament consisting of Monarchy, Lords and Commons. They were not democrats and did not advocate political democracy for the mass of the population.

After the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, and the receding of the threat of an absolutist monarchy, the Whigs became less reforming. When confronted by the idea of an extension of the political franchise to the so-called lower classes the Whigs were quite clear as to who they considered had the right to decide on who formed die government: those who owned freehold property. Thus one Whig argued: “It is owned that all governments are made by man and ought to be made by those men who are owners of the territory over which the government extends. It must likewise be confessed that the FREEHOLDERS of England are the owners of the English territory, and therefore have a natural right to erect what government they please ” (Quoted in H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 86- 90).

By the late 18th century', and following the French Revolution, the property-owning class showed what they thought of democratic movements. Both inside and outside parliament many favoured the imposition of repressive measures to prevent the spread of radical ideas. Several showed their contempt for ideas concerning the sovereignty of the people. Edmund Burke argued:

“The sovereignty of the people was the most false, wicked, and mischievous doctrine that ever could be preached to them . . .  The moment that equality and the sovereignty of the people was adopted as the rule of government, property would be at an end, and religion, morality and law, which grew out of property would fall with it."

The useful majority in society had a long time to wait before their struggle for democratic rights would make some progress. Until 1867 in fact, when the Reform Act added 400,000 borough voters nearly doubling the borough franchise (but women, paupers and farm labourers were still denied the vote).

Safe to extend the vote

The question is why was it at this point that the franchise was extended to a large section of the working class? The early part of the 19th century had seen militant working class agitation both industrially and politically. This period saw the Luddite risings and mass demonstrations seeking political reform, including the famous Peterloo massacre of 1819. Following several unsuccessful strikes by various groups of workers in the 1820s the idea of general unions also began to gain ground.

The failure of the 1832 Reform Act to give the working class the vote added further momentum to ideas about general militant industrial organisation. This movement culminated with the formation in 1834 of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. For Bronterre O’Brien the aim of general unions was to bring about: 

"an entire change in society—a change amounting to a complete subversion of the existing order of the world. The working classes aspire to be at the top instead of at the bottom of society—or rather that there should be no top or bottom at all."

The 1830s also saw the development of the largest and most important working class political movement up till then. Chartism. However the defeat of Chartism in the 1840s signalled the incorporation of militant organisation into the mainstream labour movement which was itself being integrated into capitalist society.

Thus the 1850s saw the development of the so-called “New Model Unions”, more centralised, bureaucratic and more eager to protect their funds than to engage in militant action. By the 1860s the leaders of several of these trade unions had set themselves up at the head of the movement. This group, known as the “Junta”, sought acceptance for the trade unions into the capitalist order. In 1862 they formed the Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association declaring: 

“Let our advocacy be firm, intelligent and persistent, not a sowing of the seeds of discord, but a promotion of the growth of union; not an exciting of class against class; but an endeavour to extend the welfare of all."

Therefore by 1867 the extension of the franchise to sections of the working class was no longer fraught with danger. In fact with fresh agitation breaking out in 1866 for parliamentary reform many members of the ruling class felt that denying the working class the franchise was providing workers with an issue to unite around. A further consideration was that granting the franchise to a section only of the working class would divide and weaken them.

Real democracy

Political democracy and the law developed from the seventeenth century according to the needs of a property and developing market economy. In other words, they developed in line with the interests of the property-owning class and had nothing to do with anything like the moral superiority of democracy over dictatorship.

The extension of the vote to the working class was not “given” but was won by years of struggle. It was conceded, even if only partially, only at a point when it would probably have been more dangerous for the ruling class to continue to deny it and at a time when large sections of the working class had been integrated into capitalist society.

Extending the vote to workers under capitalism is not the same thing as establishing real democracy. Meaningful democracy in a world where the means of producing and distributing the things we need to live are owned and controlled by a tiny minority is at best a sick joke. Real democracy under capitalism is an illusion. The limited democracy we do have can however be used as a tool to bring about a worldwide system where the Earth’s resources are owned and controlled by its inhabitants. When that goal is achieved, and only when it is achieved, can we start to talk about living in a true democracy.

Ray Carr

Books and Booklets. The Citizenship of Women (Keir Hardie) (1905)

Pamphlet Review from the June 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Citizenship of Women—is the latest pamphlet from the pen of Mr. Keir Hardie, and within its covers are probably all the few arguments that can be adduced by the supporters of what is known as the Limited Franchise Bill for Women. Its chief value, however, lies in the fact that it emphasises the back-door and step-at-a-time (the smaller the better) methods which find favour in the sight of Mr. Hardie’s I.L.P. Thus :—

“Once women are admitted to citizenship and some women become voters, the male mind will insensibly accustom itself to the idea of women citizenship and the way be thus prepared for adult suffrage complete and unrestricted.”

The same writer recently gave it as his opinion that Socialism would probably come as a thief in the night, and it is not extraordinary to find the same argument being used in regard to an alleged step that was used in regard to the ultimate object of that step. But to the man who understands that the first postulate of Socialism is the existence of a class-conscious and well organised proletariat whose every step towards emancipation must be taken with eyes wide open, Mr. Hardie’s position is grotesque.

If Mr. Hardie and the I.L.P. hold that the only way for the workers lies in the unconscious absorption of these alleged preliminaries to Socialism, obviously their duty to themselves and to the workers is to ensure that the process shall be unconscious. Because clearly if the workers have their suspicions aroused by the clumsy administration of an overdose, they may on the one hand do themselves an irreparable injury by refusing to acquiesce in a measure designed to benefit them, and on the other, summarily and ignorantly, seal the fate of the I.L.P. that to-day trembles in the balances. Therefore the course Mr. Hardie should adopt in this matter of the enfranchisement of women, is to reduce the persons immediately affected by the measure to the lowest possible minimum. Let it embrace the wives of, say, dukes only, and let it be smuggled through if possible without fuss and under some other guise by someone who cannot be accused of sympathy with the working-class. Thus a commencement will have been made, and the principle, which is to have such beneficial and far-reaching effects upon working-class life and outlook, will have been conceded, and, before the male worker who, according to Mr. Hardie, “will not lightly or all at once part with the authority which has so long been his, and admit that the wife of his bosom is his political equal,” will have awakened to the fact that his authority has been weakened, his mind “will have accustomed itself to the idea of women citizenship and the way will have been, prepared for complete adult suffrage.”

Really one would think from a perusal of Mr. Hardie’s pamphlet that the extension of the franchise to women was a matter of the first importance. The fact is, of course, that to-day the working-class have sufficient political power to do pretty much as they like. Unfortunately they like to return the Liberal or Tory or bogey Labour man. The reason they like to do that is because they do not know how to use their power. And they have failed to understand largely because reformers, with the best of intentions maybe, have worked upon the untenable assumption that the average mind is not capable of taking a grip on the whole Socialist position and have so omitted to tell the whole truth. While the workers do not know the whole truth they cannot understand, and while the mental activity they can spare is harnessed to and expended upon, attempts at altogether ineffectual reforms, they never will.

The pamphlet is prefaced by a character sketch of the author by W. T. Stead.

A. J. M. Gray

Letter: The Franchise. (1927)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Rimington writes again criticising the reply to an earlier letter printed in our July issue.

To the Ed. Com.

It is not that I have any fresh evidence to bear upon the subject above, as your wilful misinterpretation of that already submitted, that I write again.

You quote a string of figures from official sources, and because I do not enter into numerals, you imagine that I have discovered a “mare’s nest.”

Whatever may be said of the Capitalist Class as a Class, they are pretty astute, otherwise they would cease to be Capitalists, and I think that your assumption that they are a lot of “duds,” sheer self-complacency.

It may appear to be clever to say, as you do, “If those anomalies were abolished to-morrow, the great mass of the working class would still vote Capitalist candidates into Parliament.” Fortunately, you limit your prognostication to the next twelve hours; but it is a nasty get-out. By abusing the working class you shirk your responsibilities to safeguard and extend their powers of political expression. Because I do not give the name and address, etc., of my informant re the flaw in the Act, you refer to it as nebulous stuff. Why not investigate for yourselves and prove your statement?

You say that “the reference to the Proxy vote and the dead you do not understand,” and I would refer you to your reply, May, 1927, where you state that only those persons may vote by proxy who (a) are already on the absent voters’ list. Now persons who are already on the absent voters’ list are not exactly imperishable, and it follows that, unless they are replaced by others, ultimately there ceases to be anyone on the absent voters’ list. You may say that this is a quibble; nevertheless, without this explanation, it is obvious that absent voters must be a diminishing quantity. Of course, if the desire to strengthen the arm of working class political representation is opposed to your ideas of Socialist propaganda, it would be a pity to suspend it. Taking your own figures, which do not include the wives and families of the men registered for business qualification, I submit that, as a whole, they constitute sufficient in many cases to turn the scale at an election, for many candidates are returned by a few hundred or less. I wish particularly to draw your attention to the working of the Redistribution Act of 1918, taking Leicester as an example. Prior to this Act, Leicester was one Parliamentary area returning two members. It was then divided into three separate divisions, returning one member each. In most cases the owners of business premises live in another part of the town, so automatically they qualified for extra votes. That the issue is not so negligible as you imagine is, I contend, worthy of searching investigation, and in these days when the democratic principle is being attacked so frequently in the Press and on the platform, it is up to us to contest every plutocratic privilege. I enclose cutting from to-day’s Observer, which shews that the Divines are at it too, but these are quite mild to articles I have read by Gilbert Frankau and others.

In the words of Joseph Dietzgen, “Take care of the principles and the details will take care of themselves.”

Yours fraternally,

F. L. Rimington.

Reply.

Mr. Rimington admits that he has no “fresh evidence.” I propose, therefore, not to follow him again into numerous side-issues, but would refer him to the reply to his first letter. He still does not attempt to disprove the figures which showed that the plural voting anomaly is of negligible extent. While there is a single person with a plural vote an anomaly can be said to exist, but we decline to interest ourselves in anomalies which are unimportant and do not debar the working class from achieving Socialism. Let us repeat the main point, in 1925 there were in England and Wales 19,167,275 persons registered as voters (Statistical Review, 1925, p. 81. H.M.S.O.). Of these 51,357 had University votes and 217,509 had business premises votes. Thus out of every 200 voters three persons had two votes which they could use at a general election. Of the 200 voters 170 (85 per cent.) were members of the working class (see May ”S.S.”). Thus the distribution of votes as between workers and Capitalists in about 170 to 43. Mr. Rimington asks us to get into a sweat about those three votes, and we reply that it is much more important to convert the 170 workers to Socialism. Incidentally, if Mr. Rimington is so anxious to break a lance, why not advocate the disfranchisement of all Capitalists? It would not be very much more difficult to achieve, and when it was done he would still have the great majority of the 170 working class voters supporting capitalism.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letter: Is the vote a weapon? Some questions and our reply. (1927)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Comrades,—I am prompted to ask the following questions after having read article “Backward Race ” in August S.S,

First of all, I had better state that I am not an “Industrial Unionist” or an “Anti-Parliamentarian.” I agree with the words of Marx that “the workers must first of all acquire political supremacy” in order to control the State machinery for the sole purpose of establishing Socialism.

(1) Yet how are our black comrades to get hold of the State forces if they are “disfranchised” and “legally barred from effective participation in most political activities in South Africa”? Would the S.P.G.B. oppose the agitation of “disfranchised” workers, such as our black fellow workers for the vote, because it was not Socialism?

(2) Does the S.P.G.B. lay it down that the workers can only “acquire political supremacy” through Parliament? I fully agree that this is the only method known at the present time in Great Britain, or in any other country where the workers have the majority of the votes !

(3) Would Socialism be impossible to establish if the workers are without votes? I am not suggesting that the Capitalists have only to disenfranchise the workers whereby making Socialism impossible. That would, I think, not be possible under a highly industrialised country. Am I correct?

(4) When South Africa becomes industrialised, will our fellow black workers be enfranchised by the Capitalists? I am not wanting you to be prophets, but it is a historical fact that, in countries that begin industralism, the franchise is a necessity for the carrying on of the Capitalist system?

Has the Franchise ever been granted to the workers in any country without agitation?

Yours fraternally,

T. W. C.

Clapham.

Reply.

For convenience I have numbered “T. W. C.’s” questions.

(1) It is obvious that the black workers cannot unaided gain political control in South Africa against the might of those who govern, backed up, as the latter are, by the full strength of capitalist Britain. We would strongly urge them to agitate for the franchise, although it is plain that workers who have only just begun to organise, and have had no political experience, are not yet possessed of the knowledge and confidence necessary for the establishment of Socialism.

(2) The S.P.G.B. is concerned primarily and directly with conditions in this country, and our Declaration of Principles is framed accordingly. Speaking generally, however, we may say that the centralised political machinery of the Capitalist State (whatever its name and its peculiarities in different countries) must be controlled by a working class seeking to establish Socialism.

In passing, it is interesting to see how the Irish Republicans, in spite of all their brave words and threats of civil war, have been compelled to enter the Southern Irish Parliament as the only alternative to political extinction.

De Valera says :—

“The alternatives with which the new Free State legislation confronted them were to resign their responsibilities, to dissolve their organisation, sacrifice everything they had built up, or to take the step they took”. (“Manchester Guardian,” 23 August.)

Here we have a striking illustration of the power of Parliament, in spite of the fact that the Free State Parliament is still in its infancy, and that the Government has only a bare majority of votes. (Of course, the Republicans are as Capitalist as their opponents.)

(3) In the long run, the Capitalist State, in its modern developed form, needs representative government as a means of maintaining stability and carrying on the increasingly complex work of administration. In spite of the post-war fascist movement, there has been no general tendency to limit the franchise. Here and elsewhere the tendency is to extend it still further.

(4) The black workers (in Cape Colony only) did possess a limited franchise, which, owing to their own backward condition, has not been of any particular value to them. Under the recent “Colour Bar” legislation, a new and more limited form of representation is to be given to black workers throughout the South African Federation.

We can fairly confidently predict that, in due course, the backward workers drawn into the realm of capitalist production will be given the vote. It must not be forgotten that the Capitalists are themselves divided into groups with sectional interests. While there remains in existence a body of disfranchised workers, there is always the inducement to the competing Capitalist groups to add to their influence by a campaign for the extension of the franchise. Instances are numerous. In this country, after the mainly working class Chartist movement had failed to secure votes for the workers, the Radical movement, under John Bright, rallied them. The objects of the Radicals were entirely capitalist, and their working-class supporters were regarded, and were, in effect, simply so many potential “voting cattle,” to be thrown into the struggle against rival propertied interests.

In Chicago this year the new Mayor, Thompson, appealed directly to the negro vote (hitherto left severely alone). Thompson won, and it is certain that the bosses of other political groups in America will in due course be compelled to bring the negro into the political arena, however little they may like doing so.

In Kenya Colony, during the heated struggle between the Indian trading class and the British landowners (who were in political control), the Indians threatened to start an agitation among the millions of blacks, intending to use them simply as a weapon against the whites.

In South Africa there has always been acute bitterness between the mineowners, who want to employ more cheap black labour and less white, and the white workers, who thought to resist a lowered standard of living by laws preventing the introduction of blacks into white men’s jobs. The Boer farmers, who resented the loss of their cheap black labour by migration to the mining areas, support the white trade unionists. In the great strike and riots of 1922 the mine owners already talked of supporting the claims of the blacks to political equality as a means of outvoting the white workers and Boer farmers, and it is inevitable that one or other of the political parties will sooner or later seek to gain kudos and votes by advocating an extended black franchise.

The franchise has certainly been extended without the existence of any strong agitation on the part of those who received it. (So far as can be seen, there is no strong demand for the vote among women under 30 years of age, who are promised the vote.) Clearly, however, there must be some degree of political knowledge and interest before it would be worth while giving votes. There must, for instance, be sufficient interest to make the newly enfranchised take the trouble to record their votes. What has usually happened in the past is that the struggles of the rising Capitalists for a place in the political sun has communicated some of its enthusiasm to the ranks of the workers underneath, and served to create interest.

Edgar Hardcastle

Letter: The Value of the Franchise. (1927)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The correspondent whose letter was dealt with in our May issue writes again. His letter and our comment are given below:—

To the Editor.

Thanks for the consideration of my letter under above heading in S. S. May. We want the facts certainly, not so much that they prove our case, but because they are facts. It is absurd to draw the inference that I am a busy body nobly searching for “injustices” to put right, but I am not half so enthusiastic as your good selves in your endeavour to prove the “injustice” but a little one. The extracts you give from the Acts of 1918 are quite correct, but I am by no means impressed by your figures when I know that almost every brick that stands on top of another, and almost every piece of enclosed land, carries a vote, and I am convinced that such is by no means a negligible factor in determining the result of an election. On the authority of an official connected with the compilation of the voting register, I am enabled to state that, while the act says that a person may not vote in more than two divisions at a general election, the lawyers have found a flaw in the Act which enables a person to exercise the vote under business premises or occupational clauses in as many pieces of property above a certain value in separate divisions as they may possess. As this applies, not only to the actual owner, but the members of his or her family, and in the case of a limited company, to the directors and their dependents, the plural vote assumes enormous dimensions. I am not able to state definitely the nature of the “flaw” in the Act, but should imagine that it has something to do with the Acts round about the time of the Charles.

“No taxation without representation.”

You ask me how many persons there are in the family cited who qualify for twelve votes in the three Leicester divisions. Four—father, mother and two sons. You also ask me to state the disqualifications which militate against working-class representation, and I will name a few: for instance, soldiers and sailors (R.N.), lodgers and boarders of the artisan class, who form the bulk of the floating population, inmates of workhouses and other Poor Law institutions, the Mercantile Marine in most cases, as they never know where they will be at the time of an election. As to the proxy vote, you speak as if, when those on the absent voters’ list die off, there will be no more. Then, of course, we come to the final argument. If the plural vote is of such infinitesimal importance as you would lead your readers to believe, why do the Capitalist Class retain it? They are not such fools as to cling to a thing which carries with it a certain amount of odium, unless it is of use to them. Perhaps you can find an excuse.

F. L. Rimington.

Reply.

I did not suggest that Mr. Rimington is interested in searching for “injustices” to put right. What I said was that we are not interested in doing so.

Mr. Rimington “is not impressed” by the figures given in my article but does not show where they are in error. He cannot, in the circumstances, expect me to be impressed by his repetition of his criticisms: He says he "knows” that “almost every brick . . . carries a vote.” If it did, the plural vote would not be a negligible factor. But it. does not, as I showed, and I repeat, therefore, that it is a negligible factor. Against my figures from official sources of the negligible number of business premises votes, Mr. Rimington refers to an unnamed “official connected with the voting register,” in proof of the existence of a ”flaw in the Act,” the nature of which he is ”not able to state definitely,” but which he “imagines” has "something to do with the Act round about the time” of the Stuart kings. Really, Mr. Rimington, how can you expect such nebulous stuff to be answered ?

Mr. Rimington lists a number of obstacles which may make it difficult for some workers to use their votes, but he does not answer the main point of my reply, which was that, in fact, the workers have so overwhelming a majority of votes that, allowing for these disabilities and all the plural votes of the employers, the working class are in a position to swamp the master class at the polls. If this is true in fact, then the anomalies are negligible. If it is not true, it is for Mr. Rimington to show that it is not true.

The reference to the proxy vote and the dead I do not understand.

Mr. Rimington’s final point is that the capitalists would not keep the plural vote unless it were worth something to them. In the first place, I did not deny that it is useful. I expressly pointed out that it gives them the control of a certain few constituences like the City of London, and this is valuable to them. But the loss of the City of London is not of so great importance to the workers that it is worth while suspending Socialist propaganda in order to secure further amendments in the franchise law. It may, however, be pointed out in passing that the Capitalists are, contrary to Mr. Rimington’s belief, “such fools" as to cling to useless forms. The long resistance of influential capitalist circles to any extension of the franchise in the 19th century shows that they were “such fools” as not to realise that the workers, when given votes, would use those votes for the retention of the capitalist system.

In conclusion, I would repeat that the only major obstacle to socialism is the non-socialist outlook of the workers, not anomalies in the franchise law. If those anomalies were abolished to-morrow, the great mass of the workers would still vote capitalist candidates into Parliament.

Edgar Hardcastle

Franchise Centenary: A Very Limited Democracy (2018)

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836 – 1917)

From the September 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Centenary of Votes for All Men and Some Women

The demonstrations in June to mark the centenary of the coming into force of the Representation of the People Act 1918 (which was obviously a good thing) didn’t tell the whole picture. It is quite well-established now that the Suffragists (constitutionalists) and the Suffragettes (direct actionists) were both campaigning not for votes for all women, but only for votes for women on the same terms as men, votes for ‘middle class property-owning women’ (see: LINK).

As about a third of men didn’t have the vote before 1918, this would have left an even higher proportion of women without the vote. Hence the criticism of both the Suffragists and Suffragettes for standing for ‘Votes for Ladies’ and ‘Votes for Rich Women’.

Actually, already before 1918, Ladies had the vote, but only for local elections. Bebel describes the position in the 1910 edition of his Women and Socialism:

    ‘In regard to municipal administration, woman suffrage in Great Britain is constantly expanding. In the parish councils tax-paying women have a voice and vote as well as men. Since 1899, women in England have the right to vote for town, district and county councils. In the rural districts all proprietors and lodgers – including the female ones – who reside in the parish or district are entitled to vote. All inhabitants who are of age may be elected to the above-named bodies, regardless of sex. Women vote for members of school boards, and, since 1870, are eligible to stand on the same terms as men. But in 1903 the reactionary English school law deprived women of the right of being elected to the school board in the county of London. Since 1869 independent and unmarried women have the right to vote for the privy councils.
   Two laws enacted in 1907 made unmarried women in England and Scotland eligible to district and county councils. But a woman who may be elected as chairman of such a council, shall thereby not hold the office of justice of peace that is connected with it. Women are also eligible to parish councils and as overseers of the poor. The first woman mayor was elected in Aldeburgh on November 9, 1908. In 1908 there were 1162 women on English boards of charity and 615 women on school boards. In Ireland, tax-paying women have had municipal suffrage since 1887, and since 1896 they may vote for members of boards of charity and be elected to same.’

The Mayor of Aldeburgh, a town on the Suffolk coast, was Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the first woman doctor and sister of Millicent Fawcett, the Leader of the Suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, whose statue outside Parliament was unveiled in April.

Tristram Hunt in his (hostile) biography of Engels notes that in the 1876 elections to the London School Board Engels gave all his 7 votes to the woman candidate. This was Alice Westlake in the Marylebone ward, who topped the poll.

She was a Suffragist who was later a member of the central committee of the NUWSS. And like Fawcett a Liberal.

What, it might be asked, was Engels doing voting for a Liberal? Presumably he wanted to make the point that socialists stand for woman’s political and social equality. In which case, he was wrong for the right reason. Socialists do stand, and have always stood for women’s equality.

The Suffragettes (1968)

From Punch Magazine, 1918.

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

In January 1918 Punch signalled the end of the struggle for female suffrage, which had provided it with so much material, with one last cartoon. There was a woman, looking like Joan of Arc, holding a banner with the words “Women’s Franchise”. The caption read simply “At Last”.

In February that year an amendment to the Representation of the People Act gave the parliamentary vote to those women over thirty who held a £5 occupation qualification, or were householders, the wives of householders, or graduates. That was the beginning; in 1928 the Baldwin government, despite one or two diehards still resisting from the last ditches, conceded the vote to everyone over the age of twenty-one, man and woman.

The campaign for the vote was part of a great surge of female discontent which had gathered its force at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the full effects of industrialisation were being felt; the old type of home life had been undermined and women had been forced onto the labour market in competition with men. Wherever they could —in the craft unions and, for the better off in the so-called professions—the men organised to resist this competition.

For most women, the one hope of escape from the labour market was by marriage which, since it involved the exchange of conjugal rights for some sort of livelihood, was sometimes stigmatised as legal prostitution. Marriage, in any case, had its problems; the old melodramas about wife beating were based on more than the authors’ imagination.

Yet even marriage was a mathematical impossibility for many. In 1851, for every 1,000 males in Britain there were 1042 females. This surplus went on increasing until in 1911 there were 1068 females for every 1,000 males. The 1851 Census found that, with 24½ the average age for a girl to marry, 42 per cent of females between the ages of twenty and forty were spinsters. [1] 

The unmarried woman found few opportunities for a job outside certain fields. Many became domestic skivvies; others "submitted to the sweatshops in the rag trade or went onto the streets. For the more genteel there was always the dreary treadmill of the governess, of which the 1851 Census recorded 21,000. These unhappy women got their living trying to teach rudimentary mathematics and languages at a cut price to the children of clergymen and stockbrokers, ever fearful of being dismissed, always fighting to preserve their faded respectability to carry on to their next “position”.

Even when, after the turn of the century, women had broken into industry in a big way, their conditions still compared badly with those of men. In 1911, for example, they could work at making army and police uniforms for ten and a half hours a day for a wage of a shilling a day. For four and a half hours’ work basting police trousers they were paid 3¾d. [2] This sort of wage was useless for a woman who had to keep herself.

The reaction to this came when women began to organise into trade unions, and even to form their own union — the Women’s Protective and Provident League. Among the well- to-do it came also in the rise of the “new women”, who demanded that society catch up with the changes which industry had forced upon it and recognise that women could do most jobs as well as men. They were rich enough to argue that their place was not in the home. They wanted the vote as a means of settling their grievances.

When these demands became crystallised into the cry Votes for Women the result was one of the most impressive examples of militancy, beside which Tariq Ali is dwarfed. The most original and determined of the demonstrators were the Suffragettes.*

Few organisations have rivalled the Suffragettes in their techniques of publicity and fund-raising. Without votes and candidates, they could dominate a by-election. They jammed the streets and parks with mammoth rallies. They called up Army reserves with bogus telephone calls, burnt down Lloyd George’s new home at Walton Heath, flooded the organ at the Albert Hall and, in one hectic night in 1914, destroyed three Scottish castles.

The Suffragettes had to endure a great deal of ribaldry, and worse. At one demonstration Churchill, who was then Home Secretary, told the police to deny the women their object of being arrested but to do anything else they liked with them—an order which was faithfully obeyed. The Suffragettes’ answer to arrest was the hunger strike, to which the authorities’ reply was forcible feeding, which was as barbarous and revolting as it sounds. Their ordeals made the Suffragettes’ unity all the stronger, but they did not raise unvarying sympathy; the Socialist Standard for June 1911 made this comment on the rich hunger strikers;

   Starvation, to them, has all the charms of novelty, Self-indulged, it buys a martyr’s crown, clears the blood, and whiles away the prison hours.

It is true that many of the Suffragettes were rich, and many of them aristocrats, and that they aimed at perpetuating the voting privileges which went with poverty. Many of them were moved by the same indignation as a Miss Bancroft of St. Anne’s Manor, who found that the 1868 election allowed three of her male employees to vote but denied it to her. Their organisation was not democratic; it was, in fact, Mrs. Pankhurst’s private dictatorship in which anyone who fell foul of her—like the Pethwick Lawrences—were disposed of.

Indeed, the very tactics of the Suffragettes prevented them being democratic. A lot of what they did was criminal— and crimes cannot be decided upon democratically, after a free discussion and vote. The majority of WSPU members could not know, or influence, what was going on; they had to take the orders laid down by the secret meetings or sent over from Christabel Pankhurst's secret hideaway in Paris.

In time they developed their own notions of sex superiority. In much the same way as the Black Power movement has reacted against Negro suppression with theories of white inferiority, the Suffragettes began to say that men were an unclean menace to Woman’s purity. “Votes for women and chastity for men” became Christabel’s favourite slogan. She also wrote The Great Scourge, an exaggerated and alarmist account of the extent and effects of venereal disease among men and alleged that “only an insignificant minority—twenty- five per cent at most—of men escaped infection from V.D.” [3]

Just as the Suffragettes were hotting up, the First World War, which might have been their big opportunity, finished them. With hardly a backward glance, they gave their talents to the recruiting drive and the scorn which Mrs. Pankhurst had previously reserved for devious politicians was turned upon the men who refused to fight at the call of the government which had so recently tortured her followers:

  Could any woman face the possibility of the affairs of the country being settled by Conscientious Objectors, passive resisters and shirkers? (Queen’s Hall, London, 1/10/1914.)

The popular notion is that it was as a reward for their war work that the women got the vote in 1918. In fact, the vote was not given to the very age and income group which had supplied the muscle power of that effort. More likely, the government simply gave in, knowing that to hold out any longer would have brought a resumption of the whole sorry business.

Since then, one of the central questions of the Votes for Women campaign has been answered. Women have voted, we have had women M.P.s, Cabinet Ministers—we might soon even have a woman for Premier. But the poverty and injustice on which the Suffragettes hung their propaganda are still with us and women have no more idea of how to abolish them than have men.

Indeed, some of the feminists have gone along with the sort of frothy nonsense which it supposed to prove that women are social and intellectually inferior. Here, for example, are a couple of comments—not untypical—on the political scene from a one time woman M.P.:

   I could always tell by Mrs. Attlee's knitting when another grandchild was on the way.
   Mary Wilson (wife of (he Prime Minister) is a sweet girl. Pity to involve her in the political game. [4]

One other question is still to be settled. Women has physiological differences to man but these do not make her inferior; what has often given her a social back seat is the fact that capitalism puts a price on those differences. The employers buy labour power on the most economical terms, which for some jobs means that they must look for labour power which will stay available. These jobs — for example technical, managerial, professional — are usually better paid and are difficult for a woman to hold because her role as a child bearer must periodically take her out of the labour market.

The tendency is therefore to confine woman to the humdrum jobs like typing and simple assembly work where a high labour turnover does not matter to the employer too much. This has the effect of making the man the main wage earner in a family — in the last analysis it is from his wage that the children are brought up and the bills art paid. And the effect of this is to raise the value of a man's labour power above a woman’s, which has the overall result of keeping his wages that much higher. This is not the verdict of a sex war; it is simply capitalism applying its own laws to human beings—and degrading and suppressing not a few of them in the process.

If women are to do something about their place in society, they must first face the fact that most of them are workers, with labour power to sell, just like the majority of men. They must realise that their vote has solved nothing, changed nothing, because—again like the majority of men—it is a vote not backed by an understanding of society. But with that understanding the vote can do more than any Suffragette ever dreamed of — it can bring ". . .  the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex."

Ivan

* The term Suffragette is here applied to what eventually became called the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). There were other organisations in the campaign—for example the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies — which were less militant.

[1] Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain by Constance Rover.

[2] Women On the Warpath by David Mitchell.

[3] The Suffragette Movement by Sylvia Parkhurst,

[4] Woman In Parliament by Jean Mann.

Votes for Rich Women (1968)

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has long been a socialist aim, first voiced by the Utopians, that men and women should be equal in the conduct of social and personal affairs. This was a direct challenge to the Christian doctrine that women were inferior and to the legal contract called marriage which made the wife the private property of the husband. This aim is expressed in our own Declaration of Principles: “the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”. In other words, the establishment of Socialism would mean an end to all oppression and discrimination against women.

The heyday of the Suffragette movement was the decade before the outbreak of the first world war. During that period also, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was set up. Since political democracy is the only condition in which a genuine socialist movement can become effective, it may surprise some to learn that the Socialist Party not only did not advocate woman’s suffrage but was opposed to the Suffragettes. But we opposed them mainly because their demands were undemocratic; they did not stand for universal adult suffrage.

People often do not realise that universal suffrage was not achieved in Britain till 1929 and that about four out of ten men were excluded till 1918. When, for instance, in 1912 McKenna, the Liberal Home Secretary, introduced an unsuccessful bill to extend the franchise he estimated that there were twelve million men over twenty-one of whom less than seven-and-a-half million had the vote. Incidentally, we denounced this bill which would still have left over two million men voteless as a typical Liberal vote-catching swindle. Only certain ratepayers had the vote under a system called Household Suffrage. The Suffragettes wanted to give women the vote on these terms. The Socialist Standard of June 1908 pointed out what this would mean:

   What are the facts regarding the Suffragettes? Under the pretence of sex equality they are buttressing class privilege. Under the guise of democracy they are endeavouring to strengthen the political power of property. They plausibly propose that women be admitted to the franchise on the same terms as men, and since all Socialists want sex equality this looks attractive. But wait. What does it really mean? Men vote at present under the £10 franchise. The suffrage is thus upon a property basis with plural voting for the wealthy. Therefore, according to the proposals of the women Suffragists, only those women having the necessary property qualifications are to be allowed to vote. This excludes not only all those single working women unable to qualify because of their poverty, but it also bars practically the whole of the married women of the working class who have no property qualifications apart from their husbands'. Further, it increases enormously the voting power of the well-to-do. since the head of the wealthy household can always impart the necessary qualifications to all women of his house, while the working man, through his poverty, is entirely unable to do so.

Votes made by transferring enough property to unqualified persons were known as ‘faggot votes”. We returned to the same point in February 1912:

   As already stated (and it has not been denied) the Suffragettes oppose adult suffrage. The vote to women on the same terms as men as at present would exclude the mass of working-class women (or their husbands) because of their lack of property. It would permit the doubling of the voting strength of property by enabling the wealthy to provide their women with the requisite qualifications. It would deal a blow at the whole working class, and set back the hour of emancipation.

When a Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill was introduced in 1910 we were able to show that our opposition to the Suffragettes was fully justified. Even Winston Churchill, then a Liberal, pointed out that its effect would simply be to multiply faggot votes for the wealthy. The whole trend of the debate, commented the August Socialist Standard, “showed how essentially undemocratic is the spirit of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the measures it proposes.” This was also why the Liberal leaders said they were against it. Indeed Asquith earned what must have been the only praise from us (normally we called him “butcher” as he was Home Secretary in 1893 at the time of the Featherstone shootings) for the way he opposed “the hysteric demands of women for the enfranchisement of the propertied ones among them”!

Thus we opposed the Suffragettes because their demands were against the interests of workers, women as well as men. Their proposals would have strengthened the political power of the capitalist class by increasing the proportion of rich people who had the vote. The movement, we stated, was “only a means of providing votes for the propertied women of the middle class, and faggot votes for the wealthy”. They wanted not votes for women, but more votes for property. We warned “the women of the working class are being used for the purpose of obtaining a limited suffrage in the interests of propertied women”. The Women’s Social and Political Union we denounced as “essentially a rich women’s organsation”.

The attitude of the Socialist Party towards reforms is basically that a socialist party should not advocate them as this inevitably leads to compromise with capitalism. This is not to say that all reforms are against working class interests. They are not, and we have never said they were. Obviously some are, and some are not. The Suffragette proposal to extend the Household Vote to women on the same terms as men was and we opposed it for that reason. Universal adult suffrage was a different proposition. We were not opposed to this and frequently said so: “we are of necessity Universal Adult Suffragists” (April 1906) and “we are necessarily and without qualification democrats” (July 1912).

However, we did not advocate universal suffrage or seek support on the grounds that we thought it useful. This was because there were already sufficient workers with the vote to win political power for Socialism if they were so minded. We held that in the political conditions of pre-1914 Britain there was no need to advocate extension of the franchise. The Socialist Standard put this well in answers to queries on this point:

  The Socialist Party is not opposed to Adult Suffrage, but maintain that the working class have quite sufficient votes at their disposal to effect the revolutionary purpose when the class are sufficiently class conscious to make the time opportune. It is a question of education, not of extensions of the franchise (December, 1910).
   While Adult Suffrage would be a useful measure for the working class, to enable them to more quickly and completely take control of political power when they understand how to use their votes, yet as the working class have a franchise wide enough for the initial steps of their emancipation, it is not the business of a Socialist Party to spend time and energy in advocating the extension of that franchise, but to educate the workers in how to use the voting power which they already possess; hence the business of a Socialist Party is to advocate Socialism only (November, 1913).

Of course had there not been enough workers with the vote, as in Britain before 1868, this would have been a different situation.

The woman’s suffrage issue was first raised in these columns in April 1906 in a letter asking for funds from Mrs. Emmeline Pethick Lawrence of the WSPU. In our reply we pointed out that no doubt when the workers had won political power for Socialism one of their first acts would be to introduce adult suffrage, if indeed the capitalist class had not already done so in a bid to ward off their coming dispossession. Demanding the whole baker’s shop, we said, was the best way of getting the whole loaf.

Adam Buick

The Franchise Fiasco. (1913)

From the February 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “After years of promise the Liberal Party have drawn up a Suffrage Reform Bill. With a long sham fight about ‘Home Rule’ and ‘Welsh Disestablishment’ before them, the measure seems to have had its last and first reading.”
    “The suffrage for women, too, seems to have been left out of this Government measure in the hope that it will help to keep the fires of controversy burning—and perhaps to sufficient effect to cremate the Bill.”

So wrote we in our issue of July last upon the introduction of the now cremated Bill. We wrote the truth because we know the history of this party of cravens—of their contemptible cowardice in the past. We never expected them to do more than dress the political window to catch the eye of the voter in bye-elections.

It is the old, old story—ever new to the politically blind—the story of ’32, ’67, and ’92. Hypocrisy writ large over the actions and speeches of the “leaders of the People.” Just as King Edward conveniently died to prevent them “doing things” to the House of Lords, so now something turns up to help them out of the ditch.

“The Speaker” discovers that if Asquith keeps his promise and allows the Bill ‘‘to be widened in its scope,” it can’t go through. So Asquith pronounces its funeral oration.

They never dreamt of such s thing as the Speaker doing that! Oh, dear, no! Eminent lawyers, too, most of them! The very men, moreover, who make and maintain the laws of procedure in the House of Commons! What a sorry tale of bluff!

It was ever thus with them. They don’t want j to see a wider franchise. They fear its possibilities. They are afraid of political changes—they might lose their jobs. As the passing of a Franchise Bill is coincident with a General Election, they don’t like to take their chances. The story of the fight for the franchise is a story of Liberal and Tory betrayal of the working class. Both parties made use of the Chartist movement, and both helped to smash it. Persecution and broken promisee were the weapons then used, and they served their purpose well. After a generation had passed that grand old humbug, W. E. Gladstone, promised the workers the franchise, but, true to his kidney, he wobbled when the time came. So they went on. Parliament after Parliament voting down franchise Bills.

Yet to-day, relying upon the working class short memories, the lying Liberals boast of having given the toilers the vote.

So now, after years of promise, they deliver their still-born Bill. But just as Household Suffrage was inevitable, so now we believe that in the march of events Adult Suffrage is bound to come. But, true to their historic methods, the Liberals will try it in instalments. A small portion at a time in order to reap the kudos on many occasions. They will go warily, lest they alter the complexion of political life.

We, however, do not regret the death of this Bill. As we pointed out in July last, there was nothing democratic about it. But the way it has gone shows what a fund of ingenuity these cunning lawyer politicians can bring to tbs bluffing of the working class. And is it not significant that we were able to foretell this six months ago ?

Adolph Kohn