WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE COLLECTION
from Manchester Central Library

Part 1: Lydia Becker and the Manchester Society for Womens Suffrage

Part 2: The Papers of Millicent Garrett Fawcett - sections on Womens Suffrage, Education, Employment, Welfare, the First World War and other Womens Issues

Publisher's Note

Covering two leading figures in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, this project comprises a complete microfilm edition of the Women’s Suffrage Collection from Manchester Central Library, providing exciting new research opportunities through wider access to previously unpublished archival material.

Lydia Becker was the driving force behind the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage from 1867 until her death in 1890. Part 1 of this collection makes available her own Letter Book of outgoing correspondence as well as incoming material, Minute Books, Annual Reports and other Papers on Women’s Suffrage up to 1919 when Manchester Society was disbanded. From 1881 she was also Secretary of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and in 1870 founded and edited the Women’s Suffrage Journal.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett became a member of the Executive Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1867 and President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897, a position she held right through to 1918. She was a Vice–President of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Part 2 makes available papers regarding her involvement in these pressure groups, and her subject files on suffrage, education, employment, welfare, the First World War and other women’s issues. These feature correspondence with many leading figures in the international feminist movement, such as Carrie Chapman Catt, Madame de Witt Schlumberger, Lydia Becker, Isabella M. Tod, Eva McLaren, Alice Stone Blackwell and Emily Davies, plus significant exchanges with major newspapers and journals of the period.

Lydia Becker (1827-1890) is the subject of a recent detailed study by Audrey Kelly published as Lydia Becker and the Cause (Cambridge University Press 1992). Born in Manchester, the eldest of fifteen children of Hannibal Leigh Becker, calico painter, she became interested in women’s suffrage on hearing a paper “On Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women” by Madame Bodichon, at the Social Science Association meeting in Manchester in October 1866. At the most important figure of the suffrage movement in the north of England and with powerful influence through the Women’s Suffrage Journal and at the heart of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, her papers deserve much greater attention and analysis.

Incoming correspondence (M50/1/2/1-98) includes letters received from Emily Davies, Henry Fawcett, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Josephine Butler, Laura McLaren, Frances Power Cobbe, Priscilla Bright McLaren and one from Elizabeth C. Wolstenholme Elmy.

Her personal letter book (M50/1/3) contains letters written as Secretary of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage, as Treasurer of the Manchester Committee for Married Women’s Property Bill and personal letters to her family and friends. They all express her belief that women’s suffrage was the first and most important step to the equal treatment of men and women in other fields. In a letter of 19 October 1868 she urged Josephine Butler to leave her philanthropic work to those who were incapable of anything else and to devote her talents to securing the vote of women. Her opinions on her contemporaries are expressed very forcibly. The Mayor of Manchester ‘vindicated his reputation for being a stupid ass’ by refusing to sign the petition in favour of the Married Women’s Property Bill. At an election meeting ‘Mr Bazley was dry, Mr Jones was full of claptrap...Mr Bright… was calm, and dignified and statesmanlike.’ Jacob Bright was considered to be of a ‘far higher nature’ than his brother, John. Dr Pankhurst was ‘a clever little man’… with some extraordinary sentiments about life in general and women in particular. The early work of the Manchester Society and the electoral campaign of 1868 are well illustrated by this letter book.

The Manchester Society began in earnest on 11 January 1867, when Jacob Bright, Revd. S A Steinthal, Mrs Gloyne, Max Kyllman and Elizabeth Wolstenholme met at the house of Dr Louis Borchardt. [See “Women’s Suffrage” by Helen Blackburn, and “The Suffragette Movement” by Silvia Pankhurst for the claim made by Mrs Wolstenholme Elmy that it had begun in October 1865]. Lydia Becker was made Secretary of the Society in February 1867 and Dr Richard M. Pankhurst was one of the earliest members of the Executive Committee.

Its aim was to obtain for women the right of voting for members of Parliament on the same conditions as was, or might be granted, to men. In November 1867 the Manchester Society joined in a loose federation with societies in London and Edinburgh into the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. It was then known as the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage until 1897, when along with about 500 other suffrage societies, it joined the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and became the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage. In 1911 it changed its name to the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage, part of the Manchester District Federation of the NUWSS.

In its first year the Manchester Society worked to put women with the requisite properly qualifications on the electoral register. Though most of these were subsequently removed by the Revising Barrister (and the advocacy of Sir John Coleridge and Dr Richard Pankhurst in the Court of Common Pleas on 7 November 1868 failed to have them reinstated) thirteen women who had been overlooked by the Revising Barrister were still on the Manchester register at the time of the election of November 1868, and nine actually cast their votes.

The efforts of Jacob Bright and others secured the right of women to vote at municipal elections by the Municipal Corporations Amendment Act of 1869, and the right to vote for and sit on School Boards by the Education Act of 1870; but Women’s Disabilities Bills, issued each year except 1874 from 1870 to 1879, and petitions to Parliament, failed to gain the parliamentary franchise.

In the 1880s the old suffrage societies became divided among themselves as to whether married women should have the vote. In 1889 several former members of the Manchester Society, including Dr and Mrs R .M. Pankhurst, who had removed to London, Mrs Alice Cliff Scatcherd, Mrs Jacob Bright and Mrs Wolstenholme Elmy founded the Women’s Franchise League, which brought forward the Women’s Electoral Franchise Bill of 1889, to give the vote to those women, whether married or single, who possessed the relevant qualifications.

With the death of Lydia Becker in 1890, the Manchester Society lost its driving force. It did, however, survive as the chief suffrage society in the area, despite the resignation in 1905 of its secretary, Miss Esther Roper and nine other members of the Executive Committee of twenty nine, including Eva Gore-Booth, Miss [Christabel?] Pankhurst and one of its founders Revd. S. A. Steinthal. The annual report, presented in November 1905, includes a note about the resignation of the members and their attempts to win over others to their new society [Women’s Social and Political Union].

In 1906, Margaret Ashton, [to become Manchester’s first women councillor in 1908], President of the Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Women’s Liberal Associations, took over the chairmanship of the Society which she held until 1915. Then, along with the Hon Secretary, the Hon Treasurer and ten other members, she resigned over the failure of their resolution before the Council of the NUWSS for, inter alia, 'discussion with women of other nations to promote the establishment of a stable system of international law and mutual understanding …’.

The Manchester Society was disbanded in January 1919 following the passing of the Representation of the People Act, 6 February 1918, which gave the vote to women over thirty.

Part 1 also includes Papers of Margaret Ashton and the International Women Suffrage Alliance (M50/1/15/1-8).

Through Correspondence, Annual Reports, Minute Books, Newspaper Cuttings, Scrapbooks and other Papers, along with her editorial copies of the Women’s Suffrage Journal and Common Cause, one can assess the achievements and influences of Lydia Becker and her colleagues at the regional, national and international level.

Part 2 focuses on Millicent Garrett Fawcett who was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1847, the fifth daughter and seventh child of the ten children of Newson Garrett, merchant. The struggles of her elder sister, Elizabeth, to become a woman doctor made her aware of the unequal treatment of men and women, while her marriage in 1867 to Henry Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and MP for Brighton, brought her into close touch with radical thinkers like John Stuart Mill.

On the Executive Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, from 1867, as President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 1897-1918, and as Vice-President of the International Women Suffrage Alliance, her chief aim was to gain the vote for women. But she was also involved in many other causes for improving the position of women. She was one of the founders of Newnham College, where her daughter, Philippa, was placed above the senior wrangler in the maths tripos list in 1890. There are several papers in the collection about her attempts to have women admitted to degrees (M50/3/1-3) and others which show her interest in the advancement of female education in general (M50/3/4-28). She was granted an honorary LLD by St Andrew’s University in 1905. She was also concerned about the employment of children in theatres (M50/5/2), conditions of employment of women in match factories (M50/4/22) and the formation of women’s sick benefit societies (M50/5/14-25).

Correspondents include Walter Morrison MP, William T. Stead of Pall Mall Gazette, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Lydia Becker, Eliza R. Whiting of The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), Lord Wolmer (of the Liberal Unionist Association), John Gorst MP, W. H. Smith MP, R. B. Haldane MP, Frances Balfour, Charles Cooper of The Scotsman, William Woodall MP, Emily Davies, Lilian Ashworth Hallett, Margaret Farrow, Eva McLaren, Carrie Chapman Catt, Madame de Witt Schlumberger, Isabella M. Tod, Allice Stone Blackwell, Walter S. B. McLaren MP. Albert Rollit MP, Amy Delay of the Women’s Franchise League in New Zealand, Marion Hatton (of the same), Miss A. Lister of Melbourne, Australia, Lucy Stone of The Women’s Journal, (Boston, USA), Margaret Ashton, Eva Gore Booth, Esther Roper, George Meredith, Louisa Garrett Anderson, Mrs M Winifred Ball, Ethel Snowden, H. M. Swanwide, Bertrand Russell, Helena B. Dowson, Clara E. Collet, Henry Noel Brailsford, Edith Dimock. Lord Lytton, Margaret Parkes of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, Lady Robert Cecil, Lady Constance Lytton and Lady Maud Selbourne.

In politics, she was a Liberal Unionist, being very much against Home Rule. On this one can examine her Notes for Speeches.

The letters of the First World War period show the difficulties of trying to keep an International Woman Suffrage Alliance, consisting of members of warring nations, united in their common objective of female suffrage. Attempts of the ‘peace party’ to make Jus Suffragii the Alliance’s publication, into a pacifist paper were strongly opposed by Madame de Witt Schlumberger of the French suffrage society, who had three sons at the front and one a prisoner (see M50/2/22/122). An Austrian suggestion in
September 1917 that all societies affiliated to the Alliance should unanimously express their desire for peace aroused a passionate response from Italy ‘to the insidious proposals which came from the country of hangmen they answer sending a rousing cheer of enthusiasm to the glorious army which in this day renews the virtue of the Italian race ’ (See M50/2/22/221). Letters from Mrs Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the Alliance, include references to America’s attitude to the War.

In Britain active suffrage work was suspended by the NUWSS during the war and women were encouraged to devote all their energies to the war effort. The collection contains many pamphlets on the effect of the war on women as well as on the war in general, including various anti-war pamphlets.
Letters to Mrs Fawcett relating to suffrage work in Britain, 1871-1915, (M50/2/1) are largely from and about the constitutional suffragists, but they contain several references to the militant suffragettes in 1906, 1908, 1909, 1910 and 1912. A letter from Margaret Ashton of the North of England Suffrage Society, 16 January 1906, condemned the actions of ‘these few violent women who have injured the reputation of women politicians in Lancashire... including Eva Gore Booth, two Miss Pankhursts and other seceders from the North of England Suffrage Society ’(see M50/2/1/225). A letter from Eva Gore Booth of the Lancashire and Cheshire Women Textile and Other Workers’ Representation Committee, c.24 October 1906 objects to Mrs Fawcett saying the women’s protest in the House of Commons was a natural for working women and that they did not wish to be held accountable for upper class women who kick, shriek, bite and spit (see M50/2/1/230). Mrs Fawcett was entirely against violence to obtain her ends. She believed that ‘ the crimes committed in Ireland by Home Rulers stopped Home Ruler and if Women Suffragists embark on crime as propaganda they will stop Women’s Suffrage.’ (See M50/2/1/270).

There are significant references to the struggle for women’s suffrage in America, Australia and New Zealand. In Britain, the goal of a lifetime’s work was reached in 1918, and Mrs Fawcett’s contribution was given public recognition in 1925 when she was made a Dame of the British Empire.

There are strong sections on the education, employment and welfare of women. These crucial issues, which will fuel much new analysis and appraisal, are covered in detail.

School and University Education for Women, Women and Medicine, Educational Opportunities for Women in America, Technical Colleges, the Education Reform League, the Schools Inquiry Commission, the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, the British Nurses Association, Trade Unions, the National Union of Working Women, the Society for Women Welders, Home Industries and Individual Jobs, the Guardianship of Infants, Employment of Children, Children’s Homes, Social Clubs and Societies for the Protection of Women and Girls, the Soho Club, Sick and Friendly Societies, the Church of England Temperance Benefit Society, the Working Women’s Benefit Society, Convalescent Homes, Hospitals, Housing and other welfare subjects all feature prominently.

This collection from Manchester Central Library has never been made available in microfilm before. It should be of tremendous interest to all those researching in the fields of Women’s Studies, Gender History, Suffrage, Education, Welfare and Employment.

The Detailed Listing featured in this Guide has been complied from the existing finding aid which was produced by Dora Rayson of the then Archives Department at Manchester Central Library in 1977 and subsequently reproduced by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. This finding aid also appears at the start of Reel 1 of the microfilm edition and the section relevant to the Papers of Millicent Garrett Fawcett is repeated on Reel 13 at the start of Part 2 of the microfilm edition.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Steve Willis, Humanities Group Manager, Richard Bond, Judith Baldry and Colleagues in the Local Studies Unit at Manchester Central Library for all their help with this microfilm project.

<back