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What methods did the suffragettes use, and how effective were these in gaining the vote for women?
tradition of protest. The WSPU drew on historical examples of unlawful physical force being used to justify its tactics and identified the suffragettes with past revolutionary and resistance heroes. Finally, the suffragettes were convinced that the Government would not grant women the vote until they were forced to do so. Christabel Pankhurst noted that miners had succeeded in gaining improved pay and conditions in 1911 because they had made themselves a nuisance. Other comparisons were drawn between the suffragettes and pressure groups who advocated violence. Militancy often began at a local level, and was only adopted as WSPU policy when it received extensive support from the members. Sandra Holton pointed out that arson, window smashing, letter burning and hunger striking were all initiated by rank and file members. After looking at the reasoning for more militant methods, these exact tactics must be looked at, and whether they were indeed more effective than the peaceful attempts made for so many years.
One of the first violent tactics used was that of window smashing. The first window was smashed as response to the treatment that a woman received outside the House of Commons in 1908. Window breaking was not authorised by the WSPU leadership but was an angry response to police violence. Window breaking did however soon gain retrospective approval from the leadership of the WSPU, and then it became official policy. Window smashing did not generally occur haphazardly, but as a consequence of alleged government double dealing. An example of this being when Asquith rejected a Conciliation Bill for women’s suffrage in November 1911, the response of the WSPU was immediately shattering windows at the Home Office, the War Office, the Foreign Office, the Board of Education, the Board of Trade, the Treasury, Somerset House, The National Liberal Club, Guards Club, the Daily Mail and the Daily News. The suffragettes did not only limit their violence to window smashing, but there were also arson attacks.
Arson attacks, like window breaking, were initially started by individuals acting on their own, and later became official WSPU policy. Emily Davison’s destruction of a pillar box in December 1911 shifted militancy to a new level. Although there were a few sporadic arson attacks before 1913 the partial destruction of Lloyd George’s country house in Surrey that year marked a watershed in suffragette violence. Emmeline Pankhurst stated “We have tried blowing him up to wake his conscience”. The arson attacks were usually a response to particular political events as with the window smashing. In Ireland the destruction of windows in English buildings was usually in response to the failure of a women’s suffrage amendment in England. The arson campaign was widespread throughout Britain. Arson attacks and window smashing were the prominent acts of violence made in response to particular political occurrences. There were however other acts [next page]