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What methods did the suffragettes use, and how effective were these in gaining the vote for women?
be it in their working clothes, dressing in prison clothes, or being accompanied by pipers. Demonstrators carried eight feet high banners and enormous posters with the portraits of the leadership on them. Various bands playing protest songs accompanied the marching women. These demonstrations have been called the ‘spectacle of women’. The demonstrations were highly effective in gaining publicity and introducing the idea of votes for women to many people. The suffragettes also used propaganda techniques, as did the NUWSS to push the movement along.
The suffrage newspapers talked about in relation to the suffragists were the same for the suffragettes. The suffragettes also used plays and performances to reach their audience, such as How the Vote Was Won, a play by Elizabeth Robins, an active member of the WSPU. The suffragettes would even disrupt plays about female heroines. An example of this was when three suffragettes barricaded themselves into a box at Covent Garden to interrupt a performance of Joan of Arc. A film, ’True Womanhood’ was also released, and looked at the struggle for women’s suffrage. The suffragettes made full use of limericks, poetry and music, ’The March of the Women’ being an example of this, where a catchy tune and memorable lyrics were used for a rallying song. The effectiveness of all of these propaganda techniques was really down to the fact that the WSPU were great sales-women. They designed, advertised and marketed a wide variety of goods in their London shops. The suffragettes also made use of their party colours, selling soap, cakes and tea caddies in purple, white and green. Cards, crackers, dolls and scarves were sold in shades of purple, with badges, bags, blouses and belts being sold in shops also. The stock did not stop there, they created books, pamphlets, stationary, games and playing cards. Another propaganda technique was holding bazaars to raise money, and at one particular bazaar in Glasgow a quilt embroidered with the names of suffragette hunger strikers was offered for sale. The methods used in the twentieth century by the WSPU suggested a sense of humour that was far removed from the conventional dour image of the suffrage movement. By being innovative in its techniques the WSPU rarely missed an opportunity to promote votes for women. The WSPU also used sporting events as a good base for publicity, such as the boat race between Oxford and Cambridge, where the WSPU ran a launch filled with ’Votes for women’ banners, while on another occasion it hired a boat to sail to the House of Commons in order to harangue MPs taking tea on the terrace.
The suffragettes did use a variety of peaceful methods to try and gain the vote for women, but their attempts were unsuccessful and the movement seemed to have ground to a halt. As a consequence, the suffragettes turned to [next page]