The Feel of the Feminist Network: Votes for Women after The Suffragette

Abstract

As the official organ of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, Votes for Women was one of the most successful suffrage papers of the Edwardian period. The famous ‘split’ over militant policies that divided the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union in October 1912 severed the suffrage paper Votes for Women from its sponsoring organization. This traumatic event offers a window into the workings of the feminist periodical networks of modernity since it shows how the connections and disconnections of the network are filled with feeling and emotion. Bringing affect theory, especially conversations regarding transmission, to the materialist strategies of new periodical studies provides a new window into the feminist periodical networks of modernity, revealing them to be saturated with affect. This offers a new understanding of the role of emotion and sentiment in the formation of the political movements and collectives of modernity.

Keywords:

• women’s suffrage
• feminist periodicals
• suffrage print culture
• modern periodical studies
• affect
• twentieth century
• Votes for Women
• Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)
• Emmeline Pethick Lawrence
• Frederick Pethick Lawrence

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This question is also at the heart of the recent excellent suffrage graphic novel Sally Heathcoate, Suffragette (Talbot et al. 2014).

2 Many scholars of suffrage hyphenate the Pethick Lawrences' name. I follow their own unhyphenated style used in Votes for Women during the 1910s.

3 Studies of the WSPU are too extensive to cite here. For a few key examples, see Holton (1986) and Rosen (1974). Also see the edited collections by Purvis and Holton (2000), Eustance et al. (2000) and Joannuo and Purvis (1998).

4 Frederick Pethick Lawrence served as the first secretary of the WSPU's own Women's Press; organized the newspaper department; and provided both legal guidance and, with his wife, financial support. He described his work for the WSPU as ‘“planning” on the business side’ (F. W. Pethick Lawrence 1943: 71). Emmeline Pethick Lawrence was the WSPU's innovative treasurer and, with her husband, the co-editor of Votes for Women. Their friendship network brought important authors both to Votes for Women and to the WSPU's Women's Press (Murray 2000).

5 I take up the much-studied periodical culture associated with the WSPU advisedly. While there are, admittedly, many periodicals about which we know very little deserving of our attention, the publications associated with the WSPU still offer mysteries for the periodicals scholar to explore. For studies of Votes for Women, see also Morrisson (2001) and DiCenzo (2003).

6 Brian Harrison notes that Virginia Woolf was put off by Emmeline Pethick Lawrence's style, thinking ‘very badly of this form of art’ (Harrison 1987: 249).

7 I am especially grateful for the stimulating work of participants at the Modernist Studies Association seminar on ‘Revolution and Affect’, organized by Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth Sheehan in November 2015.

8 Indeed, as I argue elsewhere, since periodicals are so committed to theorizing and demonstrating issues of circulation, they are also immeasurably useful as registers of other sorts of connection, such as the transatlantic or transnational connections built through movement of people and papers (see Green 2016).

9 For a critique of theories that treat affect as pre-subjective, see Leys (2011).

10 Despite the history of divisions within the WSPU, including the dramatic split of 1912, there were numerous points of contact between banished or alienated former members of the WSPU and current members outside of the Pankhursts’ immediate sphere of influence. Sandra Stanley Holton points out that Frederick Pethick Lawrence lectured to northern WSPU branches even after the split, in what she speculates ‘may well have been an “unofficial” programme, not one sanctioned by WSPU headquarters’ (Holton 1996: 192).

11 By this, I do not mean that the Pethick Lawrences attempted to split the movement further or to highlight their sense of injury. The Pethick Lawrences refused to criticize the Pankhursts openly during the movement (Harrisson 1987: 251).

12 For a fuller description of periodical codes and their significance for new periodical studies, see Brooker and Thacker (2009: 6).

13 Colmore's popular 1911 novel Suffragette Sally, for instance, is an ideal example of the form, tracking the experience of three activists who come to associate themselves with the militant suffrage movement and with one another. Scholarship on suffragist conversion narratives includes Hartman (2003) and Miller (1994).