To All Women All Over the World

As I write Diary of A Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, (a free ebook about a college girl in 1911/12, the Titanic era) I am reading Votes for Women, the magazine of the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, and one issue in particular, the issue for April 19, 1912, published a few days after the Titanic sank. I will have this issue drop into Edith Nicholson’s hands, and that will partly explain why she takes Flora to a suffrage meeting in early May 1912. It’s described in Threshold Girl.

This issue is perfect for my needs. It has an article on Teachers and Suffrage and a letter to the editor from an Alberta Minister, defending St. Paul – but in a pro-suffrage way. And it also has some first hand accounts of the Suffragettes being Tortured in Jail… for breaking windows and going on a hunger strike.

In May 1912, Edith is also organizing her fellow teachers at Westmount Methodist, in a mass strike – or exodus. This following article will be her inspiration.  I’m going to have her read it out to her fellow teachers.

(I have written a play about my grandmother’s trials as a Prison of War in Changi Prison during WWII. She was tortured in an infamous incident called the Double Tenth. All true, she wrote it in a diary. Looking for Mrs. Peel. I wonder if reading accounts like this, as a teenage girl, inspired. But she did not believe in female solidarity, as her prison diary shows.)

Here’s the testimony of one Dr. Ede. Just like in Changi, doctors were given special status.

I was put straight into a ‘room’ which remained mine thenceforward. This room had a many-paned iron-framed window, and four panes open, given about eight inches by eight inches for ventilation. These cells are a little larger, and much superior to those in Holloway, where I had just previously been roomed for twelve days. Arriving late, most formalities were left till next day, when the doctor listened to my chest (with my consent0 and the Governor told me that we were just ordinary prisoners, without the privilege under Rule 243a (Mr. Winston Churchill’s vaunted clemency), but we were allowed to wear our own clothes.

The pillow I had brought (a most essential comfort, not a mere luxury) was taken away, all books, knitting, even one’s brush and comb and many small possessions we taken and I began ‘to do time.’ But I was thankful for the sight of real country, fields and looked out of the window, the fresh country air which we all revelled in at exercise time and the songs of the birds. The food was ample in quantity, and the vegetarian diet, which I had, was in quality and variety sufficient, though not quite satisfactory for a healthy person. Whether I should have said the same after four months, I do not know. We ten exercised by ourselves at first, but were soon allowed exercise in common with those who had arrived before and came in after us. Chapel was also common ground. Associated labour was deferred for several days till we had settled in and knew better what was allowed and what forbidden. Then it was for two hours every afternoon. We did coarse needlework, each in her cell, in the mornings after chapel and exercise. During this time our doors stood open and the Governor and Doctor went their rounds.

Once or twice a week a Lady Visitor paid us a very welcome short visit, and once to local Justices came and asked if we had complaints to make. They were not red-tape officials, but seemed quite human. We all, I believe, sent up the formal humble petition for the privileges Mr. Winston Churchill had given and Mr. McKenna had withdrawn, but the earlier arrivals had done this without success and we did not get an answer up to the time we were released. After allowing the Home Secretary a week and carefully deliberately discussing matters, twenty five out of the twenty eight suffragette prisoners decided to begin a Hunger Strike as a means of getting these privileges. Thursday’s supper was to be the last meal: With Good Friday we began. We had thought out how to keep it quiet for a few days , and about the usual amount of waste bread, fragments and so forth appeared on our plates which we always washed ourselves. We drank an amount of water that might have drawn attention, but apparently it did not. Chapel, exercise work, associated labour, all went as usual. We showed cheerful faces, hid up the pangs of hunger, endured sleepless nights, various forms of pain, and we shrank daily visibly in face and body. It was curious to note the marked contrast in the step of one (for adequate reasons) was not striking, and any of us walking with her. The spring was quite gone out of our step. Our clothes became loos, then began to slip down around us. Still nothing seemed to be noticed by the Governor or the Doctor in her daily rounds.

We expected the weakest to faint in chapel, but though the Chaplain, as it happened, hold forth on the duty as well as the pleasure of man that it is to protect women, he also seemed oblivious of what was going on. On Easter Monday, I thought matters had become so serious that with some of us it was medically wrong to allow it to go on unobserved. Several had become so utterly exhausted that I feared grave permanent injury and their condition at this time would have, in my opinion, justified anyone in asserting that their offence had been dearly paid for. However, there seems to be absolutely no bottom to the supply of courage and endurance in our women, and they refused consent. I had often admired the pluck of our members, but I now saw such heroism in frail and tottering bodies, such forgetfulness of self in the interests of the Cause, as amazed me once more.

Suffragettes 1912 from Pankhurst’s 1913 bio.

Next morning I took the responsibility of telling the Governor and we were thenceforward confined each to her cell and kept strictly apart, chapel and exercise being stopped.Those who had not struck, and one or two who absolutely could not keep on any longer, were exercised together. The relief of having these trying meals off our hands was great, and the feeling that we need no longer keep up. But when Tuesday’s dinner had been refused by us, and the tea, we became anxious as to what the next step would be, and when it would be taken. About five o’clock we began to hear sounds of struggling in cell after cell, pleadings and remonstrances, sounds of choking and gasping, moans and distressful cries. I have never head, in all my professional experience, anything so agonising.

And we had to hear this, recognising which our comrades was being tortured and waiting for our own turn to come. Let no one pretend that to be fed forcibly is either safe or free from suffering; it is neither, and it is inexpressibly revolting. Many were fed by tube through the nose and one at least by tube through the mouth, and others by feeding cup forced between teeth , the mouth pulled about, the nose held nearly to suffocation. The Suffragettes throw Flour at Asquith’s car My turn came. Some half dozen wardresses, in a body, came quickly into my cell. But I had thought out how best to resist, and I was standing on a table with my arms out of two upon panes, elbows bent and hands well up the sleeves of my coat. I refused to come down so a wardress on each side of me tried through the other two open panes to get at my hands. The small openings made this impossible and they had to give it up, and went away. I remained on my table, for a frequent eye at the spy slit in the door shoed that once I drew in my arms, I was done for. I had put a strap round my body and up both sleeves, buckling it outside the window, and I got some rest by leaning back on it.

After two hours of this they came in again, tried as before, in vain, and said men were coming with ladders to undo my hands from outside. My cell was on the first floor. Two men and two ladders appeared, my sleeves were with difficulty pushed up so that my wrists could be grasped, the strap was cut and I was seized, lifted down into a chair , bound down with towels and a sheet and firmly held. I then saw the Governor and the doctor waiting to feed me. I was by this time gasping deeply for breath and was allowed a minute in which to recover it and then, refusing to accept food from a cup, I had the rubber tube passed through my nose and on and on until the loathing and feeling of insult injury and foul wrong was inexpressible.

When it was over, withdrawal of the tube was nearly as distressing, and one felt as if a bruised and degraded body had been in the hands of fiends. I do not think the wardresses had used unreasonable force, and one even pitied them for having to do such hateful work. But one could not feel that a man who could inflict such horrible cruelty at the bidding of any human authority, our offence being merely that we claimed our political rights, must be wholly blind to divine law and justice. Indeed, I could not help asking the doctor, “Are the thirty pieces of silver worth it?” I was very sore in mind and body next morning and for reasons not told me, the tube was not used on me again, but wardresses tried their best, morning and evening, to force food down from a feeding cup. I think they got down about a tablespoonful in an hour, and they were nearly as tired as I was. On Wednesday evening a special Medical Inspector of Prisons came round to five of us; asked questions and made observations.

After his visit, all water was taken away from our cells and a mug of milk left instead, fresh means of breaking down the strike, for we were very thirsty. The milk went promptly out of the window, and I heard a voice say, “This is the last straw.” After this they may grind me to powder and I won’t give in. “ In the morning, we had access to water as usual. On Thursday afternoon, ostensibly for reasons of health, five of us were sent out of the prison. How were the five selected? Two were really seriously ill, but it struck me as remarkable that the other three were sound, strong, medical women, who of course, knew too much and were too determined for easy victimization. A woman about whose identity and relationships they had shown themselves puzzled and curious- neither of those having reached the limits of their strength, and a nurse.

There were others in greater need of release, in my opinion. And the whole of this suffering could have been stopped instantly by restoring to use the privileges under Rule 243a, and giving us the status of political prisoners instead of that of ordinary criminals. Frances Edes M.D.

Religion and Politics and Power: 1912, 2012

Margaret Nicholson and Norman Nicholson in the garden at Tighsolas in Richmond Quebec. Norman in Masonic regalia (I have the sword!). The Presbyterians did not approve of the Masons, because they kept secrets from their wives. But not to be a Mason was social and business suicide for Norman.

Well, in a letter from 1909,Norman writes this to his wife Margaret:

You must have hit Uncle Alec hard when you mentioned about ‘milking cows and making fires’ and when you said St-Paul has been dead a long time and there have been many changes in the world since St. Paul’s time. I think women’s suffrage is one of the changes that will happen in the near future. Too absurd to think that a woman cannot exercise her franchise with as much intelligence as some of the male sex. And that they are making this so hard is so many countries when you have to drag some of these supposedly intelligent men to the polls as you would cattle. I think ladies taking an interest in politics could study out which side to take. I am giving you this speech as an extra.

It shows that Norman supported his wife (and vice versa as it happens) during hard times, even from his lonely post on the Canadian Transcontinental Railway in Northern Ontario.  But it also shows something else, that in those days,  religion was used as a tool to argue both for and against women getting the vote.

The sword. It is in my living room. (The family got it back through a strange coincidence.)

Last week I turned on the TV to a discussion on Meet the Press about religion’s place in politics. This is now an ongoing debate in the US, where once the establishment, at least, believed in the separation of church and state.

The American Right Wing is recognized as the “Religious” faction, although it appears a somewhat unholy alliance between Big Business and Evangelicals. And they are as anxious to change the social agenda as much as the political one.

As usual, it was argued that the Civil Rights Movement was a religious movement, “so if mixing religion and politics  was ‘good’ in that case, (everyone, left and right agrees) why can’t it be a good thing now?

( I think Salon had an article last year with the same argument. But I wish someone would bring up the Suffragette Movement, in this debate, because I think that movement better reflects what is going on today than the Civil Rights Movement. The Suffragette movement was an unholy alliance, too, between factions, business and social and political. And the Pankhurst’s et al handled these disparate parts with some savvy

Corset advert in April 19 Votes for Women Magazine.

Anyway, as it happens, the April 19, 1912 edition of Votes for Women has a rousing report on the debate by the National Union of Teachers, with the unfortunate acronym of NUT. For my book Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, I will have Edith get her hands on a copy.

In Threshold Girl Edith takes sister Flora to hear a British suffragette speak, that’s  in early May.  As it also happens, right beside the article on the Teachers is a letter to the editor, from an Alberta Minister!! So perfect. Edith is thinking of quitting her job at her missionary school. The school is run by a man, Paul Villard.

Even though the Alberta Minister is living ‘near the Klondyke Trail’ he is definitely the working man’s proselytizer.

In Threshold Girl I show that some business people didn’t want women to get the vote because it was thought they’d vote for the removal of tarifs on cotton, so they could cheaper clothing. The Nicholsons were staunch Liberals, in large part because they felt their livelihood depended on it. They were sort of right.

Dear Editors of Votes for Women,

Last year, when I was working in London and occasionally had the privilege of speaking at Suffrge meetings held by the various societies, I frequently came across the view that the Bible strongly taught the subordinate position of women. St. Paul especially came in for a great deal of censure, and, as I would suggest, quite undeservedly. I always feel myself that the imperfections we notice in the Old Testament, which was written all the way through by men considerably in advance of their respective generations, show us more clearly than anything else the need for the higher conceptions in the New, and the careful student of the Bible may notice that the higher the revelation man received of God’s character the higher the honor paid to women hood.

In Christ people recognise that the ideal was reached in the matter, but it is often felt that St. Paul was somewhat retrograde. This is probably due to the fact that some of his letters to definite communities, written in reply to certain particular questions from those communities, contain advice which he thought suited to the particular occasions. To say that these statements that he sanctioned the subordinate position of women is scarcely fair. Another test I have often heard quoted against St. Paul is 1 Cor. Xi.2: “The head of a woman is the man.” I confess that at first sight these words seem to have hav only one possibly  significance, but ‘authority’ is beginning at the present time to have a meaning which our grandfathers were not familiar, but meaning which Christ and St. Paul both understood very clearly.

To our grandfathers, the word ‘authority’ almost implied the arbitrary right of one individual to treat another as he pleased. To Christ, to St. Paul, to some in authority in the governments of the present time, and to all, it can be hoped, in governments of the future, the word implies the obligation and privilege of one individual to do all in his power for those over whom he may be placed.

The difference is enormous.

I would now point out that the words ‘the head of the women is the man’ immediately follow the words “the head of every man is Christ.”

If these two sentences are taken together in this context, it would be clear, that Man in his attitude to women is to emulate Christ’s attitude to Man. Surely this is no base ideal.

I suppose it is gradually becoming recognised, that the three things that hinder the human race are race and colour prejudice, the inequality of sex and the differences between capital and labour.

In St. Paul’s day the prejudices between Jew and Gentile correspond with colour and race prejudices of the day,the struggle between bond and force correspond to our struggles between capital and labour.

The question of male and female has never come up asa practical question, but St. Paul was idealist enough to see that these prejudices and inequalities were never part of the divine scheme for the world.

And at the end of Galatiana number 3, he made this statement,which one could not but admire if it had been  made in the 20^th century, but when we realise that it was written about 48 AD we cannot but be astounded. The words are these: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

To remove these artificial divisions is the object of those who are now working for International Peace and for the Emancipation of Womanhood and for the welfare of all the labouring classes – St Paul’s Programme.

I have been today reading a little book which has just reached me in my log shack a few miles fro the Klondyke Trail. It is entitled Christ and Labour and in it eleven Labour members, whose speeches were delivered in Browning Hall during the second Labour Week, all avow that they intend to use their ‘authority: to give statutory effect to principles  of Christ’s teaching; and I believe it would be fair to St. Paul to say he has sketched out the lines of which this may be effective than to regard him as one who would lend his sanction to old customs out of which are rapidly growing, such as the subordinate position of women.

(Rev) W. L Seymour Dallas MA. Paddle River, Alberta, N.W. Canada.

(I checked. He doesn’t appear to have gone down in history.)

Suffrage and Quebec and Temperance

A temperance pledge signed by Herbert Nicholson, around 1910, when he was in his early twenties, to please his parents no doubt. He moved out West and was always in debt, so they feared he had fallen into bad habits. Since he roomed with a bartender and, yikes, a young woman stenographer, he probably did!

“I hereby promise with the help of God to abstain from the consumption of intoxicating liquor including wine beer and cider.”

Anyway, here’s another quote from Anna Howard Shaw, US Suffragette that reveals the close ties between women suffrage and the temperance moviement.  Herbert’s sister Edith clipped a picture of this famous woman from a newspaper for posterity, but Edith wanted women to get the vote for more personal reasons: they wanted more from life. She wanted more opportunities for women and security outside of marriage.

“We do not fear that little band of professional anti-women going around the country advocating home, heaven and mother. The only purpose they serve is that by holding out their skirts they act as a screen for the liquor traffic, the gamblers, the vicious, and those interested in dance halls, and places where young girls are ruined.”

As I write my play, Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, and as I read the report of the 1925 Coderre Inquiry into Police Corruption and, more to the point, incompetence, where my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services,  was implicated, personally. The charge of corruption centered around the cops turning a blind eye to dance halls and taverns  breaking by-laws by staying open after 1 am, thereby allowing prostitution and gambling to flourish. (Because after midnight is when all the bad stuff begins.)

Quebec didn’t give women the vote until the 40′s and that seems backwards. We have always been told it is the Catholic Church’s fault. But, frankly, maybe Quebec was wary of this link between the Presybterian Social Reformers and Women’s Suffrage. Maybe the didn’t want their fun curtailed. (Winston Churchill hated the suffragettes for that reason: he thought it appalling that anyone might keep him from drinking.)

(My grandfather’s relation, Therese Forget Casgrain, fought for suffrage for women in Quebec. Indeed, my grandfather always told my mother women could do anything they wanted.)

Anyway, I just happen to have a blow- by -blow account of a Town Hall in 1921, during the election campaign, in Richmond Quebec, where the Nicholson’s neighbor asked an indiscreet question about that very question: Why doesn’t the Province of Quebec give women the vote.

It embarrasses the politicians. And the crowd.

Wednesday, November 23, 1921 Dear Edith and Flora and Marion, I thought I must jot a few things down while they are fresh in my mind. We had the Tobin meeting last night and Tobin was first speaker. . He made a very fine speech and said he wanted to thank his friend Mr. Crombie who opposed him in 1917 that he did it convincingly and after the war returned to his party. “The Applause hearty and long.” Then the Honorable Mitchell. His speech was grand. He was speaking about the conservatives claiming they gave women the franchise. He said how Dougherty in the House argued that women were not persons. Said he had always been in favour of it. Just then Mrs. Montgomery who was in the center of the hall said the Quebec government thought they were not persons. Mitchell stopped and asked her what she meant. As she repeated he said, I will explain that Madam. Mr Ginn and myself were in favour of it but we did not want a minority to force anything in a majority that did not want it. Said Roman Catholic church did not want it. We were all disgusted at hearing her voice; I’m sure he did not like it. It was the only interruption at the meetings. I asked Mrs. Fraser to go. We were on the elevated. Father went with Mr. Ginn. I do hope the Liberals will win out. Mrs. Farquharson takes no interest, but I will make sure she gets to the polls and votes for Tobin. Take care of the little ones. I am anxious to see them but must stay here until after the election. I may be so sorry I will need a change. Mother

Suffragettes and Iconic Mini Series’

Suffragettes throwing flour at Asquith’s auto.. from Pankhurst’s bio.

I watched almost all of series two of the old Masterpiece Theatre series Upstairs Downstairs yesterday, it being a very rainy day (although I got my dahlias in, don’t I sound like Mrs. Dalloway who lived in Belgravia, am I right?) Anyway, yes, it does appear that that iconic series got to the Tighsolas era before I did…

The last episode I watched was about the daughter Elizabeth and the Suffragettes. Now, I likely didn’t see this episode in 72 (although I may have.) I was in CEGEP then, and not likely watching much tv. And, remember, in those days, families tended to have only one tv and the dad commandeered it at night.

My husband remembers the series, however. His Mom watched it and he took it in on some level.

Anyway, it’s interesting for me to see that episode. Upstairs Downstairs did not have a huge budget .. that is obvious. So the producers and other artists had to be creative. The scenes with the suffragettes were stylized… Only a handful of women gather at Eaton Place and head out to break windows and vandalize a politician’s home.

Rose tries to stop Elizabeth but can’t, then follows her and gets put in prison.
And force fed..

There’s a prostitute among the women, a noblewoman, a woman of the educated middle class etc and they are not particularly nice to each other in jail.

So the suffragettes are not portrayed too sympathetically here… although as per usual excellent research was done. (But had I seen these series I would have learned that the term suffragette refers to the militant brand.)

I did post, earlier on, an article about the British Suffragettes (Margaret Nicholson mentions them in a letter and I find the event she is talking about). The article does say the woman arrested represent all stratas of society.

…I got an email from someone commenting negatively on a post about a Maclean’s article from 1910 about the negro. The person said I shouldn’t quote things out of context. Hmm. This entire blog is about the context of 1910, and contains an awful lot about immigration policy, the eugenics and purity movement. My goal is to get into the head of Marion Nicolson, a prim and proper Presbyterian, who happens to get a job in a school that has black students. Her letters reflect little of her feelings about her students. I have to research the ideas of the time. The fact that so many of these ideas have been censored, or at least not repeated in history books for the masses, is important. Indeed, a commentator in the New York Times wrote a similar article but a few months ago.. he perused 1911 articles from the New York Times about immigration to explore era attitudes about race and ethnicity. He remarked on how the Powers that Be liked to stereotype different ethnic groups with respect to personality and character. In his mind, they did this is similar fashion to the way the American Kennel Club describes different dog breeds.

Upstairs Downstairs touches upon the racism in the era, but only lightly. Their purview is class prejudice.

Lady Bellamy is a nice enough woman and a clothes horse, but she is not much into social reform…as some wives of MPS were. Indeed, Mrs. Snowden, a suffragist Edith heard speak in 1913, was the wife of an MP, a Philip Snowden who went on to get a very key position . I can’t recall, now, which one.. I read it in the book The Thirties: An intimate history..

Evangelical Progressives? Not a contradiction in terms in 1910

I’ve been having fun reading the different articles on Women’s Suffrage in the Montreal Gazette published between 1908-1914, (not all as the archives contain only a sample of the newspapers published). Still, what interesting stuff and great fodder for an essay on “Spin: then and now.” La plus ca change, indeed! I’ve read quite a bit about the “Mrs. Snowden” who Edith hears talk in 1913 and of whom she says, “But she is not militant, and for this I am very sad.” Oddly, this Mrs. Ethel Snowden, wife of an MP Philip,is sometimes call a ‘suffragette’ which has come to mean militant suffragist. Anyway, she was a very lovely looking woman, smart (as ‘clever’ as her socialist MP husband who even attends meetings in his place when he is ill, according to a blurb from Every Woman’s Encyclopedia, 1910) and a terrific speaker. All which goes to prove Edith Nicholson, my husband’s prim and proper great aunt, was VERY in the thick of things, with respect to her social activism as a young woman.

The articles are often wire-stories and such, and many letters to the Editor quote other newspaper reports and people, so these articles illustrate a broad view of the debate in the newspapers. Quite a remarkably silly debate, or so it sounds in retrospect, although the tone taken (and illogic spewed) is all too familiar to me as a modern media watcher.

(Yesterday, I happened to catch an interview on CNN of a policeman in Arizona, who was all for a serious crackdown on illegal immigrants. He mentioned that ‘the crime rate has risen in his area’ but didn’t actually say illegal immigrants were responsible and the interviewer didn’t ask him to be more specific. He also said something like “Who knows what these people are doing here?” and framed the crackdown as a security issue. So it’s not about poor people coming to America because they want a piece of the American pie, because they admire the US way of life, it’s, well, the OTHER thing. But nothing was stated outright, indeed, no mention of the word Mexican at all. Just THEM, THOSE PEOPLE. All very scary, I think. And terrible journalism.)

No one has come a long way, baby in 100 years. My first observation: if an article’s spin was pro-suffrage, the article almost always mentioned how ‘good looking’ the speaker, the marchers, were.

Remember, editorially speaking, the Gazette was against women’s suffrage. The Montreal Witness, an evangelical anti-temperance newspaper the Nicholson’s read, was all for it.

Here’s an link to a 1911 letter about a mock parliament at McGill, where women’s suffrage was voted down 4 to 1. The Nicholson letters, refer to this mock parliament. Too bad about what happened at McGill. (I’m pretty sure. I’ve got to check the dates.)

Odd, the other mock Bill introduced was to have further restrictions on Oriental Immigration, which passed as well. Indeed, only ‘a few socialists’ voted against it.

Hmm.

In 1909, Marion attends a talk at Knox Church where Peter Hing, the first Chinese graduate of McGill, is being feted by his fellows and others. President Peterson of McGill speaks and says restrictions should be lessened to allow more brainy Chinese to attend McGill.

The Chinese have never felt at home in Montreal. No wonder.