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A Woman’s Place is in the Home
Posted on 19th January, 2024 in Cicely Hamilton, Suffragettes, Women's Freedom League
One of the arguments against women having the vote was that women who dabbled in politics would neglect their homes and families.
Bristol Liberal MP Charles Hobhouse, a prominent member of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, was one of those who dreaded the impact of votes for women on family life.
In a speech given at an anti-suffrage meeting in Bristol in 1912, he fretted that the vote “could only lead in the case of woman to grave and serious neglect of her occupation at home….absorption in politics would prejudice the principles, character and vigour of the race. It would lead in the case of women to the limitation of the capacity and inclination for maternity. It would lead to their unwillingness and incapacity to manage their homes…Upon the efficient direction of the home depended whether the race was to be endowed with the vitality, strength and endurance which had made it famous in history”.
The Suffragette Not at Home
In her anti-suffrage novel Delia Blanchflower (1915), Mary Ward (Mrs Humphrey Ward), wrote about how “women everywhere…were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections, servitudes, demanding “self-realisation”, freedom for the individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools.”
My wife’s a suffragette.
The anti-suffragist Lord Cromer, president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, thundered that the women’s franchise “would be subversive of peace in our homes”.
Is your wife a suffragette?
The suffragettes of the Women’s Freedom League, a militant but non-violent group formed in 1907 after a split in the Pankhurst Women’s Social and Political Union, responded by insisting that engaging in politics would not make women neglect their homes. Far from it: the suffragettes were just as homely as the next woman.
To prove the point, in 1910 they published a series of photographs in The Vote showing “Suffragettes at Home”. The images were intended as a riposte to “the male ‘anti’ who so frequently requests us ‘to go home and do the washing’, ‘mind the baby’ or ‘darn the husband’s socks’” (The Vote, 19 March 1910).
Mrs How Martyn makes jam
The WFL also launched a competition inviting members to send in photographs “showing Suffragettes doing…domestic duties”. The prize was won jointly by Mrs Joseph McCabe of Cricklewood for her photograph “Washing Baby”, and Mrs John Russell of Hampstead of Hampstead for “Home Nursing” which showed her looking after an elderly relative. The photographs were published in The Vote.
Alison Neilans cleans the stove
But some suffrage campaigners didn’t see the need to justify women’s domestic skills. In her poem, Beware! A Warning to Suffragists (1909) novelist and playwright Cicely Hamilton mocked the anti suffragists who thought domesticity the height of women’s ambition.
Mrs Snow makes pastry
So I’ll give Cicely Hamilton the last word:
“This is a cosy
little home,
Whence no nice woman
Wants to roam.
She shuts the doors
And windows tight,
And never stirs
From morn to night.
With pots and pans
She spends her life
Who would not be
A happy wife?”
(You can read the illustrated poem at https://archive.org/details/BewareSuffragists/page/n1/mode/2up)
Picture Credits:-
Mrs How Martyn makes jam; Alison Neilans cleans the stove; and Mrs Snow makes pastry: Women’s Library on Flickr, No Known Copyright Restrictions