This book can be judged by its cover but it’s perhaps better not to go by the preface. Diane Atkinson dives straight into her subject with such ferocious detail that readers could feel weighed down by the 650 pages in their hands — a march-past of briefly introduced names from the suffragette movement runs on through page xii as one paragraph. But a deeper acquaintance reveals that historian Atkinson, author of other books on remarkable women, including three volumes on suffragettes, is a masterful and subtly witty arranger of facts.
India is the world’s first large democracy that gave all its adult citizens, including women, the right to vote and contest elections from its inception.
There were 15 women in the 299-member Constituent Assembly, among them tribal rights activist Malati Devi Choudhury, who wanted more original thinking from the legislators framing India’s Constitution; the first and only Dalit woman in the Constituent Assembly, Dakshayani Velayudhan, who strongly opposed reservations; and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman to hold a cabinet post in pre-Independence India. We can call to question the inadequate representation of women in the legislature then and now, but it was a significant beginning. This may have allowed the subcontinent’s subsequent generations to take for granted an uncommonly intrepid law — most Western democracies opted for ‘incremental suffrage’, where the right to vote was extended in a stepped way after decades of protests, and achieved at a terrible cost to the campaigners, as this book shows.
Struggle for suffrage
The author’s ‘definitive biography of a phenomenal, ground-breaking movement’ is focused on the struggle for suffrage, across the chasms of class, by over 100 British women between 1903 and 1914.
The right to vote campaign began in response to the insertion of the phrase ‘male persons’ to the Great Reform Act of 1832, which expanded Britain’s then existing electorate by nearly 60% but kept many men and all women out of it.
The beginning was tentative. It was at the behest of Mary Smith, a Yorkshire ‘lady of rank and fortune’ that radical MP Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt cited ‘several excellent reasons why every unmarried female possessing the necessary pecuniary qualification’ should be entitled to elect a Member of Parliament. The petition was introduced as a possible subject of mirth to some members in the House of Commons, reported Hansard (it appears non-italicised and the book doesn’t tell us that Hansard has been the official and substantially verbatim report of proceedings of the British Parliament since 1909 — Atkinson’s writing assumes such contextual liberties).
The 2015 film Suffragette , which had Meryl Streep as the eponymous Emmeline Pankhurst, left this viewer with only a sense of something much larger. Rise Up, Women! suffers from no such shortage. The author’s determination to give lesser-known suffragettes their due in this ‘collective biography’ makes up the backbone of this book. It’s both humbling and inspiring to read of the scores of women of little means who never gave up, their courage vastly surpassing highly vulnerable circumstances. The British suffragette movement took over 50 long years of campaigning before finally achieving a restricted right to vote on February 6, 1918.
Vignettes of a movement
A book that wants to re-trace every peep, ridge, crack and texture from a movement that adopted violence as the only way forward (‘Deeds not words!’) cannot be called easy reading. But into an earnest marathon of erudition, Atkinson sprinkles vignettes of deadpan relief: the contrarian Edith Rigby’s inflexibility over her doctor husband’s supper time; the Reverend Percy Bischoff getting off to a poor start on a Triumph motorcycle wearing the militant Women’s Social and Political Union ‘s tricolour sash at a Brooklands race-track; or the ‘charming and easy-going’ shop assistants, teachers, millworkers and servants serving as Mrs. Pankhurst’s bodyguards, making themselves at home on the floor and easy-chairs in suffragette sympathiser Gladys Schültze’s drawing room.
Wrenching accounts
There’s no getting away though, and nor should we, from the wrenching accounts of resisted imprisonment, hunger strikes, police brutality, force-feeding, social shaming and emotional trauma (several campaigners were denied access to their children) that leave the modern, educated imagination confounded: why could the men in power not see? Still, Atkinson refuses to offer opinion, not even over the apparent and short-lived capitulation of ‘the suffragettes’ greatest foe’, former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Her sparse style in letting facts speak for themselves lends greater poignancy to her in-depth account. This is particularly evident in the concluding chapter on the ‘After-Lives of the Suffragettes’.
When the right to vote finally arrived in 1918, it was granted only when a woman met one of several criteria, such as that she had to be a householder or married to one, or be over the age of 30, or be the graduate of a British university or similarly qualified.
Suffrage for all British women over the age of 21 was achieved in 1928 in contested but peaceful instalments thereafter. Britain reduced the voting age for men and women to 18 in 1969, over two decades after her former colony adopted universal adult franchise.
Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes ;
Diane Atkinson,
Bloomsbury,
₹799.
