Pacifists and feminists (From The Oxford Times)

Pacifists and feminists

11:52am Thursday 10th November 2011 in History By Chris Koenig

Civilisation came to an end in 1914, or so I remember elderly school teachers, both male and female, wryly remarking to each other as they surveyed the post-war world they had inherited in the 1950s. They had lived through two world wars and were perhaps the unluckiest of generations; certainly compared to us baby boomers who followed in their wake and have been called by some ‘Generation L’ — for lucky.

The Great War changed the entire social order, not least for women and not least in Oxford and Oxfordshire. Emily Davison (1872-1913) for example, the suffragette who died by throwing herself in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in June 1913, had earned a first-class English degree from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, but was never awarded it. Not until after the war — in 1920 — did Oxford University finally agree to award degrees to women.

Ms Davison had earned the fees to put herself through Oxford by working as a teacher. She was a militant member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) led by mother and daughter team Emmeline and Christobel Pankhurst. A hundred years ago this year, in 1911, she hid herself in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster on the night of April 2, 1911, in order to claim the House of Commons as her address on the census of that year.

Not until 1918 did women over 30 get the vote and not until 1928 did they get it on the same terms as men.

Not until 1919 did the American Christian Scientist, Nancy Astor, become the first woman to take her seat as an MP. Famously, she is reputed to have told Winston Churchill at Blenheim: “If you were my husband I would poison you.” He replied: “If you were my wife I would take it.”

The 1914 declaration of war led immediately to a sort of armistice in the conflict between the suffragist movement and the Government. The Pankhursts suspended their civil disturbances and in return the Government freed all suffragette prisoners. “This was national militancy. As suffragettes we could not be pacifists at any price,” wrote Christobel (1880-1958). Nevertheless there were plenty of women who disagreed with her. Virginia Woolf, for one, detached herself from the war. She recorded seeing “the faces of our rulers in the light of the shellfire. So ugly they looked — German, English, French — so stupid.”

She was a frequent visitor to Garsington Manor, the home from 1915-1927 of Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband Philip (and until recently a home of opera). And Lady Ottoline (1873-1928), half-sister of the Duke of Portland, was another pacifist feminist. In 1915, she was one of 156 women anxious to travel to The Hague to attend a peace conference organised by the Women’s International Congress in order to raise a voice “above the present hatred and bloodshed” and “to demand that international disputes shall in future be settled by some other means than war”. In the event, only three British women attended the conference — attended by women from Germany and Austria — and Lady Ottoline was not one of them. This was because Winston Churchill, then at the Admiralty, had ‘closed’ the North Sea to British shipping in order to prevent the women, called by some “unpatriots”, from going to the unpopular conference. According to Frances Stonor Saunders’s excellent book The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (Faber and Faber, 2010), Lady Ottoline comforted herself with a trip to the spa in Buxton instead!

But Garsington became a hotbed of pacifism all the same, playing host to such literary conscientious objectors as D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley (as well as war poet Siegfried Sassoon on leave in 1916). And when the quantity of ‘conscies’ became too great for the manor, they overflowed into the bailiff’s house opposite.

Amazingly, it seems that they were tolerated with benign amusement by locals despite the foundation in 1914 of the Order of the White Feather — which encouraged women to follow the official line and urge their men to don khaki.