Welsh Journals

DIVIDED LOYALTIES: WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE AND PARTY POLITICS IN SOUTH WALES 1912-1915.1 Ursula Masson In 1912, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies abandoned its non-party policy and entered into an electoral pact with the Labour Party, which took the form of its Election Fighting Fund (EFF). In this paper I will examine the implications of this new policy for the constitutional suffrage societies in Wales, using as my main sources the papers relating to the EFF in the Catherine Marshall Papers (CMP) in the Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, and the Minutes of the Executive Council of the NUWSS held at the Fawcett Library, as well as other archive material in south Wales repositories. The papers allow us to consider issues of the relationship of Welsh suffragists to the political parties, especially the Liberal and Labour Parties, as well as of the relationship between the centre and the semi-autonomous regional societies of the National Union. They suggest that political conditions in Wales, and particularly in south Wales, were such that this was the area of most determined opposition to the new policy in general, and to its implementation in Welsh constituencies specifically. The National Union, through the EFF Committee, while seeming to placate local sensitivities, was, nevertheless, prepared to put the policy into action where it judged fit, in the face of the opposition of local women. While historians have tended to see opposition to the policy as coming from areas where Liberalism was still strong, and where, (as in south Wales, it has been suggested), there was an absence of class politics, attention to the language of the correspondence, and to regional and local contexts suggests more complex, and diverse, reasons. In the two years before the First World War, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS or National Union) the central body of the constitutional suffrage societies, pursued as the "keystone" of its strategies an electoral pact with the Labour Party, through its Election Fighting Fund (EFF). This new policy, adopted at a Special Council Meeting of the National Union in May 1912, involved support for Labour candidates in by-elections where Labour opposed an anti-suffragist Liberal; and, from late 1912, a general election strategy targeting the seats of anti-suffrage cabinet ministers, and the defence of the seats of Labour MPs likely to be challenged by Liberals. The EFF would contribute to the expenses of the official Labour candidate; set up committee rooms; provide organisers, workers, speakers and cars. All of this was to be financed by earmarked donations from suffragists, while ordinary National Union work at elections would continue to be financed from the general funds. Hence women who did not wish to support the new policy could keep up their donations to the National Union. By mid-1913, the EFF had 14 organisers trained to work with the Labour party.3 The policy was a radical change of direction for the National Union, and, despite the disclaimers of its architects, represented a break with the strictly non-party policy the organisation had pursued since its I This is a version of a paper delivered at a history graduate seminar at the University of Glamorgan. I am grateful to colleagues in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and others who attended, for their very helpful comments and responses to the paper. Further reading and research since has changed the interpretation slightly. My thanks also to Professor Deirdre Beddoe, and Dr June Hannam of the University of the West of England, for reading and commenting on a first draft of this article, and to the editors of Llafur for their helpful comments. 2 These sources also have been used by June Hannam in her biography Isabella Ford (Oxford, 1989), by Sandra Holton in Feminism and Democracy: Women's Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 1986) and by Jo Vellacott, for her biography of Catherine Marshall From Liberal to Labour With Women's Suffrage (Montreal, 1993). For my general account of the EFF and relations with Labour, I am indebted to those writers and to Leslie Parker Hume's The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies 1897-1914 (New York, 1982). 3 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p 116; Catherine Marshall Papers (CMP) Minutes of NUWSS Provincial Council Meeting 1 July 1912; Vellacott, Liberal to Labour, p225.