TY - JOUR
AU - Pedersen,, Susan
AB - Abstract Given on the centenary of women's suffrage, this lecture explores the tensions and conflicts the claim for the vote raised among elite women already enmeshed in parliamentary and political circles. Drawing on the unbuttoned and sometimes angry correspondence among A.J. Balfour's suffragist sisters-in-law Lady Frances Balfour and Lady Betty Balfour, Frances' collaborator (and suffragist leader) Millicent Fawcett, Lady Betty's militant suffragette sister Lady Constance Lytton, and their old friend (and wife of the anti-suffragist Prime Minister) Margot Asquith, it explores the appeal but also the costs of this democratic claim for such “incorporated” women - and explains why some nevertheless supported it. Let’s begin at one of the most celebrated moments of the suffrage struggle, the ‘rush on the Commons’ of 13 October 1908. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst weren’t actually in Parliament Square for that event: they had been arrested the previous day for inciting it. But hundreds of women, wave on wave, tried to battle their way into the Palace of Westminster, and 24 women and 12 men were arrested—their efforts and the police response expressing perfectly, one might say, the militant movement’s analysis of Britain as a male oligarchy, one from which their sex was utterly shut out.1 But pause for a moment and note the activities that evening of Lady Constance Lytton—the Earl’s daughter who became a martyr for the cause. Lady Constance wasn’t yet a convert, but she had gone round to the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union to see if she could help. She was asked to try to secure first division treatment—that is, political prisoner status—for those arrested. So she rang up Arthur Ponsonby, a family friend who was now Private Secretary to the Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone, and took a hansom cab to Parliament. She had been told, what with suffragettes and police and bystanders mobbing the place, that she’d never get in, but reported that the policemen let her through ‘without any objection or apparent suspicion’. ‘Angelic’ Ponsonby then ran messages back and forth to Gladstone and put her in another cab to ‘drive away with as much ease as when I came’.2 The suffragettes were ‘rushing Parliament’, but one woman slipped in and out with no difficulty, her passage eased by connection and the deference showed her class. I’ve begun with this vignette, and the paradoxes it reveals about the relationship of unenfranchised women to political power, for a reason. 2018 was the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act—the act that, among other things, first admitted some women to the Parliamentary Franchise. That centenary has spawned a host of celebrations, commemorations, and books, many about the devotion and sacrifice with which women pursued the suffrage cause. We should honour that, especially those among us who are democrats, feminists, or even just women. But I want to focus on something different—that is, on the complex interaction between that commitment and existing political norms and structures. For the suffrage struggle was, after all, only one of women’s political commitments in the decades before 1914, taking place at a moment when women were already embedded in political life. The suffrage struggle didn’t so much bring women into politics as change what it meant to be a political woman, and change, as well, how institutions accommodated gender in public life. Let me be a bit more pointed. What we find striking, impressive, even moving about the suffrage movement is that it was, and became ever more, a genuine women’s movement, articulating the claims of one sex qua sex to be included in the polity. The movement was mostly nonpartisan; it worked, however inadequately, to surmount class divides; it drew women beyond dynastic alliances and family loyalties. By doing so, it created one of the most powerful consciously sex-based political movements ever—its coffers and membership rivaling those of a major political party. But what did it mean for women to seek to break into the political system with this gendered consciousness, organized by sex, especially at a time when class and party divisions were more acute than ever? What were the consequences for women and for the political system alike? Those issues will absorb me here. But I shall approach them through a family story—by recounting the suffrage engagements among five very elite women bound by ties of kinship, friendship, and commitment. Two—my central figures—are daughters of peers who married into the Balfour family. Lady Frances Balfour, born Lady Frances Campbell, was the fifth daughter and tenth child of the Duke of Argyll, a Scottish magnate who was a ubiquitous figure in Liberal politics in the Gladstone years. In 1879 she married A.J. Balfour’s youngest brother, the architect Eustace Balfour. Lady Betty Balfour, born Lady Betty Lytton, was the oldest daughter and amanuensis of the Earl of Lytton, poet, diplomat and sometime Viceroy of India, and the elder sister of Constance Lytton. In 1887 she married the second youngest Balfour brother, Gerald, who had followed Arthur into the Commons in 1885. Frances and Betty were both constitutional suffragists; given their establishment families and married state, it’s hard to imagine otherwise. But Frances was a staunch advocate of women’s suffrage within an aristocratic milieu that was reflexively ‘anti’, and, with her deep knowledge of political personalities and ways, in the late 1880 s and 1890 s became the constitutionalists’ best parliamentary lobbyist and Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s indispensable collaborator. Fawcett, the intelligent and public minded widow of a Liberal Cabinet minister who guided the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies for 20 years, is thus the third woman who comes into our story, for Frances mostly took her orders from Millicent: even when she didn’t agree (as, in this case, over the alliance with Labour), as she wrote Betty in 1912, ‘I never contradict a word she says, any more than I should contradict Deborah under the Palm Tree.’3 Betty’s involvement with suffrage was less protracted, but her love for her sister Constance, our fourth subject, pushed her into an active role. For Con’s militancy had that galvanizing and troubling effect on many in her family and class, and shocked and enraged our fifth subject too. Margot Asquith, born Tennant, might seem an odd addition here, since she shared the anti-suffrage views of her husband Henry, Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916 at the height of the struggle. But the untamed Tennant sisters had been friends with the Balfour brothers from girlhood, their Scottish Borders estate, Glen, not far from the Balfours’ Whittingehame, and through the half-decade that Frances was speaking three times a week for suffrage, she was dining with Margot—and sometimes the recalcitrant Henry too—regularly. The battles over women’s suffrage were fought out not only in Parliament Square and Holloway Prison, but also as Frances and Betty Balfour walked in and out of Parliament, Downing Street, and the country houses of their friends. We can reconstruct this long argument because Frances and Betty and Con and Millicent and Margot were all writers. They sat down every day and wrote letters for perhaps two or three hours—to family and friends, often to one another. Some of those letters had ‘Burn This’ scrawled across the top—instructions that were not always followed. Some were chatty and domestic, handed round the family circle. But some were about suffrage, tracking speeches and demonstrations, reporting votes and conversions. The letters only very occasionally contain sustained political argument, and then usually when they were written across either the suffragist-anti or the male-female divides. But they do contextualize the suffrage cause, showing its place in the lives of these already-political women, women born into the heart of the political elite, women who expected from girlhood to live political lives. The suffrage movement challenged these women, and all but Margot cast their lot with it. They chose, one might say, sisters over husbands, sex over class, supporting a democratic movement that would radically change their own lives. * * *  A political life was certainly what Frances, especially, yearned for. This is what women of her rank did. Her maternal grandmother, the famous Whig hostess Harriet, duchess of Sutherland, offered one model; her mother Elizabeth carried on in that mode.4 Twelve confinements notwithstanding, the duchess of Argyll travelled to and from London for the parliamentary season, helped fight elections, supported abolitionism and women’s education, and was out to political dinners all the time. The children went down to Argyll Lodge in London with the Duke and Duchess, travelling back by coach for the summer and fall at Inveraray Castle, cheering loudly as the carriages crossed the border.5 But Frances was lame and was often left behind; letter writing became the way to keep taut her ties to those she loved. Frances needed love: she may well have accepted the first young man who proposed to her. But adjustment to the Balfours was hard. Her family was religious, enthusiastic, highland, and Whig; the Balfours were rationalist, cold, lowland, and Conservative. Adjusting to marriage was hard too, not least because Frances discovered that the life she craved was not what Eustace wanted. Eustace was an aesthete, training as an architect, friends with the ceramicist William De Morgan and the painter Edward Burne-Jones, tied into the artistic and queer circles around Lord Battersea and the Grosvenor Gallery, with a house full of finds on Addison Road in Kensington, to which he brought his bride. Frances’ flaming hair and pre-Raphaelite looks may have attracted him (he had Burne-Jones paint her), and two children were born in the early years of their marriage. But Eustace was a clubman, not a family man. Worse, he cared little for politics and, when offered a constituency in 1882 to nurse and then fight in the next election, turned it down. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Frances accepted this—she had no choice—but was devastated. She discussed the matter with his brother Gerald, who was living in Florence and pretending to write philosophy. ‘You are by nature ambitious, with a woman’s ambition’, Gerald pompously replied; ‘that is, you are eager for those connected with you to gain distinction and to have part of it yourself’. But that vicarious achievement couldn’t happen, for while Gerald acknowledged that Eustace had many merits—an affectionate nature and natural refinement—he was not ambitious; he needed ‘an external force’ to direct him.6 The need to make a living provided that force: Eustace would first set up a practice and then in 1890 become surveyor for the Duke of Westminster’s London properties, a position that carried a modest salary. The 1882 crisis told on him, though. In 1897, when there was a general blow-up in the family about his alcoholism, he admitted his habitual drinking dated from this year.7 No wonder: for Frances transferred her ‘political wife’ ambitions to Gerald, to whom she had become passionately attached. When Gerald decided to contest Leeds Central in 1885, Frances fought the election at his side—driving through the city on the blustery polling day in an open carriage, full of scorn for the opponent shut up with ‘his womenkind’ against the rain. Cheers went up for the Duke of Argyll, as well as for Gerald, when the results were read out.8 Gerald then rented a bedroom and sitting room from Frances and Eustace—a practical arrangement for a bachelor MP, but one that surely deepened Eustace’s habit of spending his evenings out, with friends or drilling the volunteer London Scottish Regiment, of which he became Honorary Colonel. So we leave Gerald in the armchair and Frances on the hearthrug, talking politics and reading Tennyson by the hour. How could this ménage survive Gerald’s marriage to Lady Betty Lytton in 1887? It did because both women insisted on it. Gerald meant everything to her, Frances admitted to Betty: ‘I do not think there has been a thought in my mind which has not been told him, or that I have passed one minute away from him that I could have spent in his company’.9 And Betty, sympathetic by nature, promised not to come between Frances and her husband. ‘I love your love for him’, she wrote Frances, ‘and my eager hope is that you should both feel I would not for the whole world separate you’.10 She let Frances rent a house for them across the road, and for the next dozen years this foursome—which Frances named The Colony—were in and out of the two houses. They usually dined together, and raised their children in concert, especially the four girls born between 1889 and 1891—two to Frances, two to Betty, a group that called themselves ‘Us Four’. The two families spent long summers in Scotland, at Whittingehame, the children cheering as the train cleared the border, just as Frances’ siblings had done.11 But the arrangement had its tensions, especially as Gerald’s career took off. He would become Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1895, in his uncle Lord Salisbury’s administration, and President of the Board of Trade in 1900, under Salisbury and then his brother Arthur. This meant that Betty, not Frances, became the political wife, and while she never took to the role as avidly as Frances would have done, she did ease the aloof Gerald’s social relations, turning their house on Addison Road, and still more the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in Dublin, into centers where artists, musicians, and statesmen met for conversation and pleasure.12 Frances would feel left out and become irritable; nor did it help matters that she—like her landlord father—roundly disapproved of the Irish land reforms on which Arthur and Gerald Balfour had embarked.13 By 1899 relations were difficult enough for Betty and Gerald to leave Addison Road and have an Arts and Crafts house built for them, Fishers Hill in Surrey. That commission went to Betty’s architect brother-in-law Edwin Lutyens, not to Eustace. ‘The Colony’ was no more. I shall turn momentarily to what Frances did next, looking to how she built a political career for herself anyway, but let’s pause first on the role to which she had aspired, that of the political wife. Pat Jalland has written an illuminating analysis of the character and limits of that role, using the cases of Evelyn Stanhope, Maud Selborne, Molly Trevelyan, Mary Chamberlain, and Marion Bryce. These women varied in their politics and activism, but all defined their role in dynastic and familial terms. They tended too to steer clear of women’s suffrage and the one who did support it—Maud Selborne, Salisbury’s daughter and A.J. Balfour’s cousin—came to the cause late, and to organize Conservative Party support.14 More common was the attitude of his aunt Lady Salisbury, who in 1897 wrote to Frances (of whom she was very fond): No, I don’t agree with you about your suffrage. What earthly good will it do to any woman to have a vote? And then it must lead to manhood suffrage the moment the other side come in again…. [A] little more of this sort of thing will leave us face to face with the reddest republicanism on the first change of Govt. This makes me really unhappy when I think about it – which is as seldom as I can.15 Dynastic political wives were embedded in a conservative order resisting as best it could democratic trends, of which women’s suffrage (Lady Salisbury thought) was certainly one. Indeed, what is striking about Frances, Betty and Constance, born into the heart of that world, is that they became such fervent advocates anyway. Frances did so first, and most creatively. * * *  In the 1880 s and 1890 s, Frances, we might say, became not a political wife but a woman politician—a woman with an independent place in political life. There was a context for this, the rapid expansion of women’s voluntary, philanthropic, and educational organizations. Frances had become ever more involved in such ventures, helping to found the Travellers Aid Society, which offered advice to and found lodgings for vulnerable girls at railway stations, following W.T. Stead’s sensationalist exposé on trafficking. Later, in the 1890 s, she helped set up a ‘Freedom of Labour’ organization to resist sex-specific labour legislation, twice taking on female temperance reformers and male trade unionists, and mobilizing her many political friends, to block legislation likely to restrict the employment of barmaids in particular.16 But Frances’ main interest was always in Parliament: she loved the theatricality, the emphasis on personality and rhetoric, and had a canny sense of how performance there affected political careers. She saw many of the leading figures socially and was not shy about offering advice; indeed, for a time, she acted as her close friend and later Lord Chancellor Sir Robert Finlay’s parliamentary secretary, handling his political correspondence under a male pseudonym. And from the 1890 s, with her children growing (her fifth and last was born in 1894), she haunted the Ladies Gallery, watching the debates and evaluating different MPs’ competence and character. She could count on one of her Balfour, Cecil or Campbell relations to take her to tea if she needed refreshment; always short of money, she took the democratic omnibus back and forth from Kensington. To her delight, the National Review began to print her impressions, written under the easily decoded pseudonym ‘Grille’. (She sat behind the grille in the Ladies Gallery.)17 Her knowledge, connections, and social cachet made Frances a remarkable catch for the suffrage movement. She was a Duke’s daughter after all, sister-in-law to Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise (whom her brother Ian, Marquis of Lorne, had married in 1871), and on intimate terms with both of the Conservative Prime Ministers who dominated politics in the 1880 s and 1890 s. But political sympathies brought Frances and Millicent Fawcett together first. In the 1880 s, Frances’ father would break with Gladstone over the 1881 Irish Land Act, and Frances would follow him. Millicent Fawcett, like so many Liberal intellectuals, would leave the party over Irish Home Rule as well. Frances and Fawcett thus first collaborated on founding the Women’s Liberal Unionist Association following the Home Rule crisis—and they would leave that body in 1903, unable to follow Joseph Chamberlain on his crusade for Tariff Reform.18 Frances Balfour always thought of herself as a Whig, not a Conservative; Millicent Fawcett is best seen as a liberal imperialist. And neither by the turn of the century had any real party-political home. Frances was thus perfectly placed to take on the job of buttonholing members and soliciting pledges for the bills on women’s suffrage or removing various ‘women’s disabilities’ that came up regularly in the late 1880 s and 1890 s—a period usually dismissed by historians as ‘bleak’, ‘the doldrums’, or ‘the nadir’ of the suffrage movement, but that very much deserves another look.19 For, not only did the suffrage organizations carry on with the work of petitioning—their ‘Appeal’ of the early 1890 s garnering some quarter of a million women’s signatures20—but they also built up a formidable lobbying apparatus in Parliament. Frances was the linchpin of that work: as she told Fawcett, she believed in ‘nothing much except getting at actual MPs or those who wire pull and return them’.21 And Frances ‘got at’ MPs with a vengeance, exploiting her considerable charisma and her kinship ties in just the way male politicians had always done. It is surely because of her persuasiveness, as well as her reliable presence at Cecil family gatherings (attendance at Hatfield was ‘a duty’, she told Fawcett, even if it took her away from suffrage work22) that those relations became some of the movement’s most reliable supporters. Both Salisbury (despite his wife’s views) and her father the Duke of Argyll would support women’s bills in the Lords; A.J. Balfour would startle his party in 1892 with an eloquent speech in favour of women’s suffrage in the Commons; his intimate friend George Wyndham would serve as the movement’s parliamentary chairman; and the Balfour sisters—usually very decorous—would also lend their support.23 Her greatest victory came in 1897, when Fawcett was out of the country but a Women’s Suffrage Bill passed the House with a majority of 71. Frances was in the Ladies Gallery with a dozen or so suffragist leaders for the division; they were astounded to see the crowd of MPs coming back to be counted through for the Ayes. Her colleagues kissed her, MPs congratulated her, and that evening, even though she was running a fever, she went round to a party at the Speaker’s house with Betty, where she was received and congratulated (Betty said) rather as if she were marrying. Frances found it all great fun, though she lost her voice and had to spend the next day in bed.24 These suffrage bills were limited measures, likely to enfranchise a relatively small number of propertied, and usually single or widowed, women; they were also private members’ bills, unlikely to be granted facilities to move forward.25 But they were not just a harbinger of the future: they were part and parcel of a process of institutional reform that was transforming women’s status and expanding women’s place. From the late 1880 s, the Women’s Local Government Society worked tirelessly to batter open one male bastion of local government after another, they too relying on what Patricia Hollis termed Frances’ ‘racy intermediatory skills’ (and her Cecil relations ‘Frances’s lobby’) to make their parliamentary bargains stick.26 It also became accepted practice—almost required—for women to be appointed to government committees and commissions dealing with social, educational, health, and housing questions. Elaine Harrison’s wonderful and still unpublished dissertation shows that 1900, and not 1918, was the real turning point for women’s inclusion in such work, with the proportion of committees with women members rising to around 25% in the Edwardian years and holding at that figure, unchanged, for the two decades after enfranchisement. The ratio of men to women serving remained roughly constant, at 4 or 5 to one, across that period as well.27 Independence of party was common among those prewar elected or appointed women. Although the 1880 s saw the formation of organizations designed to enlist women behind party lines (the Women’s Liberal Federation, the Ladies’ Grand Council of the Primrose League, the Women’s Liberal Unionist Association), ‘ladies elect’, Hollis notes, were usually considered (and considered themselves) representatives not of parties but of women.28 Women were appointed to government committees as experts and as women too, and not as party members—their numbers including Fawcett, who served on the committee appointed in 1901 to inquire into atrocities in the Boer War, and Frances, appointed in 1909 to the Royal Commission on Divorce. Not just by entering political institutions, then, but by doing so on the grounds of sex and expertise, these political women deepened women’s claim to representation as a distinct interest. Although they lacked the Parliamentary franchise, it would be hard to describe such women as political ‘outsiders’. Frances, certainly, was a consummate insider—a woman not just with the impeccable family connections of political wives, but with a record of effective political and parliamentary work in her own right. But what would become of that status once suffrage became a popular movement, with a militant wing and with convictions about gender antagonism driving it? * * *  I am going to turn to that question now, but I first need to remind you of the party-political context of the last decade of the suffrage struggle. The 1906 election gave the Liberals an overwhelming majority; indeed, both Arthur and Gerald Balfour lost their seats, although Arthur, as party leader and outgoing Prime Minister, was found another immediately. But the new Liberal Government was not pledged to women’s suffrage: this is why the WSPU shouted, at one election meeting after another: ‘Will the Liberal Government give the vote to women’? That is, would the Liberals make women’s suffrage a party commitment, thus guaranteeing whipped votes and parliamentary time? This would have been a departure. Women’s suffrage had always been a cross-party measure, not least because both parties were divided on the question. As Millicent Fawcett wittily put it, the Conservatives offered generals but no army, with the urbane Balfours and Cecils favourable but many backbenchers opposed. The Liberals, by contrast, were an army without generals, for while most Liberal MPs were supportive, Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908, was (like Gladstone before him) viscerally and entirely hostile, while many of the radical leaders were anxious about the electoral impact of any limited measure, which was all that the Conservatives would stand.29 The Liberals would put democratization first, the Conservatives the defense of property first—and how could a women’s suffrage bill survive those antagonisms? Militancy didn’t solve this conundrum but it changed the question: women’s suffrage was about women, a group defined a priori by sex, whatever its members’ class or status. Militancy, one might say, asserted gender as the most meaningful category of social analysis, positing sex difference, even what people at the time called ‘sex antagonism’, as the key division structuring social and political life. Some constitutionalists found this thread in suffragette argument worrying. As Mrs. Fawcett wrote Frances, ‘as long as mothers have sons and fathers daughters there can never be a sex war’.30 But militant language and still more militant action suggested otherwise. The processions of women clad in pure white, the rushes on parliament, the spectacle of women brutalized by police, and above all the ‘instrumental rape’ of forcible feeding, all showcased women as a distinct and outsider class, performatively victimized by a state structured to defend the powers and rights of men qua men. That spectacle revitalized the suffrage cause. A press that had scarcely heeded the constitutionalist movement went after the militants, in Frances’ words, ‘as devoted lovers’.31 All suffrage organizations grew and new ones were established; recruits and money poured in; organizers and staff were hired; premises rented and papers founded. Militancy catalyzed another cross-party parliamentary effort too: the Conciliation Committee, chaired by Betty and Constance’s brother Lord Lytton, and masterminded by the political journalist Henry Noel Brailsford, whose wife was a militant. The fruits of their work, a ‘Conciliation Bill’ that would have enfranchised some one million women householders, for which the WSPU called a temporary truce and that was the best hope for suffrage in the prewar period, was introduced in three successive sessions, in 1910, 1911, and 1912. But Parliament, following the two 1910 elections fought over the powers of the Lords, was now evenly balanced between Liberals and Conservatives. The Asquith government was dependent on Irish nationalist votes and both parties very chary of any measures likely to cost them seats. Although the Conciliation Bill would pass in 1910 and 1911, it would not be granted facilities to move forward; in 1912 it would fail, scuppered by Asquith’s shocking announcement that the Government would introduce a Reform Bill expanding the male franchise and allow a women’s suffrage amendment on that instead. In the event, the Speaker ruled that course of action out of bounds, driving Betty to tell Margot that Asquith had pursued this course ‘with the express object of dishing the women’,32 and catalyzing the WSPU’s final desperate turn to property damage and arson. After 1912, parliamentary prospects for women’s suffrage were bleak indeed.33 So women’s suffrage became a mass movement in these years, but at a time of ferocious party conflict. What did that mean for the established, admittedly more genteel, suffrage movement, and for the activities and capacities of women politicians and political wives? Certainly it quickly made Frances’ behind-the-scenes activities, which turned on her ability to move freely around Parliament, more difficult. The WSPU’s efforts to mob ministers meant ‘a good many fusses round the House, which annoys me’, Frances reported in February of 1908; ridiculously, Asquith required an assurance that she and her constitutionalist allies would attempt no violence before he would see them.34 Worse, after two members of the Women’s Freedom League chained themselves to the grille in the Ladies Gallery and rained leaflets into the chamber, the Speaker closed the Ladies Gallery; it would not reopen for 6 months, and entry would then be restricted to MPs’ relatives.35 Frances still had unusual private access, reporting to Fawcett on conversations with Herbert Gladstone or Asquith (with whom she sometimes lunched),36 but she could no longer get in to watch debates or buttonhole ministers whenever she wished.37 Militant action, in other words, didn’t just expose women’s exclusion from political institutions; in some cases, it narrowed the access elite women already had. So the constitutionalists took their cue from the militants and stepped up their public activities; symbolically, they became ‘outsiders’ as well. They held a first rally in Trafalgar Square on a blustery November day in 1906, at which Frances spoke,38 and the following February, she and Mrs. Fawcett led some two or three thousand constitutionalists from Hyde Park to the Strand on ‘the vilest day, seas of mud’—a procession that became known as the Mud March.39 Frances and Fawcett were at the head of the ten-thousand, strong procession through London to the Albert Hall in June 1908, and from 1909 Frances also did an enormous amount of speaking, addressing audiences from Edinburgh to Plymouth, often three times a week. Her family, always inclined to view her commitments sardonically, took no notice; only Betty expressed ‘hot admiration’. ‘When you came back the other night, dead tired’, she wrote Frances, ‘I felt a great desire to behave as if you were Scott’s monument & bend my knee’.40 But the public bent the knee, one might say, not to Frances, with her third-class train tickets and witty speeches, but to a woman who had little political experience but whose behaviour evoked near-ancient tropes of female sacrifice. Lady Constance Lytton might seem like an unlikely candidate for suffragette heroine: an aristocratic 40-year old spinster in delicate health, living with her mother in a dower house on the Knebworth estate, devoted to music, gardening, and her nephews and nieces. But when Constance fell for the militants, she fell hard. In September 1908, she was full of admiration ‘for the devoted workers & martyrs in the cause’ but still questioned their tactics.41 By early 1909, she was willing to try militancy herself. Once persuaded that women were oppressed and inclined to feel guilty about her privilege anyway, the language and practices of religious devotion came naturally to her. Imprisoned for attempting to rush Parliament in February 1909—only 4 months after she had so lightly slipped in to see Ponsonby—she carved a ‘V’ for ‘Votes for Women’ into her chest.42 In prison again in Newcastle in October 1909, she professed herself ‘Oh so happy’.43 When she was released after hunger striking—because of her rank, she was certain—she was deeply ashamed. Determined to expose that unequal treatment, and to be found worthy of her suffragette friends, in January 1910 Constance disguised herself as plain ‘Jane Warton’, travelled to Liverpool with the aim of throwing a stone at Asquith’s car, was arrested for window-breaking, and hunger struck again. This time she was forcibly fed—repeatedly held down, gagged, and fed through a rubber tube—before her family finally discovered her. Her suffering electrified the movement, giving the WSPU their best celebrity martyr so far. She would speak of her ordeal, and later publish a classic account, but it surely contributed to the stroke she suffered in 1912, which left her partially paralyzed.44 It’s fair to say that this is not what titled women did, and Constance’s exploits sent shock waves through her family and social circles. They strained the Lyttons’ long friendship with Margot Asquith in particular. Margot was living out another role under pressure, for new Liberals were hardly comfortable with meddling by political wives—even had Margot’s tactlessness and poor judgment not lessened her influence, even had her husband not preferred to shower amorous attention and state secrets on his daughter’s friends.45 Threatening letters and rocks shied through her windows had already made Margot sharply hostile to the militants’ demands: ‘poor, poor Connie’, she wrote Frances, was ‘off her head’.46 But while Frances would also privately call Con ‘insane’,47 and would express sharp frustration about militant action—‘I begin to understand what Parnell felt when his followers murdered Lord Frederick!’ she wrote to Fawcett that same month48—she would never criticize the militants to Margot. In 1912, when the window-breaking raids began, she treated her instead to a detailed explanation of why all British reform movements had had their militant wings—the inevitable result of the unjust repression of a just cause.49 This is the kind of sophisticated understanding of context and process that a truly talented politician has, but Constance’s feminine self-sacrifice galvanized friends and family more. From 1909, partly to defend Constance, Betty too made women’s suffrage her cause. She was never a militant, but in letters and addresses she praised the high motives driving the militants’ actions and pointed out that they inflicted suffering only on themselves.50 In 1909 she joined the Executive of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, formed the previous year, accepting the Presidency of two Scottish branches and building up a Woking branch near Fishers Hill. During the campaigns for the Conciliation Bill in 1910 and 1911, she also did a great deal of public speaking—including a grueling Scottish tour—and spent much time lobbying Conservative politicians and her own relations.51 A hard woman to say no to, she persuaded A.J. Balfour to meet with Christabel and Annie Kenney in the run-up to the 1910 bill, and then with Constance and herself in the run-up to the 1911 one (not that they got more than courtesy from him)52; during the January 1910 election she extracted a statement that the Conservative Party would leave its candidates free to follow their own conscience.53 She insisted that her organization refuse to support Conservative candidates who were opposed to women’s suffrage and resigned the Presidency of the local Primrose League chapter when her MP voted against the Conciliation Bill.54 She made sure her brother Victor, leader of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and chairman of the Conciliation Committee, knew how much she appreciated his efforts.55 And the Lyttons’ suffragist commitments and loyalties stand out, especially in contrast to the hostility of Frances’ titled relations (her brother, now the 9th Duke, would support Lord Cromer’s anti-suffrage League56) and the growing ambivalence of the Balfours. The Balfours and the Cecils had consistently supported women’s suffrage, but never on grounds of abstract right and in A.J.’s case partly because he felt it wouldn’t have much effect. Indeed, if there were any chance of men and women having very different views on public policy, Arthur told Annie Kenney at that meeting arranged by Betty in January 1910, that would be ‘a strong, and even overwhelming, argument against Women’s Suffrage’.57 Moreover, as the suffrage movement became more militant and democratic, and as his personal relationship with Frances cooled, Arthur’s support weakened. (At a family lunch in 1904, with Frances absent, Arthur would quip that while he had once supported women’s suffrage, ‘watching Frances for many years had gradually changed his opinion!’58) The most Frances and Betty could get from him in 1910 was a speech supporting the Conciliation Bill at the second reading—a speech that, characteristically, downplayed the significance of the measure and its likely effects.59 He declined to press the Liberal government to let the bill go further.60 When it came up again in 1911 he simply paired with Asquith—he for, Asquith against—the two party leaders and old friends perfectly illustrating by their absence from the House how little they cared to deal with the issue at all.61 Betty’s husband Gerald, whose own career had benefited so greatly from her unstinting support as a political wife, was even less help. Like all the family, he would agree that Constance was ‘a saint upon earth’ but thought Asquith had no choice but to deal with the suffragettes as he had: after all, he told a family gathering one evening, government ministers were in office to pursue party programs, and it was ‘quite reasonable they should be allowed to differ on minor policies’.62 From 1906, when he retired from Parliament, Gerald would devote himself almost entirely to the Society for Psychical Research, even—in a truly strange episode—fathering a child with the medium and automatic writer ‘Mrs Willett’, otherwise Winifred Coombe Tennant, as part of a secret plan for world salvation. That torrid relationship would start in 1911, when Betty was pregnant with her sixth and last child, and would last 7 years, through which Gerald would dote on that ‘messianic’ son in a way he never doted on his own children. Betty welcomed lover and child to Fishers Hill, as she had welcomed Frances’s love for Gerald so many years earlier, but she later admitted that these were years of indescribable loneliness and misery. However demanding her suffrage commitments may have been, Betty surely found them a respite from her unhappy private life.63 And so Frances and Betty lived out the last years of the suffrage movement in tandem. Frances was now a widow, for Eustace died of the effects of his alcoholism in 1911, and Betty almost as good as one. By that date, the National Union’s wildfire growth and professionalization had taken parliamentary work largely out of Frances’s hands: that was managed, now, by an able team of idealistic younger women—Catherine Marshall, Kathleen Courtney, Helena Swanwick—who were a good deal more radical than Fawcett or Frances and who would resign in 1914 and 1915 over the Union’s support for the War. But Frances and Betty still managed a level of suffrage activism—writing, speaking, private lobbying, and even marching—that Betty at least could not have imagined 10 years earlier. Fawcett, Frances, Betty, and Con all walked in the all-organization 40,000-strong Women’s Coronation Procession on 17 June 1911—Betty with her Woking suffragists, Con with the contingent of suffragette prisoners, and Frances at the head of the National Union contingent with Fawcett. Frances and Betty would march too in the final stretch of the National Union’s cross-Britain suffrage pilgrimage in the summer of 1913, Betty leading her Woking branch and Frances the sixty branches of the London Federation, of which she was President.64 On neither of these occasions, so far as I can tell, would any of Frances’ sisters, or any of her three grown daughters, march with her.65 So it was that, by 1913, Frances and Betty were floating free of the politics of party and family, their lives transformed by a women’s movement that was for the first time without parliamentary prospects at all. And their trajectory is illuminating, for the constitutionalist movement as well had been remade. After the failure of the Conciliation Bills, finally entirely out of patience with the Liberal government, the National Union would come round to the position the WSPU had held and refuse to work for any more private bills.66 It would move instead into an alliance with Labour, the only party to have women’s suffrage in its platform, but at that stage much too tiny to have any prospect of forming a government. The militants, whom Frances thought now ‘drunk with vanity & the love of going a-warring’,67 would turn to property damage and arson and go into decline: by 1913, the number of WSPU branches had fallen to 90 and would spiral further. But the National Union, which had learnt so well from its example, was still growing: it would count 460 branches by 1913 and over 600 by the outbreak of the war, rivaling a political party.68 Its power was at once remarkable and, should gender not remain a key political divide, worrying. For the woman’s cause was now just that: a woman’s cause. Suffragists’ party and dynastic ties had frayed. And Parliament was more masculine than ever. * * *  The war broke through that impasse, forcing a franchise reform, one that gave the parliamentary vote to women on conditions that were chosen, hastily and arbitrarily, to yield a female electorate of a particular size. When some women over thirty first voted, in the election of 1918, Fawcett was 71, Frances Balfour 60, Margot Asquith 54, Betty 51, and Con 49. Fawcett essentially retired; in 1919 she would turn the leadership of what was now the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship over to Eleanor Rathbone. Constance lived as a semi-invalid at home; she would die in 1923, and Betty would edit her letters. Margot Asquith would scheme for Henry’s return to power, holding ‘your females who have voted Tory all over England’ (this written to Frances) responsible for his defeat in 1918.69 Were that charge true, it could only be the most perfect justice, given Asquith’s near single-handed destruction of the women’s movement’s long alliance with Liberalism. But what of Frances and Betty, female politician and political wife turned suffragist campaigners? Women were given the right to stand for Parliament only three weeks before the 1918 election. Sixteen women managed to do so, but only Constance Markievicz was elected—and as a Sinn Feiner, she would not take her seat. But both Frances and Betty were asked to stand—Frances for Glasgow Hillhead (the constituency later famously won by Roy Jenkins in 1982 for the Social Democratic Party), where her Argyll name and Whig credentials might have given her a chance, and Betty for her own solidly Conservative Surrey constituency, where her name, party ties, and dedicated record of local service would probably have put her in. I like to pause and imagine Betty, rather than Nancy Astor, as Britain’s first woman MP, but Betty wasn’t interested. She liked local political work and didn’t want to bother Gerald; decades later, when she came across Frances’ letter explaining how much the suffrage leadership would like her to stand, she couldn’t even recall that she had been asked to do so.70 But Frances must have found passing up the chance to sit as a member in the chamber she had observed from behind the grille for three decades bitter indeed, especially if—as her biographer Joan Huffman surmises—A.J.’s insistence that the family could not afford the cost of an election fight was the main factor barring her way.71 For A.J., who had inherited two estates and a vast fortune had by this stage squandered something on the order of 300,000 pounds on the stock market and on an ill-judged venture to turn peat into a fuel to rival oil; when he died in 1930, Whittingehame was heavily mortgaged and the bulk of the family fortune gone. Gerald, obsessively analyzing reams of automatic writing, would do nothing to restore it. Betty kept her house going as well as she could, occasionally asking her brother to advance her quarterly payment on her settlement,72 and Frances kept hers going as well as she could by her pen—turning out well-reviewed biographies of important Scotsmen and women, occasional journalism, and a evocative two-volume autobiography.73 Frances destroyed her correspondence with Eustace as she sorted her records for that last project and left all her other letters to Betty.74 Frances died in 1931, one obituary after another saying that, had she been born a man or in another time, she would have been a great Prime Minister.75 Betty spent much of the next decade editing, weeding and supplementing that correspondence; she died, untroubled by the wartime requisitioning of Fishers Hill, in 1942. Her grandson would place her whole compilation, some 80 volumes, in the Scottish Record Office—possibly the best record we have of the way elite women lived out, in her case without regret or complaint, the end of one political order and the beginnings of another. * * *  One could call that new order ‘democracy’, but it was something more. For Britain in 1918 took a decisive step away from a social and political order in which gender was a fundamental, in some ways the fundamental, divide. The suffrage movement was at once the most impressive product of, and the most profound challenge to, that system. And, for reasons that had only partly to do with the brilliance, inventiveness and sheer drive towards martyrdom of the militant wing of that movement—always a female strength, martyrdom—that challenge succeeded. Women could now vote for parliament, stand for parliament, and hold ministerial posts. They found, however, that they could not make their way after 1918 the way they had before, coming out of the world of women and reform, running as independents, sustained by their separate organizations, and bearing in their difference some necessary supplement to the male political world. At the local level, women would find their energies welcomed by parties and municipal movements: the number of women on County Councils would jump from twelve to 46 in the spring 1919 elections; that November, the number of women on London’s 28 borough councils would burgeon from 36 to 134.76 Women found the House of Commons much stonier ground. There were lots of men in the queue for winnable seats before them, and the suffrage leaders, who had learned the hard way to be sceptical of parties, had a particularly terrible time finding a party home. Many would go off into internationalism and pacifism or remain in the world of voluntary service and social reform. Few suffragists and suffragettes entered parliament, although the Duchess of Atholl, a leading anti, did as a Conservative—Frances Balfour telling her she should enter the chamber as a penitent, ‘clothed in a white sheet, with a candle in either hand’.77 Interwar Conservative and Liberal women MPs were sometimes wives inheriting their husbands’ seats, interwar women Labour MPs often single women with strong records in the labour movement. And women’s representation in the Commons would remain, really until the New Labour landslide of 1997, infinitesimally small. I return to Fawcett’s successor Eleanor Rathbone, time and again, because she was, I think, one of the few people—male or female—who was able to work doggedly for the end of that prewar gender order but also to understand the cost of its ending. Casting her lot entirely with women, Rathbone had broken with her family’s historic Liberalism and first ran for Parliament in the Liverpool constituency of East Toxteth in 1922 as an Independent. Observers thought that if any woman could win as an Independent, she could: she had a straight fight against a Conservative, plenty of money, a distinguished name, and an unmatchable 25 year record of local service. But she didn’t win; as an Independent she could only enter parliament in 1929 through a university seat—those seemingly undemocratic anomalies abolished by Attlee’s Labour Government after the Second World War.78 Unlike Frances Balfour, who was intuitive and attuned to personality, Rathbone was analytical and attuned to structure. Long before she entered the Commons, there to chisel away at one bulwark of privilege after another, she knew that joining male bastions was only the precondition for feminist reform; the real work was to reform the structure of society—including and especially the way it remunerated the unwaged labour of care—so as to offer women as well as men truly equal chances for autonomy, fulfillment, and power. The suffrage movement strove for equal political rights merely as the gateway to that truer equality; the real work still lay ahead. But how does one enter a world built for men, and at once inhabit it, and change it? Every one of the women I’ve discussed, with the possible exception of Margot Asquith, grappled with this question. We are still grappling with it today. Acknowledgement The author is grateful that Gerald Balfour, grandson of Gerald and Betty Balfour and fourth Earl Balfour, granted the author permission to use the Balfour Papers in the Scottish Record Office, for which he held copyright, more than two decades ago and regrets that she was so tardy in returning to this wonderful collection. Footnotes 1 But note Ian Fletcher’s analysis of how the WSPU used the ‘Rush on the Commons’ trial to claim political agency and challenge that ‘outsider’ status. See, Ian Christopher Fletcher, ‘“A Star Chamber of the Twentieth Century”: Suffragettes, Liberals, and the 1908 “Rush on the Commons” Case’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (October 1996), 504–30. 2 Lady Constance Lytton to her mother, 14 October 1908, in Letters of Lady Constance Lytton, ed. Betty Balfour (London, 1925), 138–41. 3 Scottish Record Office [SRO], Balfour Papers, GD433/2/344, Frances Balfour [FB] to Betty Balfour [BB], 16 October 1912. 4 For aristocratic women’s political roles, see especially, K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998), which has much about Harriet Sutherland and some information about Frances’ mother Elizabeth. 5 Lady Frances Balfour, Ne Obliviscaris – Dinna Forget, vol. 1 (London, 1930), 16–7. 6 SRO, GD433/2/296, Gerald Balfour [GWB] to FB, 5 December 1882. 7 The conflict over Eustace’s drinking, which pitted his sister Alice against Frances, and which A.J. Balfour [AJB] was forced to mediate, is laid out in correspondence contained in SRO, GD433/2/162. For Eustace’s admission that his habit was fifteen years old, see fols. 3-5, FB to AJB, n.d. [1897]. 8 SRO, GD433/2/298, FB to Alice Balfour, 26 November 1885. 9 SRO, GD433/2/299, fol. 35-40, FB to BB, undated [July 1887]. 10 SRO, GD433/2/299, fol. 41, BB to FB, 27 July 1887. 11 Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Family Homespun (London, 1940), 65. 12 For a vivid account of Gerald and Betty’s life in Ireland, see Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall (1937; rpt. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991), 230-–69. 13 For that policy, one Gerald described (deludedly) as ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’, see esp. David R. C. Hudson, The Ireland That We Made: Arthur and Gerald Balfour’s Contribution to the Origins of Modern Ireland (Akron, OH, 2003). Betty’s angry reply to Frances’ attacks on Gerald is in SRO, GD433/2/317/6-8, BB to FB, 6 September 1896. 14 Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860-1914 (Oxford, 1986), 189–249. 15 Cecil Papers, Hatfield, CHE 58/65, Lady Salisbury to FB, 11 February 1897. 16 For these campaigns, see Joan B. Huffman, Lady Frances: Frances Balfour, Aristocrat Suffragist (2018), 83–4, 86, 117. 17 See, e.g., Grille, ‘A Lady’s Impressions of the House of Commons’, The National Review, September 1898, 116–22. Frances published similar impressions of Parliament in 1899 and 1900. 18 Frances and Fawcett were both so angry about the Tariff Reform campaign that they just wanted the WLUA wound up; when the Executive was captured by tariff reformers, they resigned instead. See, Women’s Library [WL], Autograph collection, FB to Millicent Garrett Fawcett [MGF], 17 October, 24 October, 30 October and 1 November 1903, and 17 March 1904; and Ian Cawood, The Liberal Unionist Party: A History (London, 2012), 235–6. 19 These characterizations from: Rubinstein, Different, 313; Constance Rover, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866-1914 (London, 1967), 28; and Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1914 (1974; rpt Aldershot, 1993), 12. 20 For the appeal, Rubinstein, Different, 135, and for FB’s efforts to have it displayed in the Commons’ library, WL, FB to MGF, 24 April 1896. 21 WL, FB to MGF, 7 December 1891. 22 WL, FB to MGF, 7 June 1899. 23 For her efforts with Salisbury and Argyll, see WL, FB to MGF, 23 Nov. 1893; Balfour’s speech in favor of women’s suffrage is in 3 H.C. Deb. (27 April 1892), cols. 1524–30; for Wyndham’s commitment see WL, FB to MGF, 9 May 1895; for Frances’ sisters-in-law Nora Sidgwick’s and Lady Rayleigh’s participation in a reception, see the Annual Report of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (1892). 24 SRO, GD433/2/318/13-16, FB to Baffy, February 1897. It is possible that Fawcett’s absence was an advantage, for David Rubinstein is right to note the extent to which Fawcett’s strident unionism alienated Liberals; in 1894, her puritanical and successful campaign to deselect his friend Harry Cust as candidate for a Manchester constituency seriously damaged her relations with Balfour and other Conservatives as well. Frances’ relations with male politicians were a great deal more pragmatic and cordial. See Rubinstein, A Different World for Women: The Life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett (Columbus, 1991), esp. 87–9, 118–19. 25 Ben Griffin notes that measures to remove sexual disabilities within the context of a ‘householder’ franchise appealed partly because—since only one member of the ‘household’, normally the man, could vote—they sidestepped any prospect of enfranchising married women with co-resident husbands and thus introducing political discord within the family. See, Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (2012), esp. 268–76. 26 Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914 (Oxford, 1987), 323; FB, letter to George Saintsbury of 1899, quoted in Ne Obliviscaris, vol. 2, 155. 27 Elaine Harrison, Women members and witnesses on British Government ad hoc Committees of Inquiry, 1850-1930, with special reference to Royal Commissions of Inquiry, DPhil., LSE, 1998, 31–2. 28 Hollis, Ladies Elect, 463. 29 Millicent Garrett Fawcett, The Women’s Victory – and After (London, 1920), 125. 30 WL, MGF to FB, 5 March 1910. 31 FB, Ne Obliviscaris, vol. 2, 144. 32 Bodleian Library, Mss Eng. D. 3283, 74–7, BB to Margot, 18 November 1911. 33 Much of the enormous literature on the suffrage movement after 1900 has focused on the militants and their vivid culture of protest; for a readable recent synthesis, see Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (London, 2018). For the political strategies of the constitutional organizations and their complex negotiations with the Liberal government, see especially: Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 1986); Jo Vellacott, From Liberal to Labour with Women’s Suffrage: The Story of Catherine Marshall (Montreal, 1993); Leslie Parker Hume, The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 1897-1914 (New York, 1982); Mitzi Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists: The Women’s Vote and the Tory Party (London, 2007); and Martin Pugh, Electoral Reform in War and Peace, 1906-18 (London, 1978). Historians continue to disagree sharply over the impact of militancy, the significance of the National Union’s late alliance with Labour, Asquith’s motives in choosing to introduce a Reform Bill in 1912 (which effectively doomed the Conciliation Bill), and the impact of the suffrage movement on the Liberal Party. 34 SRO, GD433/2/337, FB to Frank Balfour [her son], 1 February 1908. 35 For that protest, see ‘Review of Parliament’, Times, 29 October 1908, 10, and for the new rules, Times, 27 May 1909, 6; also Laura Nym Mayhall, ‘Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1908-1909’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (July 2000), 340–71, here at 357–9. 36 SRO, GD433/2/339, 6, FB to BB, 18 August 1909; WL, FB to MGF, 24 November 1910. 37 SRO, GD433/2/339, FB to Frank, 3 December 1909. 38 SRO, GD, 433/2/273, FB to BB, 30 October 1906 and GD433/2/334, 19, FB to ?, 6 November 1906. 39 SRO, GD433/2/335, 32, FB to Frank, 14 February 1907. 40 SRO, GD433/2/339/65, BB to FB, 11 December 1909. 41 SRO, GD433/2/337, 103, Con to A.T. [Aunt Theresa Earle], 20 September 1908. 42 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences (New York, 1914), 164–7. 43 SRO, GD433/2/339, 33–5, Con to her mother, October 1909. 44 A great deal has been written about Constance Lytton’s suffragette activities, including a good recent biography by Lyndsey Jenkins, Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr (London, 2015). 45 Jalland notes that Margot’s indiscretion lessened her influence and made Asquith cautious about confiding in her (Jalland, 202–4); for Asquith’s own, more serious, indiscretions, esp. with Venetia Stanley, see, most recently, Stefan Buczacki, My Darling Mr. Asquith (London, 2016). 46 SRO, GD433/2/339, 36–8, Margot to FB, 13 October 1909. 47 SRO, GD433/2/339, 19, FB to BB, 2 October 1909. 48 WL, FB to MGF, 4 October 1909. 49 Bodleian, MS Eng. C. 6670, fol. 131–8, FB to Margot, 5 March 1912. 50 See Betty’s letters to The Times: 26 Feb. 1909, 7; 15 March 1912, 4. 51 Betty’s work with the CUWFA has been excavated by Mitzi Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists, esp. 101–7, 142, 154–5, 164, 172–4. 52 BL, Add. MS 49793, fol. 144–9, Constance Lytton to AJB, 26 September, 7 October and 8 October 1909; Add. MS 49831, fol. 113, BB to AJB, 26 April 1911. 53 SRO, GD433/2/339, 54-6, BB to AJB, 20 November 1909. 54 Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists, 154, and see ‘Lady Betty Balfour and the Primrose League,’ The Times, 30 July 1910, 9. 55 Knebworth, Lytton papers, 01128, BB to Victor Lytton, 31 July 1910. 56 Inveraray Castle, Bundle 423, Cromer to Argyll [Ian Campbell, 9th Duke], 18 July 1910. 57 BL Add. MS 49793, fol. 121-3, AJB to Kenney, 3 January 1910. 58 SRO, GD433/2/330, GWB to BB, 16 March 1904. 59 19 H.C. Deb., 5th ser., 12 July 1910, cols. 254–66. 60 BL, Add Ms. 49831, fol. 108, AJB to BB, 16 June 1910. 61 Ibid., fols. 110–12, AJB to BB, 26 April 1911; AJB was more apologetic in SRO, GD433/2/342, AJB to BB, ‘very private’, 8 May 1911. 62 This is Edwin Lutyens’ paraphrase of Gerald’s ‘beautifully put’ and ‘very Geraldian’ views; see Edwin Lutyens to Emily Lutyens, 16 August 1909, in Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley, eds., The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his wife Lady Emily (London, 1985), 177–8. 63 The frankly bizarre story of Gerald’s liaison with Winifred Coombe Tennant, and of their deliberate conception of a ‘messianic child’, was known to a few members of the Society for Psychical Research but was kept secret, including from the child Henry Coombe Tennant, who only learned of his true parentage in late middle age. The story was told from the paranormal perspective by Archie E. Roy, The Eager Dead: A Study in Haunting (Sussex, 2008); more recently, Peter Lord has produced a fine scholarly edition of Winifred’s diary, which provides a full account of the relationship: Between Two Worlds: The Diary of Winifred Coombe Tennant, 1909–24 (Aberystwyth, 2011). 64 On the pilgrimage, see esp. Jane Robinson, Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote (London, 2018), and for Betty, Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists, 189. 65 In her autobiography, Frances mentions that her family members were ‘conspicuous for their absence’, although one daughter followed in a carriage—‘I believe…to pick up my pieces’—and her teenage son Oswald joined her, ‘beguiling the long trek by his talk’. FB, Ne Obliviscaris, vol. 2, 171. 66 The impact of the suffrage movement on the Liberal Party is not my subject here, but it deserves more sustained investigation. Many years ago, Peter Clarke concluded that ‘new Liberalism’s failure was not over social democracy but political democracy’: the Party could not introduce a further reform measure in the Edwardian era without including women’s suffrage; Asquith’s unwillingness to face up to this—owing, I would argue, to his deep misogyny—was thus ‘the most serious criticism that can be made of his leadership’. See, Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), 399. Clarke, unfortunately, never followed up on this critical insight, his own 400-page monograph paying almost no attention to the impact of the suffrage movement on the party’s prospects. Martin Pugh and Claire Hirshfield have shown, however, how Asquith’s hostility and the party’s prevarication on suffrage bled women (especially activist women) out of the party in the years before World War I. See, Pugh, ‘The Limits of liberalism: Liberals and Women’s Suffrage, 1867-1914’, in Eugenio Biagini, Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865-1931 (Cambridge, 1996), 45–65; Claire Hirshfield, ‘Fractured Faith: Liberal Party Women and the Suffrage Issue in Britain, 1892-1914,’ Gender & History, 2 (Summer 1990), 173–97. 67 SRO, GD433/2/344, 32-3, FB to BB[?], 4 March 1912 68 Branch figures from Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists, 105, and Rubinstein, Different World, 168. 69 SRO, GD433/2/363, Margot Asquith to FB, 1 January 1919. 70 SRO, GD433/2/362, 60–1, 66–7, FB to BB, 9 November 1918, and note by BB, 1938. 71 Huffman, Lady Frances, 183. 72 For example, Lytton Papers, Knebworth, LH5/40620, BB to Vic, May 1, 1930. 73 In addition to regular journalism and her two-volume autobiography published in 1930 Frances published: Lady Victoria Campbell: A Memoir (New York, 1911); Life and Letters of the Reverend James MacGregor (London, 1912); Dr. Elsie Inglis (New York, 1918); The Life of George, Fourth Earl of Aberdeen, 2 vols. (London, 1922); A Memoir of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, K.T. (London, 1925). 74 Frances mentions re-reading and destroying her correspondence with Eustace in a letter to AJB, SRO, GD433/2/231/142, FB to AJB, 24 October 1927. 75 See the obituaries collected in SRO, GD433/2/382, esp. Sunday Dispatch, 1 March 1931; Daily Express, 26 February 1931; Evening Standard, 26 February 1931. 76 Edith How Martyn, “Urban District Council Elections,” Woman’s Leader, 10: 521 (4 April 1919), 633; “Successful Women Candidates in the Metropolitan Borough Council Elections,” Woman’s Leader, 11: 552 (7 November 1919), 386. 77 Balfour, Ne Obliviscaris, vol. 2, 113. 78 For that election fight in East Toxteth, Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, 2004), 199–201. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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TI - Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2018The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Balfour Family
JF - Twentieth Century British History
DO - 10.1093/tcbh/hwz010
DA - 2019-09-01
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