Great-aunts, grandmothers, and women's history, by Gillian Polack

It’s Women’s History Month in Australia (and in the US) and I meant to write a delightful piece about something entirely different, but on Wednesday I took my regular students to see an exhibition on British women’s suffrage. It struck me that, although most women were given the vote in Australia at Federation, women’s lives from that generation that saw all the Suffrage debates – from the moment Australian women got the vote to 1920s when US women could vote and learned how to use it, show that it was only a partial victory.

I could focus on politics for this, or talk about income levels and glass ceilings, but today I’m thinking of grandmothers. Not all grandmothers. Women who took care of spouse, children and households born from the 1890s to the 1910s. Those who were part of these big changes the way I was part of another wave of big changes in the 1960 – they were the first generation expected to blossom. We often think of this period as changing women’s lives. And it did, in many countries in some very important ways. The truth of the everyday wasn’t as glamorous for many, many women.

I often talk about two of my great-aunts, who ran their own business. They were the ultimate glamorous working women in Melbourne, in some ways, for they ran an exclusive shop on an exclusive street and were regularly consulted by the papers about incoming fashion. They were fashionable … and they were hit by the Great Depression. A wonderful roller-coaster set of lives that doesn’t make most books. I put this picture of the arcade their shop was in up on Redbubble the other day, to celebrate them. They can't get books, but they can have t-shirts and journals.

Also, an influential pair of sisters, during their lives. They were forgotten by the press immediately after, however, for women are not expected to leave lasting legacies. A generation later their niece ran a successful business when life proved less than supportive. That was what she did during the day. Her spare time was devoted to arts and crafts, at which she had a real talent. She had to (she told me) work all this out for herself: the family career tradition was not quite that. It was more that women didn’t get much support when things went wrong. My great-aunts’ problem was that they had never married and my aunt’s that she was a widow. All three of them were born during this critical moment in women’s history. All three of them voted.

Popular literature during this period often contains the message that women’s lives were not complicated, that women’s main purpose was to support the men in their lives. The reality is that the vast majority of women’s lives in Britain, Australia, the US and other similar countries were reported to look the way popular literature described them, but they were not. My grandmother divorced and was not given any money to support herself that I know of. She took her cooking talent and made sweets for a living. 

Three sisters of that family earned their way through life. In my generation we were expected to go to university and then earn our way through life, but decades earlier, few women were given that privilege. They were literate (which has been typical of Australia for a fair while now) but left school when it was legal. Some of the males of that same generation went to university and some did not, but it wasn’t until my mother finished school that university was open to women. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that it became open to anyone bright enough and with a good enough high school result. Women who had the vote weren’t allowed to be equal in all things. Not in public image, not in decorum, not in education, and not in work.

When I talk about this to a live audience, there is always someone who says “Men missed out on stuff, too.” This is true. However, the public narratives gave them more choices. If a teenage boy was very bright and wanted to go to university, he could, for instance. For the women in the family, even though the local universities were accepting women into degrees by the time they were old enough to apply… they weren’t encouraged to apply. In fact, quite the opposite. My mother was the first woman (in an educated family) to get a university degree. That wasn’t until the 1950s.

Simple narratives are wonderful. That women got the vote was great. That –  in Australia – Indigenous women were not equal to other women until much later is forgotten in the triumphal account. The everyday life is where we find out whether that simple, triumphant narrative is accurate.

Private lives tell us so much about what actually happened to women and help explain and refine our understanding of those magnificent narratives. For me it’s the difference between those who decided on the suffragette colours and marched with them, and the smaller realty of most of our lives. The big history is important, but it’s not the whole story.

A Vote for Isabella Tod

Today, as every History Girl knows, marks the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which granted the franchise to women over thirty. When I realised that my regular History Girls post would fall on this day, I felt a tremendous weight of responsibility. What to say? Who to celebrate? So many of my posts, especially since Star By Star was published, have been on this very subject. I didn’t want to repeat myself.

There are so many suffrage heroines I could honour – the Pankhursts, of course, especially Sylvia for whom I’ve always had particular respect; Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Winfred Carney, both of whom I’ve discussed in detail in recent posts; Millicent Fawcett; Annie Kenney… and so many, as in every struggle, completely unknown and unsung.

Last week, walking up Botanic Avenue to my office at Queen’s University, Belfast, pondering this issue, I happened to look up and catch sight of a blue plaque. And there was my answer. I had heard, of course, of Isabella Tod, the 19^th century campaigner, but didn’t know as much as I should have done about her remarkable commitment to women’s rights. Which made me think many History Girls readers might also like to know more.

Scottish-born Isabella Tod (1836-1896) spent most of her life in Belfast where she campaigned for women’s rights; not only the vote but education, property and civil liberties. She wrote for several papers, helped fight the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s and helped establish several important girls’ schools, including my own old school, Victoria College, originally the Ladies’ Collegiate School (1859). She was a passionate believer in educating girls, organising a delegation to travel to London to persuade the government to include females in the 1878 Intermediate Education Act.  

A Presbyterian and a Liberal, she was opposed to Irish Home Rule, which puts her on the ‘other side’ of Irish history to revolutionaries like Winifred Carney and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, who combined feminism with republicanism. And perhaps, with her commitment to temperance and unionism, she seems less radical than these later women, but her contribution to suffrage was unequalled in 19^th century Ireland. The North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Committee, set up by Tod in 1871, was the first suffrage society in the country, and Tod addressed meetings all over Ireland, establishing the North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Society in 1873.

We sometimes forget today that women were granted the municipal franchise – the right to vote in local elections, in 1869 in England. Ireland was slower to grant this, but it is thanks to Tod that rate-paying Belfast women were granted that right in 1887, while women in other Irish towns had to wait until 1898, which was two years after Tod’s death at the age of only sixty.  

Tod travelled widely in Ireland and Britain, sharing platforms with allies from all over the country. She was highly regarded in her lifetime, on both sides of the Irish Sea, and is celebrated today as probably the most significant Irish feminist of the 19^th century.  What struck me most about Tod’s life was the sheer amount of campaigning she managed to cram into her sixty years. Like Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, she had many concerns and passions, but her feminism was at the heart of it all.

She did not live to see the Representation of the People Act in 1918. Like so many Victorian women, she paved the way for the next generation, just like the suffragettes  and the women who fought for other rights subsequently did for us. I hope we can be worthy of them.

Putting Words In Their Mouths by Sheena Wilkinson

There’s historical fiction and historical fiction.

I’ve never written about real people. Much as I admire, for example, Wolf Hall, I can’t imagine having the confidence, or the desire, to breathe fictional life into a well-known historical figure. My historical novels for teens, Name Upon Name (2015) and Star By Star (out 26 October) are about ordinary people living through times of political and social upheaval (something any sentient person in 2017 knows a great deal about.)

 My characters are often on the fringes of activity, because of their youth or their gender. Star By Star is about 15-year-old Stella, who has always looked forward to changing the world. It's what she was brought up to do, by a suffragette mother who knew all about fighting and rebellion. But it's November 1918. The flu pandemic sweeping the world has robbed Stella of her mother and her home, and she's alone in a strange country (Ireland).  But change is coming - the war is over, and women are about to vote for the first time. History is being made, and Stella wants to help make it, even if that simply means helping one woman – former suffragette hunger striker Rose, to cast her vote.

Many active suffragettes, who had suffered for the cause, still weren’t old enough to vote in 1918, or didn’t fulfill the ‘householder or married to a householder’ criteria. Rose is old enough, and keen to vote beside her husband – as a working class man, it’s his first time being enfranchised as well – but she’s living on an isolated farm, heavily pregnant, and has no way to get to the polling station. How many woman in 1918 would have loved to vote, but, like Rose, were prevented by practical difficulties – not least, the fact that the world was in the grip of one of the deadliest pandemics in human history?

Unlike most suffragette narratives, Star By Star is a suffragette novel set after the fight; after the campaigns and the hunger strikes and the fighting, when the vote has been (partially) won. Stella’s heroines are from the generation above her – her mother and her friends, women like Rose. As a young feminist in the 1980s, I too looked to the generation above me, the ‘second wave’ feminists of the sixties and seventies, whose Women’s Movement gave me a context and a language to explore what it meant to be a young woman at the end of the twentieth century.

I must admit, I didn’t pin pictures of feminist icons on my teenage walls but Stella does: I arranged my magazine pictures of my heroines, Sylvia Pankhurst and Winifred Carney, who both fought for women’s rights.

Winifred Carney 

Readers of this blog will recognise Sylvia Pankhurst’s name, but possibly not that of Winifred Carney? Maria Winifred (Winnie) Carney was a leading Irish suffragist, but like most early twentieth century revolutionaries, she was a great deal more: heavily involved in the fight for Irish independence and workers’ rights, she was famously at James Connolly’s side in the GPO at the Easter Rising in 1916. She was one of the first female parliamentary candidates, standing as a candidate for Sinn Féin in 1918. Given that my novel was set around the election and that Winifred was Stella’s heroine, I had to include this in Star By Star.

 ‘Winifred is standing in Belfast!’ [Rose] said one day.

…She made a face. ‘East Belfast. Safe unionist seat.’ She sighed. ‘She hasn’t got a hope. Not like Countess Markievicz in Dublin. She’ll get in all right.’

‘But there must be lots of women – factory workers and the like – who’d vote for Winifred because of her trade unionism. I mean, she stands for workers’ rights and –’

‘Of course she does. But she was in the GPO in 1916, and then imprisoned by the British government. Unionist women will see that before they see what she’s done for working women.’

‘But that’s awful!’ Instantly I wanted to go to Belfast and help Winifred to campaign. I imagined myself standing on a soapbox, shouting Vote for Carney! Vote for a woman!

Rose shrugged. ‘It’s how it is here. Being a unionist or a nationalist trumps anything else.’

‘Maybe that’ll change*,’ I suggested.

(*It hasn’t. Sadly.)

Researching for the novel, I became fascinated by Winifred Carney, who embodies so many of the contradictions of Irish history. I even broke my own rule of not putting words into the mouths of real historical figures, by inventing a conversation between Winifred and Rose. Rose’s husband Charlie is one of the many thousands of Irish nationalists who fought in the British army in the Great War. Often they were shunned by their communities on their return, and until recently the Irish state has been reluctant to acknowledge their sacrifice. Winifred Carney, in 1928, married George McBride, a fellow trade unionist and socialist who had fought at the Somme. Far from being a nationalist, he was in fact a former UVF volunteer, and Winfred, like the fictional Rose, incurred the wrath of the Republican movement. I risked giving the real Winifred an opinion on the fictional Rose’s situation, based on her own subsequent history:

 ‘Winnie!’ Rose said. ‘I knew her quite well in Belfast.’

‘Really? Oh my!’

‘We went to a lot of the same meetings. Some of the people in the Republican cause weren’t happy when I married Charlie – him having fought for the King – but Winnie stood by me. She said the cause of labour was bigger than that.’

Winifred and George McBride

This is as close as I’ve ever got to trying to breath life into an actual historical figure. I hope Winifred would approve. I know Stella and Rose do. 

Deeds not words by Sheena Wilkinson

Not everything I saw on TV was so benign

It is 1974. Or 1975. Or 1973. The television news is on. Belfast.  I’m standing in my school uniform. Mummy brushes my hair and says, Don’t look. Somewhere has been blown up. Rubble fills the screen. She plaits my hair too tight. Later I hear someone say that an old lady’s legs have been blown off. I live in Belfast. I am living through history. I am aware of this, though I never speak about it. The blown-off legs follow me through dreams until I wonder if I imagined the whole thing.

It is 2017. We are living in interesting times. We wonder how history will judge us. The whole world is crazy, and here in Northern Ireland, where we are good at crazy, where our very existence, clinging to the edge of the UK, the edge of Ireland, the edge of Europe, is somehow preposterous, political scandal and the breakdown of power-sharing lead to a snap election.

I am enraged. I am bruised by years of voting and never getting what I voted for. I am saddened that every election in Northern Ireland seems to polarise us more. I want to hide until it’s over and then hide some more. I want to tell myself not to look at the screen.

SF using 1918 posters 

But funnily enough I am writing a novel about the election of December 1918. When women in Britain voted for the first time in parliamentary elections, and, in Ireland, when Sinn Fein won the landslide that led – after another bloody war – to an independent Ireland and eventual partition. The novel is for teens, and it’s been hard to make the election exciting. Suffragettes are exciting, but that was an earlier story. My heroine lives in rural Ireland, and her desire to change the world is hampered by that, as well as by the fact that everyone tells her the battle has been won. I love my heroine, Stella, who is braver than I. I love her determination and fighting spirit and how she grows to understand that yes, she can change the world, but not alone, and not overnight.

It’s strange, perhaps, to be influenced by a fictional character of one’s own invention, but that’s what happened to me when it was announced that there would be NI Assembly elections on 2 March, only ten months after we had last gone to the polls. I’d recently joined the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the progressive, non-sectarian party I’d always voted for, and had met the local association, a diverse lot of people who embodied the desire for a new, modern Northern Ireland. But was I prepared to get properly involved? To tramp the streets, knock on doors, give out leaflets, ask for their votes for our candidate? To risk doors slammed in my face? I would speak on a stage in front of a thousand people more happily than I would knock a stranger’s door.

Winifred Carney, my heroine's heroine

Stella would do it, I thought, and I signed up. As I canvassed in the February frosts and rainstorms, I thought of the women who had fought for my right to do this. I remembered Stella’s heroine, the republic socialist and suffragist Winfred Carney, who stood in 1918, in an east Belfast ward she had no hope of winning.

Our candidate did brilliantly. There were five seats available and it was a close fight between him and a bigger party for that last seat. Turnout in our constituency was up by more points than in any other. For a few hours, there was the cruelty of hope, and even when it was dashed, we can say that we moved things forward.

Now the election is over and the result is, depending on how you look at it, a depressing reaffirmation of the status quo of division and suspicion; or the opportunity for real progress. Only time will tell. The election of 2017 might turn out to be as significant as that of 1918, or it might not.

Once again I have been aware of living through history. But this time I learned that being engaged feels much better than being merely enraged. Deeds, not words, as the suffragettes would have reminded me.