Were suffragettes responsible for World War One?

Suffragettes and War

By about 1700 and for two centuries subsequently, conflicts between European nations had become practically ritualized. Casualties were few, since the combatants on both sides consisted mostly of temporary conscripts, conscious that their role was merely to enable some nobleman to prove himself in courage and tactics to his peers. They could shortly be fighting on the other side. According to Veale, these minor wars were often abandoned once injuries had been sustained and the outcome was apparent.2

The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was formed in 1903 and in 1910 publicly declared that it was in a “state of war” with the British Government.3 A campaign of insurrection and arson followed, plus hunger strikes by prisoners. On the declaration of war against Germany on 4 August 1914 Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel declared a truce for its duration, and six days later the British government released all suffragette prisoners. This culminated in the granting of voting rights to women by parliament in January 1918, 10 months before the end of the war.

The franchise was given to women even before being widely available to men: at that time only male property owners were able to vote. Lord Curzon, Sir Oswald Mosley’s father-in-law, argued in opposing the bill that limiting the vote to women over 30 was a wholly arbitrary restriction which could not last. He told parliament that extending the franchise to women was “a vast, incalculable, and almost catastrophic change… which was without precedent in history and without justification in experience.”4 Curzon, like many others since, claimed that having given women the vote it could never be withdrawn, but this is a short-sighted view.

As Steve Moxon pointed out in The Woman Racket, women were already able to vote on local matters. Actually, at this time married ‘society’ women were automatically given responsibility for the hiring of domestic staff, so were the single biggest group of employers. To grant national voting rights to middle and upper-class women, as demanded by the suffragettes, was to consolidate their elevation above millions of working men.

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In the carnage of the First World War, the military traditions of the previous two centuries were shed; thenceforth Europeans would fight each other with no holds barred. F. J. P. Veale described the situation as follows:

From patriotic motives, at first to assist the war effort and later to justify the dictated terms of peace, professional historians, many of them men of great eminence and learning, laboured to confirm and endorse the Wicked Kaiser Myth. Once however this had been exposed as an impudent propaganda fiction, they failed to find any generally acceptable explanation for the blind homicidal frenzy which seized the nations of Europe during the period, 1914-1918, and ultimately they became resigned to leaving the problem for solution to the psychologists and psychiatrists.5

We should ask, and seek a satisfactory answer to the question: Was it a coincidence that the British government capitulated to women at precisely the same moment in history that it directed a blood feud of a savagery unknown for centuries? Extraordinary lengths were taken to prevail in the First World War, and extraordinary measures were taken rather than accede to the German and American peace overtures which were made, especially during December 1916.

It is generally acknowledged that the First World War directly led to the Second.

Displacement of Enemy

It is proposed that instincts are never annulled, they are only displaced. If an instinct cannot be expressed in its proper, natural way, it will always find expression in some other, invariably less satisfactory way. If, as seems reasonable to suppose, instincts are impelling, and war practically inevitable, being a masculine impulse and unlikely ever to completely disappear, the selection of enemy is of paramount importance.

One of Darwin’s observations is relevant: that “the competition is always the most severe between the most closely allied species.” The British and German populations are genetically very similar. Another proposal is that ‘females make small differences larger.’

A man who has lost control at home can seek to dominate elsewhere. This displacement idea can be extended to a national leader, perhaps an American president. He must have a great lust for power to attain such a position and it is not surprising that once installed he wishes to “flex his muscles” and exercise some real power. However his options for doing so at home are limited. His masculine instinct to dominate and subdue may be exercised far away instead.

It may be said (with justification, but which is beyond the scope of this article) that the stated reason for embarking on war is nearly always a pretext. The ‘trigger event’ can be manipulated for this purpose, or a random spark may ignite an entirely unrelated charge.

Between February and December 1913 there were 232 recorded bomb and arson attacks; from January to August 1914 there were 105.9 A telling incident was the attack on Glasgow Botanical Gardens in January 1914. Suffragettes planted two bombs, one apparently as a diversion, and sat drinking champagne and eating cakes as they waited for the night-watchman to pass.

Women who were apprehended were given lenient sentences but even these were often only nominally enforced. Imprisoned women went on hunger strike and were released under the terms of the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act.” This merely regularized the mild treatment they already routinely received. Describing a well known London women’s prison Sylvia Pankhurst wrote that “Holloway had become a jolly place indeed.”10

The desire to dominate and subdue women, a natural male instinct with sound evolutionary origins, was expressed another way. Germany was subjugated instead. Moreover the British government had itself become feminized, choosing as its adversary one more masculine than itself, the sort of enemy the female would choose. By attacking a more masculine opponent, males were serving the female interest. Some factors in support of this hypothesis are:

The astonishing rapidity of the declaration of war against Germany, made even before a peace lobby could be organized. This was because, in effect, the government had already been at war since 1910. However in that conflict the government’s opponent was one for which the options for retaliation were limited. Frustrated by the terror tactics of the suffragettes, and their impotence in fear of the public reaction which might result from a forceful response, the government was desperate for a “real enemy” it could properly engage.
The suffragettes’ alacrity in forming an alliance with the government on the outbreak of war. Both forming ‘unholy alliances’ and speed of response are feminine traits. On 8 September 1914 Christabel Pankhurst returned from exile in Paris and immediately gave a speech, not on suffrage but on “The German Peril.” Led by Christabel, militant suffragettes quickly became enthusiastic advocates of the war. Copying Admiral Charles Fitzgerald with his initial group of thirty women, they became active all over Britain in “White Feather Brigades,” handing white feathers to any man in civilian clothing with the intention of shaming him into enlisting. So fervent were the suffragettes that demobbed soldiers, soldiers on temporary leave, civil servants and boys were presented with this symbol of cowardice. In 1916 Emmeline Pankhurst crossed the Atlantic to urge American support for the war and also visited Bolshevik Russia in 1917 with a similar objective.
Much of the propaganda of the time featured obvious sexual imagery. Typical was the portrayal of a German ‘brute’ and a vulnerable, feminine Belgium, which men were exhorted to rally to defend.

Note that each item above contains an implicit admission of female inferiority. In the first, the fear of public reaction had suffragettes been punished as would males for identical offences; in the second, the automatic assumption that women themselves need not enlist and fight; the third calls again upon the notion of the “weak and vulnerable” female.

The suffragettes’ behaviour, in their new, masculine role as aggressor, was exaggerated. Similarly the Allies’ behaviour was exaggerated both during and after the wars because they were conforming to a feminine role (engaging a masculine enemy), a role to which they were unaccustomed. This might be called “over-compensating” but a more accurate description is EBIAR, Exaggerated Behaviour in Alien Role. Adopting an unnatural role, their behaviour was exaggerated.

A nation, like a man, that is secure in itself and in its masculine capacity to control does not wish to cruelly persecute a vanquished foe. This took place after both world wars. An extended analysis of war policies is given in the Table.

Certainly many of the policies being pursued by the German government in the years 1933-39 were masculine. Nationalism is a masculine expression, because it has always been males who fought to defend the tribe (women being regarded merely as the spoils of war). This is confirmed when we see that the great majority of participants in nationalist and patriotic organizations are male. The nation is a larger, more masculine extension of the tribe. Males think of ‘society,’ females of ‘communities.’

Terrorism by Champagne Suffragettes, 1914

The fiction is maintained, whenever suffragette violence is mentioned, that great care was taken by those initiating attacks to ensure that nobody was hurt in the process. Two bombings carried out in January 1914 should alone be sufficient to give the lie to this assertion.

At 8.00pm on Wednesday, 7 January 1914, in the city of Leeds, an explosion took place which was so loud that it was heard across the entire city. It had taken place at the Harewood Territorial Army Barracks in Woodhouse Lane, one of the main streets of the city. The barracks were being used as a temporary police base at the time of this incident. It was a miracle that nobody was seriously hurt by the dynamite bomb which was lobbed over the wall of the barracks, landing near the canteen. A caretaker was cut by flying glass when all the windows in the nearby buildings were blown in. A near casualty was Sergeant-Major Payne of the West Riding Ambulance Corps. He was sitting in his office and the blast knocked him off his chair.

The attack on the barracks was the second bomb to explode in Leeds in the space of 24 hours. The night before, an electricity generating station in the Crown Point district of the city was damaged by high explosives. Although no responsibility for these two attacks was claimed by the WSPU, it is hard to know who else could have been to blame. The suffragettes were the only terrorist group operating in Britain at that time.

In 1873, an enormous glasshouse was opened at the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. It was a fantastic structure, with a 150-foot-wide dome, made up of small panes of glass. This was called the Kibble Palace, after the man responsible for its construction and soon became a landmark in the city. Both Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone were, at different times, installed as rectors of Glasgow University, both events taking place in the Kibble Palace.

In the early hours of 24 January 1914, the watchman employed to keep an eye on the Kibble Palace at night and protect it from thieves or vandals, was making his rounds of the building. He checked that nobody was in the Botanic Gardens after dark and that nothing was amiss. His work entailed nothing more arduous than chasing the occasional adventurous teenager out of the gardens. This night though, was due to be different. As he patrolled the outside of the glass palace, he spotted something very odd. It was a sputtering length of string. When he bent down to investigate, he found to his horror that this was a fuse, attached to a bomb. Instead of fleeing in panic, the man took out a penknife and calmly severed the fuse, thus rendering the bomb harmless.

As the night-watchman stood up, he must have been congratulating himself on a narrow escape. At that moment, a second bomb exploded nearby, with devastating force, shattering the sides and roof of the great glasshouse. It was the closest of shaves for the man, who fortunately had his back to the explosion, which showered him with fragments of broken glass. Investigation of the scene in daylight provided a chilling insight into the minds of those responsible for the attack on the Kibble Palace. A woman’s veil was found, together with an empty champagne bottle and the remains of some cakes. Footprints indicated the presence of at least two women.

By the beginning of spring 1914, the WSPU had been reduced to the status of a very small militant group, rampaging around the United Kingdom and attacking increasingly peculiar targets, such as greenhouses, libraries and churches. The idea of ‘social purity,’ which was becoming an obsession with both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, could only have the effect of alienating still more potential supporters of the WSPU. The only thing that the group really had going for it was the input of wealthy donors who were paying the wages of the terrorists and so enabling them to continue their activities. The WSPU would struggle on for another six months, but it was really dead on its feet, disliked by many of the general public, viewed with detestation by the main political parties and regarded as a positive nuisance by the moderate suffragists who were making great strides by working patiently with sympathetic members of the Liberal and Labour parties.

The one thing that the WSPU did have though was money. The spectacular attacks, which attracted so much attention, also prompted various rich women to send more money to Mrs Pankhurst. Overall membership numbers might be dwindling but those who remained in the organisation were still ready and willing to conduct further terrorist attacks. The fact that their activities were now acknowledged even by other suffragists as harming the cause, made not the slightest difference. The bombings and arson continued. (pp. 136-139)

‘Music While You Work’ and government ‘War Work Weeks’ proved insufficient incentives to attract enough women into the factories. After the Minister of Labour had reported to the War Cabinet in November 1941 that the number of women in ‘essential’ war production was a third lower than planned, Churchill’s Cabinet reluctantly decided, in December, to take the momentous step of introducing compulsory female mobilization. The National Service Act No. 2, which was passed by Parliament just ten days after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war, made Britain the first nation in history formally to conscript women. (

Social costs

Even before World War II had ended, its social costs were being measured not just in the lives lost and the destruction of homes, but by the continued upswing in the barometer of illegitimacy, venereal disease, and divorce. This was taken as an indication that there had been a wartime breakdown in public and private sexual conduct and something approaching moral panic overtook church and lay organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. They began calling for firm and fast action to restore the old moral values of ‘The Married Way’ and sexual continence. Indeed so many marriages were threatened by wartime adultery that one English bishop proposed a blanket indulgence for war-separated couples who went through another religious ceremony to renew their marriage vows. (p. 356)

Statistics: Losses and casualties

A profound impact was made on the psyche of the female population by the loss of 292,131 Americans and 271,311 men of Britain in addition to the 671,278 men of the US armed forces and 277,077 British servicemen who returned home mentally and physically maimed by the war. (p. 359)

Seems like anti-British sentiment coupled with an idiotic MGTOW slant.

I think the more likely reason for why WW1 was so bloody was that new weapons changed the dynamics; and after so much blood had been spilled in the initial few clashes, no one was willing to concede as they had already invested too heavily.

There's also the fact that the precedent of vast and bloodthirsty wars had already been set with Napoleon; a more likely argument would be that with the dissolution of monarchy and nobility, that it was the 'demos' themselves who were in control and they were not so willing to concede defeat as their previous 'rulers' had been (after all when one of those nobles was defeated they usually just got to slink away and live out on their manor house; or in the worst case live in 'exile' with plenty of slaves and all the food, wine and literature they could consume).

The fact that France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany all lost more than the combined number of casualties of the British Empire would also further go against your theory.