Holloway Brooches

Holloway brooches were given to women who were imprisoned for their involvement in the women’s suffrage movement during the early twentieth century.

The Holloway brooch was designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, a campaigner for women’s suffrage. The design is symbolic of the suffragette’s fight for voting rights. The brooch is in the shape of a portcullis and chains, which is the symbol of the House of Commons. In the centre, there is a broad arrow, which was a recognised symbol of government property that was used on prison uniforms. The broad arrow is in the three colours of the suffragette movement: green (symbolising hope), white (symbolising purity) and violet (symbolising dignity).

The brooches were given to members of the
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) who had been imprisoned in Holloway prison and other prisons. Some brooches were inscribed with the dates of imprisonment. They were first awarded at a mass demonstration by the WSPU in the Albert Hall on 29 April 1909, which was held to coincide with the meeting of the International Suffrage Alliance.

In an issue of the WSPU newspaper, Votes for Women, of 16 April 1909 the brooch was described as the ‘Victoria Cross of the Union’. When WSPU prisoners began to use hunger strikes, the WSPU instituted the hunger strike medal, the first of which was presented four months after the first Holloway brooch.

Women’s Suffrage Movement

6 February 2018 marked 100 years since the Representation of the People Act 1918, which allowed women over the age of 30, who held £5 of property, to vote in parliamentary and local government elections.

The Representation of the People Act was the result of a decades-long campaign by men and women for women’s suffrage. This campaign began peacefully in the late 1800s. In 1897, Millicent Fawcett set up the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, which campaigned for women’s suffrage through peaceful protest and logical argument. She believed that violence or disruption would convince men that women could not be trusted to have the vote. Unfortunately, Millicent’s progress was slow. Though she convinced some members of the Labour Representation Committee, most men in Parliament believed that women would not understand how Parliament worked and therefore should not take part in the electoral process.

The slow progress of Millicent’s campaign was not enough for some women, who wanted faster and more direct results.  In 1903, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. In contrast to the peaceful protests of the suffragists, the members of the WSPU, known as suffragettes, were prepared to use militant and violent methods to draw attention to the cause. These militant methods included breaking shop windows, raiding the Houses of Parliament, burning down churches, attacking politicians and even protesting at the gates of Buckingham Palace.

Imprisonment of suffragettes

As a result of the violent acts committed by suffragettes, many were imprisoned, in Holloway prison in London and other prisons around the country.

The treatment of suffragettes who were imprisoned was often brutal. Many went on hunger strike. A report in The Suffragette on 11 April 1913 stated that Emmeline Pankhurst had collapsed in prison after being on hunger strike for eight days. The hunger strikes concerned the government, who did not want the movement to have martyrs, so prisons guards were ordered to    force-feed those on hunger strike.

In 1909, Emily Wilding Davison, known for being the first ‘martyr’ of the suffragettes, was imprisoned in Strangeways Prison in Manchester for throwing rocks at the carriage of Chancellor David Lloyd George. Emily starved herself and resisted force-feeding, leading to an angered prison guard feeding a hose into her cell and filling it with water. Davison was eventually freed from the cell and she sued the prison guards for her treatment, being awarded 40 shillings as compensation.

There was public outcry at the force-feeding of mostly educated women, so the government introduced the Cat and Mouse Act. This Act stated that any suffragette who went on hunger strike whilst in prison should not be force-fed but instead should be allowed to get weaker and weaker, at which point she would be released from prison. She would then either die, or be too weak to take part in the suffragette movement. Once she had regained her strength, she would be rearrested for a trivial reason and the process would start again. 

In response to the Cat and Mouse Act, the suffragettes became even more extreme, with some blowing up part of David Lloyd George’s house.
It is likely that they would have continued with this extreme behaviour but in August 1914, World War I broke out and Emmeline Pankhurst ordered her followers to stop their campaign and support the war effort.

The suffragette movement in north-west Essex

The first suffrage society in north-west Essex was formed in 1906, when Miss Mitchell, of Saffron Walden Training College, became honorary secretary of a Saffron Walden branch of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. By 1909, two federations of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) had been formed in the area – one covering north and east Essex and the other covering most of East Anglia.  By the end of 1911, a NUWSS society was formed in north-west Essex to cover Dunmow and the surrounding district.

In 1912, a second suffrage society in Saffron Walden was formed, known as the Saffron Walden and District Women’s Suffrage Society. Flyers and programmes in Saffron Walden Museum’s collections reveal that the society held regular events between 1912 and 1914 to raise funds and awareness for the suffrage cause. These included talks by well-known speakers, suffrage plays and musical entertainments.

The President of Saffron Walden and District Women’s Suffrage Society was Gertrude Baillie-Weaver. Gertrude and her husband Harold, who lived in Newport, were both prominent members of the suffrage movement: Harold was an active member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and Gertrude was an early member of the Women’s Freedom League. Under the name Gertrude Colmore, Gertrude wrote many literary pieces on the suffrage movement, including the suffrage novel Suffragette Sally (1911), The Life of Emily Davison (1913) and fictional stories for Votes for Women and The Suffragette. She also regularly spoke at WSPU meetings. In 1914, the Baillie-Weavers founded a Theosophical Society suffrage league and joined the Votes For Women Fellowship and the United Suffragists.  

Anti-suffrage movement

Not everyone supported the campaign for women’s suffrage. Those who wished to actively oppose the campaign joined anti-suffrage societies. In 1908, the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was formed. They submitted a petition to Parliament opposing women’s suffrage, containing 87,500 names, but it was rejected for being “informal”. A second anti-suffrage petition gathered 337,018 signatures. The League quickly grew in popularity, with a total of 104 regional branches by July 1910. In 1910, the League amalgamated with the Men's League for Opposing Woman Suffrage to form the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage.

A handwritten document in the museum’s collections reveals some of the reasoning behind the anti-suffrage movement. The seven-page document contains notes written for a speech on the topic of ‘Why Women Should Not Have Votes’. Although we know the speech was written by a woman, we do not know who she was or when the speech dates from. It is, however, likely that the woman lived locally.

Some of the reasons given by the author why women should not have votes are…

·        Men and women have different natures and roles: man’s role is in the public sphere, woman’s role is in the home.

·        Women have “illogical minds”, governed by sentiment, and lack judgement and discrimination.

·        Children who are raised by mothers with political opinions are “wild” and lack domestic affection.

·        Women’s suffrage would result in a loss of respect for womanhood and the responsibilities of marriage.

·        Granting votes to women on the same grounds as men would result in unfair and
inadequate representation.

Despite their speeches, petitions and publications, those who supported anti-suffrage were ultimately unsuccessful and the anti-suffrage societies ceased to exist in 1918 when the Representation of the People Act was passed.