The Theatre of the Suffragettes

Abstract

The women’s suffrage campaign was not overtly or specifically socialist. Indeed, relations between the suffragettes and the labour movement were complex: Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union often seemed close to the Independent Labour Party, but sometimes, as with James Sexton’s play, The Riot Act, they were far apart. But performance was central to suffragette campaigning, and theatre was used in ways from which socialists could—and did—learn. The Actresses’ Franchise League and its Play Department under Inez Bensusan were particularly relevant: ‘One play is worth a hundred speeches’, the suffragettes proclaimed. Most suffragette plays were short and sharp, often satirical, fantastical and hard-hitting, like Netta Syrett’s Might Is Right, in which women capture the Prime Minister, and How the Vote Was Won by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John, which shows women striking and seeking the support of their nearest male relative. Other plays use ‘vox pop’ (Gladys Mendl’s Su L’Pave) or history (Christopher St John’s The First Actress), while closer to socialism are A Chat with Mrs Chicky by Evelyn Glover and Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women. Suffragette drama—propagandist, aspirational, urgent—showed how drama could intervene in political struggle.