TBT: The debate around whether suffragettes had lesbian relationships with one another The 1885 the United Kingdom Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalised sex acts between men – but not women. A popular […]

The 1885 the United Kingdom Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalised sex acts between men – but not women. A popular legend claims that a flustered Queen Victoria struck references to lesbianism from the Act because she refused to believe that ladies ‘did such things’.

This is, of course, nonsense. Sex may not have been openly spoken about, but one only has to thumb through such nineteenth-century erotic fictions as ‘The Adventures of Grace and Anna’, ‘School Life in Paris’, and ‘The Pearl’, to know that the Victorians were well aware that ladies ‘did such things’.

‘This world view persists today and one of the most frequent (and stupid) questions asked of women in same-sex relationships is ‘how do you do it?’ The i newsletter latest news and analysis Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

Quite why sex acts between women were acknowledged but never outlawed in the UK is a matter of some debate, but it is likely due to the fact that the lawmakers were so entrenched in a phallocentric culture, that they simply couldn’t conceive of sex without a penis. This world view persists today and one of the most frequent (and stupid) questions asked of women in same-sex relationships is ‘how do you do it?’ To which the answer should always be, ‘we trim our nails first’.

The big debate

Finding titillating examples of women having sex with each other in Victorian pornography is one thing, but retrospectively ‘outing’ historical women as lesbian is far more problematic. For one thing, the word ‘lesbian’ (as relating to female sexuality) wasn’t in common use until the mid-twentieth century (OED). Until that point, ‘Lesbian’ meant something from the Greek island of Lesbos. Words such as ‘Sapphic’, ‘tribadism’, ‘flats’ have been used to describe female same-sex acts since the sixteenth century. Of course, same-sex desire has always existed, but how did women (and men) of the past understand their sexual identity (rather than sex acts) without adequate language to express it?

An acrimonious exchange over how historians research lesbian sexuality opened up in 2002 when two academic heavyweights, Professor June Purvis and Professor Martin Pugh, went head to head in a debate over the sexuality of prominent British suffragettes.

‘But was this sexual? Does it make them lesbians? Does it even matter if they were?’

In 2000, Martin Pugh published ‘The Pankhursts’, in which he suggests that suffragette Mary Blathwayt’s (1879-1961) diaries reveal that many of the suffragettes were lovers. Pugh notes that in her diaries, Blathwayt describes being ‘in bed’ with Annie Kenney (1879-1953), and during her many stays at Eagle House, Annie shared her bed with a number of other women as well. Blathwayt clearly had very deep feelings for Annie, and it is possible to read a touch of jealousy in her meticulous cataloguing of Annie’s bedfellows. But was this sexual? Does it make them lesbians? Does it even matter if they were?

Interpreting history

June Purvis was swift to point out that it was quite common for suffragettes to bunk up when they stayed in each other’s houses, and that the diary references to women ‘sleeping’ with each other was literally the sleeping arrangement and nothing more; ‘the words “sleeping with” did not have the same connotation then as now’. But, this is open to interpretation as the expression to ‘sleep with’ has been used to mean sexual intercourse since the tenth century (OED).

Pugh also points to the very close relationships between suffragettes such as Annie Kenney, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867-1954), Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) and her daughter Christabel Pankhurst (1880-1958) to provide context for the claim that they may have been sexual.

‘The expression to ‘sleep with’ has been used to mean sexual intercourse since the tenth century’

Ethel Smyth was a remarkable woman who seems to have been aware of her own sexuality from a young age. ‘I wonder why it is so much easier for me to love my own sex than yours’, she wrote in 1892. Smyth was clearly besotted with Emmeline Pankhurst, writing she ‘conceived an ardent affection’ for her on their first meeting. In her book, Female Pipings in Eden (1934), Smyth not only hints that they were lovers but also suggests the reason for the rift between Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Sylvia, was caused because Sylvia had male lovers and ‘will never be an Amazon’.

The queering of suffragettes

Several women are described as falling in love with Christabel, including the novelist Elizabeth Robins, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Annie Kenney. Teresa Billington-Greig (1877-1964) wrote that the sheer intensity of the affection between Annie Kenney and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence frightened her; ‘I saw it as something unbalanced and primitive and possibly dangerous to the movement’. In ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism’, Barbra Winslow examines the close friendship between Sylvia Pankhurst (1882 –1960) and Zelie Emerson and concludes ‘it was very intense, possibly even sexual’.

Despite the evidence, Purvis strongly critiqued Pugh’s work and the suggestion that the suffragette movement was a vehicle for fostering lesbian relationships. She accuses Pugh of adopting a ‘masculinist approach’ to suffragette history and of demeaning ‘the suffragettes by claiming that their politics ‘was a substitute for love affairs’ with men, and ‘hero-worship [of Christabel] an alternative to physical passion’ (Purvis, 2013). It’s important to note that Purvis is not denying lesbian history, but reads the queering of the suffragettes as part of a continued misogynistic attack upon the women’s rights that uses ‘lesbian’ as an insult.

A threat to the status quo

Whilst we will never know for certain if the suffragettes had sexual relationships with one another, anti-suffragette propaganda certainly coded them as such.

The early sexologists, Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) understood same-sex attraction as being an ‘inversion’ of heterosexual desire. Krafft-Ebing described female sexual inversion as ‘the masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom’. ‘Inversion theory’ is clumsy and offensive today, but it was the first attempt to genuinely understand sexuality as natural and made sense to a world that only saw gender and sexuality as a binary. Suffragists and suffragettes did question and redefine gender identities, and as a result they were deeply threatening to the established status quo. They were vilified in the press as manhating, unfeminine, ugly, shrieking harpies who wanted to replace men completely – the allusion to inverting ‘normal’ gender roles are palpable.

Sadly, attacking suffragettes as manhating lesbians continued in several histories written by male authors. George Dangerfield argued that the anger of the suffragettes was motivated by lesbianism and sexual frustration in ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ (1931). David Mitchell characterised the suffragettes as demented lesbians and ‘ferocious spinsters’ who really just wanted to be raped:

‘As the campaign lengthened and tempers shortened, near (and sometimes actual) rape became a hazard of the tussles in Parliament Square and at the stormier by-elections. Clothes were ripped, hands thrust into upper- and middleclass bosoms and up expensive skirts. Hooligans, and occasionally policemen, fell gleefully upon prostrate forms from sheltered backgrounds. Wasn’t this, they argued, what these women really wanted? Perhaps in some cases, and in a deeply unconscious way, it was.’ (Mitchell, 1977)

For Purvis, Pugh’s suggestion that the suffragette movement was shaped (in part) by ‘lesbian trysts’ seemed to tap into continuing belittling of feminists as, to quote a Supreme Court Justice in 2016, ‘angry, militant, man-hating lesbians who abhor the traditional family’.

Ladies did do such things

I don’t read Pugh’s work in this way. But how do we read this history? There is no doubt that intense attachments were formed amongst the suffragettes and they may have been sexual, but the evidence we have is speculative. All we can say for sure is that these were women who supported one another against ongoing brutalisation by the state.

The sexuality of the suffragettes is a highly contentious issue. In many ways, historians are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Those that work to bring the lesbian voice into suffrage history, like Pugh, run the risk of being accused of raking up old misogyny. Whereas those who don’t entertain the possibility run the risk of airbrushing lesbians out of suffragette history.

This year marks the centennial of some British women being granted the vote, and undoubtedly many of those who fought that fight were lesbians and bi-sexual. We do need to re-examine the lesbian history of the suffragettes, without being pejorative or sensationalistic. After all, its 2018 – surely we recognise that ‘ladies did such things’?