On August 16, 1819 sixty thousand peaceful men, women, and children gathered in St Peter’s field, Manchester to demand parliamentary representation in the form of universal suffrage. Sadly, these peaceful protesters were not met with debate. Instead they were met with the sabres of the Yeomanry cavalry. In a matter of minutes 18 people were killed and over 600 were horrifically injured. This event, the Peterloo Massacre, was a brutal lesson in state power.
Nearly a century later, the fight for representation was again reaching a boiling point in the same city. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in Manchester in 1903, would finally win that fight. It wasn’t won by just remembering Peterloo. It was won by internalizing the brutal lessons by forging them into a new, effective and militant political strategy.
For Manchester’s suffragette leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, Peterloo was family lore, rather than abstract history. Born Emmeline Goulden, she grew up in a radical household. The story that defined her family’s political identity came from her own grandfather, Richard Goulden who had been a fustian cutter present at St. Peter’s Field, narrowly escaping death from a cavalry sabre.
This personal connection framed the struggle for the vote as a multi-generational, life and death battle. The lesson the Pankhursts inherited was that the state would respond to a peaceful plea for justice with violence. This belief became the bedrock of the WSPU. Where 50 years of peaceful “suffragist” petitioning had failed, the “suffragettes” concluded that a new path was necessary. Their famous motto,
“Deeds, Not Words,”
was a direct answer to the failed pleas of the past.
The Peterloo marchers were victims of a surprise attack. In contrast, the suffragettes learned to anticipate and weaponise the state's predictable brutality. These women understood that the government’s greatest weakness was its own violent hypocrisy.
The first lesson was the peaceful protest would be met with violence, which was proven at the “Black Friday” protest on November 18, 1910 when 300 women marched on Parliament. For six hours these women were met with police brutality, which included beatings and sexual assault. But unlike the people at Peterloo, the WSPU came prepared. They documented the assaults, publicised the horror, and used the episode as a powerful propaganda tool to shame the government.
The WSPU’s strategy was for the government to reveal its own cruelty which led to their most powerful tactic.
Schlesinger Library, RIAS, Harvard University, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
This tactic revealed that the women of the WSPU learned something crucial from Peterloo: a movement needs its martyrs. The victims of Peterloo were largely anonymous so the WSPU ensured that the suffering of its members would be named, revered, and transformed into a political weapon.
The first to be named was Mary Jane Clarke, Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister. Mary Jane was a key WSPU organizer who was arrested, imprisoned, and force fed after the Black Friday protests. She was released in December 1910 and died just two days later on Christmas Day, from a cerebral haemorrhage that may have been a result from the force feedings. At her funeral Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence called her
“the first woman martyr who has gone to death for this cause.”
This strategy was a direct response to the government’s cruelty, which it had codified in the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act.” This law allowed prisons to release dangerously ill hunger strikers, only to re-arrest them once they had recovered. The WSPU brilliantly parodied this in its propaganda, depicting the government as a vicious cat preying on a female mouse
The line from St. Peter’s Field to the suffragettes was just as much tactical as it was historical.
Peterloo taught the suffragettes that a moral argument, even one backed by 60,000 peaceful voices, was not enough to affect change. The state would not be persuaded by justice; it would only yield to pressure.
The WSPU took the lesson of Peterloo and created a new form of political warfare. Learning that the true battle was in the headlines, rather than in the streets. By making themselves victims of brutality and turning that suffering into a spectacle, they ultimately forced the government’s hand by making the political cost of refusing the vote higher than the cost of granting it. In learning from the protest of 1819, they effectively won the fight that had began with their ancestors.
© By Jennifer Hyams, artist at Sonder Dream Press.
Unearthing the Suffragette Spirit Project
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