Stirring the Pot: Visitors who Grew the Women’s Suffrage Movement on the Isle of Wight.
- Mapping Women's Suffrage
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
by Becca Aspden
Alongside the suffrage campaigners I’ve explored who lived on the Isle of Wight and worked determinedly to grow the movement there, a multitude of different activists visited to the Island to ‘stir the pot’. Their public addresses and meetings were successful in increasing suffrage society membership and support among the Island’s population which consisted of over 88,000 people by 1911.
One significant case was that of Mr and Mrs Adela and Stanton Coit. Adela was a German-born suffragette who helped form the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Berlin in 1904. Her husband Stanton was the leader of the ethical movement, helping to establish 40 ethical societies across Britain. He was also a member of the law-abiding National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) headed by Mrs Millicent Fawcett and belonged to the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (MLWS).
In 1912, Adela organised a meeting at the now demolished St Clare Castle in Ryde. Stanton was a speaker at the meeting which centred on the injustice of women being denied the right to vote in parliamentary elections. This meeting was instrumental in forming the Ryde branch of the NUWSS, with 30 members already subscribed before the branch held its first meeting later in December that year.
The 1912 meeting at St Clare Castle was also attended by Olive (nee Malvery) Mackirdy who gave a speech on ‘why she joined the suffrage movement’. Olive, who was married to US diplomat Archibald Mackirdy, was well known for investigative journalism which focused on multiple issues impacting women. This included publications on women's working conditions and their sexual exploitation. Mackirdy was originally against joining the suffrage movement preferring writing to raise the profile of women’s plight and direct action to help women across a variety of issues instead. However, over time she was persuaded on the importance of the movement chiefly through interactions with the Church League for Women’s Suffrage (CLWS) and NUWSS. Like the Stanton Coit’s, Olive’s speech at the Ryde meeting was instrumental in helping increase the NUWSS’s presence and popularity in one of the Island’s most populated towns.
The suffrage movement on the Isle of Wight largely centred around the law abiding NUWSS, demonstrated by a visit from one of the highest-ranking aristocrats who held a leadership position in the suffrage movement. Lady Frances Balfour, daughter of the 8th Duke of Argyll and sister-in-law of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter, visited in October 1912. She spoke at a meeting in the island towns of Newport and at another in Shanklin. The Newport meeting was well attended as was the meeting at Shanklin which drew a sizable crowd, encouraging local support for the cause and leading to a newly formed Shanklin Branch of the NUWSS. Despite being professed as a ‘non-party’ meeting, Lady Baring did not spare criticism of the then party of government, the Liberal Party, and the inadequacy of its legislation under Liberal MP Lloyd George’s proposed National Insurance Bill to help the poor and needy arguing it would be substantially improved were women able to contribute to political thus to such policy making. Seizing on the chance to deride the Liberals, chair of the meeting and Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight and Douglas Hall shouted, ‘hear hear’. However, Lady Balfour quickly asserted her belief that Lloyd George nonetheless had genuine sympathy for women and the poor to which the audience responded with rapturous applause. Hall, as the newspaper report makes clear, ‘was not happy’.
While most of the visitors who came to stir the pot on the Isle of Wight, like most Islanders themselves, were law abiding suffragists centring on supporting the NUWSS, this didn’t stop the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) Mrs Pankhurst’s ‘suffragettes’ from travelling to the Island to try and generate support for the cause too. Miss Catherine Margesson, an organiser for the WSPU Reading district near London, travelled to the Island in 1910 and held an open-air meeting at the Market Place in the centre of Newport town. Standing on an upturned sugar-box her address garnered a large crowd as she argued for women's suffrage, explaining to the Islanders what the suffragettes were fighting for, how they were fighting, and what they sought to gain. The press reported that the crowd listened ‘attentively’. Catherine spoke for over an hour, accompanied by two other suffragettes holding banners, until the Salvation Army arrived for their weekly service and the WSPU members moved on.
About the Author
Becca Aspden is an undergraduate Warwick history student and URSS researcher. Originally from the Isle of Wight, she has a strong passion for local history and heritage. She has written multiple exhibition pieces for the IW Steam Railway as a conservation volunteer. She became interested in women's suffrage through her degree and is continuing her research on the Island's suffrage movement and other local history projects
Bibliography
Crawford, Elizabeth, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928
(London, UCL Press, 1999) pp. 565-67; Rebecca Odell, ‘Women’s Suffrage, Olive C Malvery’ (2024) <https://www.olivemalvery.com/womens-suffrage>
‌Ross, Ellen, Slum Travellers: Ladies and London Poverty 1860-1920 (Berkeley, Calif.; London, University of California Press, 2007).
Donovan, Stephen, & Matthew Rubery, Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Press, 2012).