Mary Gawthorpe

Mary Gawthorpe

Mary Eleanor Gawthorpe (born January 12, 1881 in Woodhouse , Leeds , United Kingdom , † March 12, 1973 in Whitestone , New York , United States ) was a British-American socialist , trade unionist and suffragette . She was one of the leading figures in the fight for women to vote in Britain in the early 20th century. After emigrating to the United States in 1916, she was also active there in interest groups of the workers' and women's rights movements.

family

The parents

Gawthorpe's mother, Annie Eliza Gawthorpe, née Mountain, was born in Yorkshire around 1857 . She turned out to be a good student, but the family was too poor to allow her to attend school for longer. She had to start working in the local textile factory when she was ten. As a result, she was never able to fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher; it was therefore very important to her to give her children a comprehensive education.

Before marrying Gawthorpe's father, John Garthorpe, she left the textile factory and worked at home helping her sister sew clothes. After the wedding she occasionally returned to work in the textile factory and as a laundress to support the family.

Gawthorpe's father, like his mother, was born in Yorkshire around 1854. He was very versatile, he worked in a tannery and was a lay preacher in the church. He also ran Sunday school and a choir, and was the captain of a local cricket team . In addition, he was involved in the Conservative Party and was political assistant to the member of parliament in his district. For a short time he had plans to run for the House of Commons as well, which he soon rejected.

He also loved to read and was a writer himself. He won several local literary competitions. Mary Gawthorpe later assessed him as a victim of his social environment; In their opinion, he could have developed much better in an intellectual environment than was possible for him as a member of the working class.

Family life

Gawthorpe had four siblings, but only two of them, her sister Annie Gatenby and her brother James Arthur, reached adulthood. Gawthorpe later attributed the early death of her two other sisters within a year to the poor hygiene in their living area. The lavatory, for example, was outside the apartment and shared by several families. On the other hand, such housing conditions were by no means unusual for the working class of the time.

The mood in the family was often irritable. One reason for this was the difficult financial situation, as the two children who died early needed expensive medication. In addition, the mother became seriously ill during this time. Another reason was the father's political activity. Annie Gawthorpe could never really warm to the new acquaintances the family made through this, which earned her the nickname The Puritan .

The situation in the family worsened when the father began to drink, which eventually led Annie Gawthorpe to spend more and more often in the bed of her daughter instead of in the marriage bed. He also repeatedly plundered the family coffers, which in around 1902 almost resulted in the family-owned piano having to be sold. However, this was the working basis for James Arthur, Mary's younger brother, who had found a job in a music business. This event was the trigger that the mother, Mary and their two siblings decided to leave the father and move out of the common apartment. None of the four then kept in touch with John Gawthorpe.

In Great Britain

Early years

The young Mary Gawthorpe proved to be a good student and found a lot of support from her parents for her school efforts. However, due to the debts of her parents, she too could not avoid working next to school to support the family. She traded in used books and helped her father run a small news agency . Here she mainly supported the sports reporting, whereby it was her task to collect the newly written reports from the various sports fields in the area and bring them to the offices of the newspapers.

When she graduated from school at the age of 13, her headmaster enrolled her for an exam that would enable her to get a scholarship to a secondary school. She passed the exam, but the family's financial worries prevented her from devoting herself exclusively to school. Instead, the father arranged for her to be employed as a pupil teacher , i.e. as a substitute teacher, at her old school.

In the following years Gawthorpe worked hard; She taught during the day and studied at night, so she passed the advanced exams on the way to becoming a fully qualified teacher. She received another scholarship, which she did not take on again in order not to make her mother completely dependent on the uncertain income of her father. Nevertheless, with great effort, she managed to pass her last exams and finish her training as a certified primary school teacher with top marks. In her childhood she had resolved to stand on her own two feet professionally. She had achieved this goal when she was just 21 years old.

Start of political activity

Gawthorpe went on to study. She took singing lessons and attended the Leeds School of Music , where she excelled as a gifted mezzo-soprano . In addition, she began to play the piano, attended courses in rhetoric and was even aiming for a university degree. She soon found personal happiness as well, becoming engaged to a typesetter at the Yorkshire Post named TB Garrs. It was through him that she found her first access to the socialist circles around her. She attended Labor Church regularly , where she also gave her first public speeches, and soon she was designing the women's page in the local church magazine Labor News .

Through a colleague of Garr’s work, the couple also entered the Leeds Arts Club of the intellectual Alfred Richard Orage , which was also frequented by Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw at the time . Gawthorpe took over offices in various precursors and splinter groups of the early Labor Party and was, for example, Vice President of the Independent Labor Party in Leeds. She was also involved in the teachers' unions National Union of Teachers and National Federation of Assistant Teachers , where she particularly campaigned for state- subsidized school lunches, a topic that came into public focus especially in the winter of 1904/1905 due to the high prevailing unemployment .

Engagement in the suffragette movement

First steps

Gawthorpe first came into contact with the suffragette movement of her day when she heard Christabel Pankhurst address at Labor Church. She became active herself in October 1905 when she learned of the arrest of Pankhurst and Annie Kenney in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester . Leeds women's rights pioneer Alice Scatcherd was no longer politically active at the time, and Gawthorpe was essentially on her own when she began disrupting political events and deliberately harassing politicians. Since the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) Von Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst was active almost exclusively in London and Leicester at the time, it instead joined the more moderate National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which was run in Leeds by the unionist Isabella Ford was headed.

In the NUWSS, Gawthorpe soon met her former schoolmate Ethel Annakin and through Ford she also met Millicent Garrett Fawcett . The first half of 1906 was marked by numerous appearances at which Gawthorpe gave speeches for the suffragettes, the trade unions, the teachers' associations and the socialists. She made a name for herself beyond the city limits of Leeds, so that her area of ​​activity expanded rapidly.

Between March and June 1906 Gawthorpe gave up her job as a teacher and helped in the middle of the year to establish an offshoot of the Women's Labor League (WLL) in Leeds . This organization was founded in London by Margaret MacDonald , the wife of James Ramsay MacDonald , through which Mary Gawthorpe was able to establish contact with cabinet ministers for the first time that same year.

A key difference in the political approach of WSPU on the one hand and NUWSS or WLL on the other was that the WSPU primarily pursued policy against the ruling Liberal Party and the latter two organizations organized campaigns for the Labor Party, which the The cause of the suffragettes was most benevolent. This sometimes led to conflicts of interest when the anti-liberal policies of the WSPU were favorable to the Conservative Party instead of Labor. This was in August 1906, the case when the WSPU in the by-election in the constituency Cockermouth the Labor candidate Robert Smillie no longer supported. Gawthorpe, who led an election campaign for Smillie on behalf of the WLL, should be persuaded to transfer to the more militant organization of the Pankhursts, but remained loyal to the WLL for the time being. A short time later, however, after she had also met Emmeline Pankhurst in London, she accepted an offer from the WSPU and joined the Union as an organizer.

Organizer at the WSPU

As an organizer in the WSPU, Gawthorpe earned better than before as a teacher, which enabled her to pay half of her income to her mother every month and thus provide for her maintenance . After a short time she was one of the most distinguished and sought-after speakers in the Union, for whom she traveled extensively in the United Kingdom. However, the relationship with her fiancé Garrs suffered from the fact that she was not at home so often, even though she did not break up for the time being.

On October 23, 1906, a WSPU delegation made its way to the House of Commons to discuss women's suffrage with local MPs, but also with Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman . When he was unwilling to put this topic on his agenda, Gawthorpe jumped into a chair and began to deliver a speech. Other activists unfurled banners and otherwise struck rioting until the police stepped in and arrested a large number of the activists. In addition to Gawthorpe, these included Annie Kenney, Annie Cobden Sanderson , Adela Pankhurst , Teresa Billington , Dora Montefiore , Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence , Irene Fenwick Miller , Charlotte Despard , Edith How-Martyn and Minnie Baldock . Faced with the choice of either not appearing politically for six months or serving a two-month prison sentence, they all went to prison, where they only had to sit for about a month.

After her release from Holloway Gaol prison , Gawthorpe was undoubtedly one of the leading figures in the British suffragette movement. She was the National Organizer of the WSPU and also sat on the organization's central committee. She worked almost continuously for the Union and only took a short break for Christmas, which she spent with the Pankhurst family.

In the first half of 1907 Gawthorpe took part in a total of seven election campaigns as a speaker. Most of the time she managed to be at least tolerated by her listeners, but occasionally she was pelted with mints or other foods. Once she was hit in the head by a hard-boiled egg and fell unconscious to the floor, but the next day she was back on the speaker's stage.

Health problems

The irrepressible commitment, without sparing one's own body, however, took its toll. In the summer of 1907, Gawthorpe fell ill with appendicitis . She was operated on by Louisa Garrett Anderson and then spent some convalescence at the Pethick Lawrence family estate and in Italy . But recovery was slow, and Gawthorpe played no role when the Women's Freedom League split off from the WSPU in the fall of 1907 under Charlotte Despard and Edith How-Martyn . Your health should never be fully restored in the following years.

Nevertheless, she was to be found again in November 1907 at election events after she had previously published a pamphlet with the title Vote for Men . In early 1908 she organized a rally in her hometown of Leeds and in June a large demonstration in London's Hyde Park , which was attended by an estimated 250,000 people. The fact that the newly elected Prime Minister and anti-suffragist Herbert Asquith was unfazed by the crowd led to a further radicalization of the WSPU, which was now increasingly violent.

It must have been a personal highlight for her when she spoke to an audience of 100,000 in July 1908 in Woodhouse Moor, the district of Leeds where she had spent her childhood.

In the second half of 1908, Gawthorpe was made the official organizer of the WSPU in Manchester . She spoke during further actions and was taken into custody several times, but apparently did not have to serve any further sentences. While under arrest, she sometimes had to endure force- feeding , and hunger strikes , which are now part of the program of action of the militant women's rights activists, continued to affect her health. Eventually her work was interrupted by another period of illness, which largely put her out of action by January 1909. In 1909 she was beaten up by guards when she interrupted a speech by Winston Churchill with heckling. The year was marked by a constant change between political activity and periods of illness; In the fall of 1910 she was unable to travel to Manchester for the WSPU autumn rally, but she still initiated fundraising campaigns from her sick bed. In the following year, she resigned from her offices in the WSPU for health reasons.

In 1911 she co-founded the journal The Freewoman with Dora Marsden , a radical paper for which HG Wells , Teresa Billington-Greig, Rebecca West , Ada Nield Chew and Ezra Pound also contributed. The following year she launched a petition against the force-feeding of suffragettes in British prisons. Her call for a national hunger strike in the 1912 Daily Herald went unheard. After 1912, her health did not allow any further engagement, which even a recreational stay in Italy in 1914/1915 could not change. Looking for another job opportunity she attended 1915 training to secretary at Kensington College . However, Gawthorpe continued to receive financial support from the WSPU until 1916.

In the United States

In the American suffragette and labor movement

In 1916 Gawthorpe emigrated to the USA with her mother, where they initially lived with family members in Monroe , New York. After initially applying as an assistant writer and proofreader to local newspapers, she also became active in the United States women's suffrage movement and soon became field organizer and later head organizer of the National Woman's Suffrage Party in Brooklyn . In February 1917, she moved to Buffalo and became involved in her party's press department, and that same year became chair of the New York State press committee, a post she held until mid-1917.

After the introduction of the right to vote for women in 1920, Gawthorpe worked for various organizations in various states, for example for the National Consumers League in Delaware , for which she studied the work of women during the First World War . She also made more speeches again, for example at a miners' demonstration in Belleville , Illinois , and finally made contact with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the Sidney Hillmans union , for which she supported Parley P. Christensen's candidacy for president . In 1920 she became director of education at ACWA and from 1921 to 1922 she was executive secretary of the League for Mutual Aid until her health again forced her to resign.

In 1921 she married John Sanders, an engineer who had previously rented a room with her brother in Newark , New Jersey . After the wedding, which earned her US citizenship, the couple moved to Whitestone, New York, where the two lived until the end of their lives. There is conflicting information about whether she kept her maiden name or adopted her husband's surname. As a wife, she did not pursue any official activity, but the ties to the American organizations in which she had previously been involved were maintained.

With the representatives of the British women's suffrage campaign had 1,931 contact when they book again in the US The Suffragette Movement of Sylvia Pankhurst should apply, not sold there so far good. About her work after 1916 the book only mentioned in a footnote that Gawthorpe had emigrated to America, became a journalist and got married . Since she found her work not adequately recognized in the book after emigrating to the United States, Gawthorpe got into a heated correspondence with Pankhurst that lasted until 1935, during which she requested that Pankhurst publish a revised version of her book. This did not comply with the request and the contact apparently broke off in the following period.

Late years

In 1933 she returned to Great Britain for a short time. Little is known about the period after World War II , but letters indicate that she remained politically interested and supported the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament .

In 1962, Mary Sanders published her autobiography Up Hill to Holloway , which spanned the period from childhood to the period immediately after her release from prison in 1906. Her husband passed away the following year. In her last years she devoted herself to astrology , gardening, and painting and drawing. In January 1973 she moved to a retirement home in Whitestone, where she died in March of the same year at the age of 92.

estate

Her memoirs Up Hill to Halloway only appeared in an edition of 6,000 and were never reprinted after 1962. After Gawthorpe's death, her heirs bequeathed all her letters, writings, and other papers to an archive at New York University . After these have been made commercially available on microfilm , they will also be available for viewing in the Leeds Central Library .

Fonts

• Votes for Men. Women's Press, London 1910.
• Uphill to Holloway. Traversity Press, Penobscot 1962.

literature

• Diane Atkinson : The Suffragettes in Pictures. Sutton Publishing Limited, London 1996, ISBN 0-7509-1017-8 (paperback).
• Krista Cowman: A footnote in history? Mary Gawthorpe, Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette movement and the writing of suffragette history. Women's History Review (2005) , 14 (3-4). Pp. 447-466, ISSN  0961-2025 .
• Elisabeth Crawford: The women's suffrage movement: a reference guide 1866-1928. UCL Press, London 1999, ISBN 1-84142-031-X .
• Mary Gawthorpe: Uphill to Holloway. Traversity Press, Penobscot 1962.
• Sandra Holton : Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, ISBN 0-415-10941-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-415-10942-6 (paperback).
• Sylvia Pankhurst : The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals. Longmans, Green, and Co., London 1931.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ International Women's Day and Suffrage in Leeds Article on secretlibraryleeds.com of March 14, 2014, accessed March 8, 2015
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l} Biography on dlib.nyu.edu , accessed on March 8, 2015
3. ↑ Recorded by Annie E. Gawthorpe in the 1901 census on ancestry.co.uk , accessed March 8, 2015
4. ↑ ^{a b c d} biography on spartacus-educational.com , accessed on March 8, 2015
5. ^ ^{A b c} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 115 ( online )
6. ↑ Record of John Gawthorpe in the 1901 census on ancestry.co.uk , accessed March 8, 2015
7. ^ ^{A b c} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 116 ( online )
8. ^ ^{A b c} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 117 ( online )
9. ^ ^{A b} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 118 ( online )
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Elisabeth Crawford: The women's suffrage movement: a reference guide 1866-1928. UCL Press, London 1999, p. 242 ( online )
11. ^ ^{A b} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 119 ( online )
12. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 120 ( online )
13. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 121 ( online )
14. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 122 ( online )
15. ^ ^{A b} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 123 ( online )
16. ^ ^{A b} Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 125 ( online )
17. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 127 ( online )
18. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 128 ( online )
19. ↑ Short biography on localsuffragettes.wikispaces.com , accessed on March 9, 2015
20. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 129 ( online )
21. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 130 ( online )
22. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 131 ( online )
23. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 132 ( online )
24. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 133 ( online )
25. ↑ ^{a b c} Biography on hydeparkhistory.blogspot.com , accessed on March 9, 2015
26. ^ Sandra Holton: Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. Routledge, London 1996, p. 134 ( online )
27. ↑ ^{a b c} Elisabeth Crawford: The women's suffrage movement: a reference guide 1866-1928. UCL Press, London 1999, p. 243 ( online )
28. ↑ ^{a b c} Elisabeth Crawford: The women's suffrage movement: a reference guide 1866-1928. UCL Press, London 1999, p. 244 ( online )
29. ↑ Abstract to Cowman, Krista (2005): A footnote in history? Mary Gawthorpe, Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette movement and the writing of suffragette history. Women's History Review , 14 (3-4). Pp. 447–466, accessed March 9, 2015
30. ↑ History of local suffragette Mary Gawthorpe returns to Leeds ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Article on leeds.gov.uk from June 19, 2013, accessed March 10, 2015