Helena Fairfax - Struggle and Suffrage in Halifax : Womens Lives and the Fight for Equality.

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Struggle and Suffrage in Halifax

Struggle and Suffrage in Halifax

Womens Lives and the Fight for Equality

Helena Fairfax

First published in Great Britain in 2019

Pen & Sword HISTORY

An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Helena Fairfax, 2019

ISBN: 978 1 52671 777 1

eISBN: 978 1 52671 779 5

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 52671 778 8

The right of Helena Fairfax to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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Contents

Introduction

A Toast to the Ladies

Womens fight for equality from 18001950 meant far more than the fight for the vote, important though that victory is. Their struggle covered almost every area of their lives.

Im not a historian. I write fiction, and in my stories women take centre stage. In the twenty-first century romance novel, the heroines independence is taken for granted. She has her own money, she has her own interests and friends, shes not looking for a man to look after her and make her life complete. Before starting out on this book, I wrote about women who were firmly at the centre of their own stories. Writing a history of womens lives in Halifax was a step outside my normal sphere, but I accepted it as a challenge. And as for researching womens lives, really, how hard could that be? I looked forward to discovering much from the wealth of information I expected to find in the archives.

And this is some of what I discovered: in 1837, a board of thirty-one men oversaw the operation of Halifaxs workhouses; Edward Akroyd, the millionaire textile manufacturer, was the founder of the first Working Mens College outside London; Halifax Town Hall was designed by Charles Barry, who designed the Houses of Parliament; the Peoples Park was donated by wealthy industrialist Sir Francis Crossley, so that every working man in Halifax shall go to take his stroll there after he has done his hard days toil.

And so it went on. As I leafed through the history books, I began to wonder whether Halifax was entirely populated by men in the nineteenth century. Where on earth had fifty per cent of the population disappeared to? While the men were strolling through the park at the end of their working day, what were the women doing? I pictured them at home, still hard at work after their own hard days toil in the factory, scrubbing floors and mending clothes and feeding the children. I felt them as a completely silent presence, unrecorded in the archives, their mouths bound.

I found a report in a newspaper which I read several times over. On 14 January 1839, a dinner was held at the Oddfellows Hall in honour of Mr Peter Bussey, a Chartist and agitator for universal suffrage. In those days only the wealthy could vote (and only wealthy men, at that). The Chartists were fighting for the vote to be extended to all men, regardless of income. It was a noble cause, but the terminology still jars, almost 200 years later. How could universal suffrage be universal, if it didnt include women?

The evening began with a toast to The People the only source of legitimate power. This is the part I read several times, in order to make sure I fully understood. Its a worthy toast, but since the dinner ended with a toast to The Ladies, I could only draw the conclusion that The Ladies were evidently not considered of The People. In the final irony, The Ladies were not even given the opportunity to answer their own toast. It was responded to in an enthusiastic speech by Mr G. J. Harney of London, who was applauded most warmly.

Well done, Mr Harney. There isnt a single mention of a woman in the entire article, and yet they must have been there. Were they just ghostly figures, shimmering in their evening finery, their mouths opening in vain, unable to make themselves heard?

Researching this book, I began to discover for myself what Virginia Woolf described so aptly in her essay on Women and Fiction in 1929. The answer to the history of womens lives, lies locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers, half-obliterated in the memories of the aged. It is to be found in the lives of the obscure For very little is known about women. The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female.

By peering through the cracks of established sources, and by closing the history books and looking instead for old diaries, memoirs and letters, I have gradually been piecing together a picture of the lives of the women of Halifax. Researching this book has been an eye-opener. It has made me realise just how far women have come on the road to equality, how far there still is to go, and just how easily everything could be lost. It has made me think far more deeply about the countries where womens voices are still not heard today, and about the shame of so many women being invisible and unacknowledged in the history books.

This book is just a tiny snapshot of some of the key events in womens lives in Halifax from 18001950. It is a small Toast to the Ladies; to all those bright, hard-working, tough, spirited women who once lived in Halifax, and who contributed unsung to the greater good of theirs and our society.

Acknowledgements

Id like to thank the following for their generous help and support: Warner Baxter, John Saville, and the staff of Calderdale Industrial Museum; Amy Binns and Douglas Simpson; Malcolm Bull for his invaluable website; Philip Cockcroft; John Critchley; Steve Gee for his very generous donation of photos; David Glover and Mike Brook of the Halifax Antiquarian Society; Ann Kilbey and the staff of the Pennine Horizons Digital Archive; John Uttley; Nicholas Walker; Sian Yates of Lloyds Banking Group Archives; the members of the Old Photos of Halifax Group on FB; the staff of Calderdale and Huddersfield Libraries; the staff of the West Yorkshire Archive Services in Wakefield and Halifax.

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