'Failure Is Impossible': The Story of the Suffragettes

In honor of Women's History Month, we look back at the women's suffrage movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America and England—and the jewelry that played a part.

By Monica Clare McLaughlin, Heritage Editor -- JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone, 3/1/2003

"No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex."— Susan B. Anthony, 1872

By the late 1800s, women in America and England—tired of being treated as second-class citizens by their societies and governments—were fed up. They began to fight back, particularly in pursuit of women's suffrage.

The organized women's rights movement began in the United States in 1848, when the first Women's Right's Convention—led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others—was held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Many women were excluded from other reform efforts of the day, such as the abolition and temperance movements, and they often were refused seating or ejected from anti-slavery conventions—purely because of gender.

Men and women began to work side by side for both abolition and women's rights, and after the Civil War the Equal Rights Association was established. The pressure for reform led to passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments (in 1865 and 1868, respectively), ending slavery and granting citizenship to African Americans. The right to vote, however, was still an issue.

Many women assumed they would be granted voting rights alongside African Americans, but the 15th Amendment—ratified in 1870—prohibited governmental infringement of a citizen's right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The question of gender was ignored.

The Equal Rights Association had split in 1869, and out of the wreckage came two rival groups. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the radical National Woman Suffrage Association in 1870, and other women's rights crusaders established the more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association.

Both groups worked throughout the country distributing pamphlets, giving speeches and presentations to women's clubs, and campaigning for support from individual states. The National Woman Suffrage Association also lobbied Congress, but the question of suffrage was proposed only once in congressional hearings, and it failed.

By 1890, many more women had joined the cause, and the two organizations decided to put aside their differences and create a single group. The new organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), retained the leadership of Stanton and Anthony.

The new century saw the U.S. suffrage movement shift to a more dramatic and militant strategy. Under Anthony's rallying cry of "Failure is impossible!" suffragettes employed publicity campaigns, civil disobedience, and nonviolent confrontations as tactics. This approach was influenced by and modeled on the activities of British suffragettes, who were crusading for women's rights on the other side of the Atlantic.

In England, the charismatic Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia were leading the fight for suffrage. In 1903, they founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the first and largest militant suffrage organization in England. Their initial campaigns included demonstrations and peaceful confrontations, but when those efforts proved fruitless, they chose more radical methods. In 1908 they began breaking the windows of government buildings and even threw stones through the windows of the Prime Minister's home.

At one demonstration in London, the WSPU incited the public to "rush" the House of Commons, resulting in a violent clash with police. This event and others culminated in the arrests of many women, quite a few of whom went on hunger strikes in prison and were force-fed by the authorities. Emmeline Pankhurst endured 10 hunger strikes over an 18-month period and nearly died in the process.

The WSPU's militant tactics continued to escalate, and by 1914 more than 1,000 women had been imprisoned for arson or destruction of public property. They suffered harsh treatment at the hands of their jailers, and many were beaten.

With the onset of World War I, the WSPU suspended all political activity and began negotiations with the British government. The organization agreed to end its militant campaigns and help with the war effort, and in return, the government released all suffragettes from prison.

In the United States, the fight continued, and Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul emerged as new leaders. Catt took over NAWSA after Anthony's retirement in 1900, and though she left office after four years to care for her dying husband, she came back to the movement as leader of the New York State suffrage campaign. She returned to head NAWSA in 1915.

Alice Paul was introduced to the English suffragist movement as a student at the London School of Economics and was one of the militants arrested and force-fed in jail. Upon her return to the United States she coaxed NAWSA into letting her organize a lobbying arm in Washington, D.C.

Paul also planned one of the most influential events of the American suffrage movement, an elaborate political parade held the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration in March 1913. She organized 8,000 college, professional, working-class, and middle-class members of NAWSA into marching units—complete with suffrage floats—that paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, starting at the Capitol and moving past the White House. A suffragette astride a white horse and dressed in white robes led the procession—a Joan of Arc figure symbolizing righteous women fighting for a moral cause.

The mostly male crowd of parade watchers taunted, spit on, and physically abused the marchers, disrupting the event. Police did little to protect the suffragettes, and the U.S. War Department called in the cavalry to prevent a riot.

Since many of the marchers and their supporters were members of the political and social upper classes, the incident embarrassed the new administration. Congress began hearings into the police department's mishandling of the situation, but the damage was done. Headlines appeared across the country giving women's suffrage enormous publicity and effectively granting the movement major political status.

Paul continued her public demonstrations, organizing pickets and publicly burning the speeches of President Wilson in front of the White House. Many American women were arrested during these demonstrations and endured the same abuse suffered by the English suffragettes.

But as time passed, public opinion in both countries began to favor the suffragettes. In America many Western states—with more progressive, frontier-influenced views about women—granted voting rights to women, and in 1917 New York State approved women's suffrage. Three years later the 19th Amendment was passed, proclaiming that the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

England granted the vote to women age 30 and older in 1918, but it was another 10 years before English women were granted full and equal voting rights.

The term "suffragette" was first used by a London newspaper. British women had formerly called themselves "suffragists," but they quickly adopted the new term, removing the sting from what had been a derisive nickname. "Suffragette" was also considered derisive in America, where women preferred the terms "suffragist" or "suffrage worker."

Battle Colors

Women involved in the suffrage movement united in both goal and appearance. At a meeting in 1903, English suffragette Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence suggested the use of official colors to represent the movement. The three she chose symbolized the ideals of the cause: green for hope, white for purity, and violet for dignity. The first letters of the colors—"G," "W," and "V"—also were an acronym of the movement's motto, "Give Women the Vote!"

The use of the colors proved popular, and they were incorporated into decorative sashes, ribbons, and clothing, and in England they began to be used in jewelry. "Votes for Women was the publication for the group led by Emmeline Pankhurst [the WSPU]," says Judy Rosenbloom, a popular Highland Park, Ill.-based lecturer on the subject of suffragette jewelry. Pethick-Lawrence and her husband were joint editors of the periodical, which, "in the early reporting, indicated that women might wear [the jewelry] almost like a secret code," Rosenbloom says. "They didn't use that term—those are my words—but the idea was that if you wore the colors and passed another woman on the street who also was wearing the colors … you would know that you had something in common."

"For many members, membership in the suffragette movement had to be kept secret as husbands still controlled, legally and otherwise, a woman's life at that time," says Darlene Tzavaras of ThingsGoneBy.Com, an online antique jewelry site. "There were only two types of ornaments worn by the movement's members: Members who could speak freely wore badges supporting the movement, [while] members who had to be secret participants wore jewelry with the suffragette colors."

Suffragette jewelry incorporates stones such as amethyst, peridot, and moonstone as well as pearls and enamel. "Most of the suffragette jewelry was produced in England, a country that produced a lot of jewelry around the turn of the 20th century," says Tzavaras. Rosenbloom agrees, citing the already-established Victorian and Edwardian propensity for jewelry. English women "had jewelry for every occasion, while the American women wore less of it," she says. "So it certainly was more of an English phenomenon."

But the suffrage movements in England and America overlapped, and suffragette jewelry soon took off in the States. Some dealers have noticed that many of the American-made pieces feature paste stones in the required colors, but otherwise the pieces are similar to English designs. At the time, Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts jewelry styles were popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and most suffragette pieces are stylistically indistinguishable from the jewelry of those periods; they are recognizable as suffragette jewelry only by their colors.

Some pieces do feature designs specific to the movement, however. "It's more than just the colors green, white, and violet," says Rosenbloom. "There were themes—for example, one of the pieces is a bar brooch in the form of a chain link." Chains, a classic symbol of oppression, seem an obvious choice to represent the movement, but Rosenbloom had never been able to tie the design to the movement until she discovered a peculiar chain-link brooch at the Museum of London. "Someone had sewn onto it a ribbon in the green, white, and violet colors. So the question is, is that how they were used, or did somebody just take the liberty to do it? I don't know, but it is quite interesting."

Other pieces became emblems of the suffrage struggle by recognizing individual achievement. Emmeline Pankhurst's daughter Sylvia designed the Holloway Brooch, a medal of honor that was given to suffragettes who had been jailed in London's Holloway Prison as a result of their protests. The brooch features an enameled green, white, and purple arrow mounted on a silver reproduction of the Holloway portcullis.

A similar American brooch exemplifies the close ties between the English and American suffrage movements. American women jailed for picketing the White House were awarded the "Jailed for Freedom" pin on their release. Inspired by the Holloway Brooch, the pin represents a prison gate chained with a heart-shaped lock.

Suffragette jewelry, while relatively unknown to the general public, is a hot commodity among collectors. "I have about 10 or 15 collectors of suffragette jewelry, but there is an increasing interest in it as it becomes more well known," says Tsavaras. "It sells as fast as I can find it."

"The marketing concept of this was so brilliant, and they were so ahead of their time," says Rosenbloom, who once worked as a marketing and public relations consultant. "The idea that they came up with this imagery that would tell their story and their way of evolving this cause was just phenomenal. The first people ever to demonstrate at the White House were women fighting for women's right to vote. … It really was a phenomenal marketing campaign."

And, ultimately, a successful one.

For further reading on the subject of women's suffrage:

Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote, Doris Stevens, Carol O'Hare (ed.), NewSage Press, 1995.

One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement, Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (ed.), NewSage Press, 1995.

Suffrage Days: The Campaigns for Votes for Women in Britain, 1865-1928, Sandra Stanley Holton, Routledge, 1996.

The Pankhursts, Martin Pugh, Penguin Books, 2002.

From the JCK Archives

January 1880

Closing Books for 1879.

The condition of the trade was never better than it now is. Country retailers have learned to buy cautiously, and not to overload their stock. … It is very much easier for a dealer to duplicate his orders than it is to work off stock after the market has been supplied, or when new designs have made the goods 'old fashioned.' A small stock of attractive goods, kept fresh by the addition of all that is new in the way of styles, is far better than an unwieldy stock that is culled over by customers month after month.