By Jill Liddington
Elizabeth Crawford and I, suffrage historians both, watched with keen interest in early 2009 as the 1911 census began to go online. On Tuesday 13 January selected English counties became fully searchable by the public. Excitement was palpable. By midnight, there had been 3.4m searches and 17.4m pages viewed, particularly by family historians. But it was suffragettes who grabbed attention – with headlines like ‘1911 Census: the secret suffragettes who refused to be counted’.
We joined the searchers at the National Archives to look for the census schedules of known Votes for Women campaigners. Among our early discoveries were, as we expected, suffragette evaders – whose names were absent on their own household census. We also came across resisters writing ‘No Vote, No Census’ angrily across their schedule. For instance, one suffragette in Essex wrote on hers, at an unrepentantly defiant angle:
‘I, Dorothea Rock, in the absence of the male occupier, refuse to fill up this Census paper as, in the eyes of the Law, women do not count, neither shall they be counted.’
But we found many other schedules at odds with our expectations. All our suffrage reading had led us to believe that census evasion and resistance had been very widespread up and down the country. But the primary evidence we were uncovering suggested considerably lower levels of boycott activity; and this hinted at a more complex mix of individual motives in households on census night. We were puzzled by these unexpected suffragette rejections of the call to boycott the census. So we began to read more widely and to revisit the broader historical context.
Our article suggests how we’ve tried to make sense of the puzzling evidence we were uncovering. We named this ‘the battle for the 1911 census’ as a way of suggesting explanations for the patterns we found emerging.
Read on for an excerpt from their paper ”‘Women do not count, neither shall they be counted’: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the 1911 Census”, which is published in History Workshop Journal, Advanced Access, 23 February 2011. You can read the full article for free on the journal’s website.
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Amid all the suffragette propaganda, it was probably the Women’s Freedom League’s uncompromising Manifesto, ‘No Votes for Women – No Census’, that had widest and most immediate impact. Issued under the names of Edith How Martyn and Charlotte Despard, it quickly caught the eye of The Times, which quoted from it extensively. The Times dilated on WFL plans to refuse ‘to give intimate personal details’ to the enumerator, and, under the heading ‘Obstruct Government Business’, noted that the WFL even incited members to:
… oppose, hamper, destroy if possible, the power of an unrepresentative Government to govern women, refuse to be taxed, boycott the Census, refuse all official information until women have won that which is their absolute right – the right of a voice and vote.
The very next day The Times published a short yet pointed letter rebutting this Manifesto argument, from the eminent educational reformer Professor Michael Sadler of Manchester University. He warned the WFL that ‘to boycott the Census would be a crime against science’ because ‘upon the completeness of the Census returns’ depended future legislation to better the conditions f