Women have played their part in revolution since time immemorial. The Trung Sisters rebelled against Han-Dynasty rule in China, 40AD; Boudicca led the Iceni tribe in uprising against occupying Roman forces in 60AD; Queen Margaret of Anjou fought for the crown, successfully, at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471; Lorenza Avemanay led the Ecuadorian revolt against the Spanish in 1803. Women have proven themselves to be worthy opponents on the battlefield and in the halls of power. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, did none of these things: she wasn’t possessed of great oratory skills, or handy with a sword, and she didn’t lead a great army, nor overthrow an oppressor. She wrote a book.

One of thirteen children, Stowe grew up in a deeply Christian family. Her father and seven brothers were all ministers, and when she married in 1836, she chose as her husband a scholar and theologian who was much respected by his peers. From the beginning of their marriage the Stowes were ardent critics of slavery. Their first home became a part of the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing numerous runaway slaves on their journey to asylum in Canada. Stowe began to write articles addressing the problem of slavery and making a name for herself as an abolitionist who didn’t run with the pack.

This might have been the extent of Stowe’s abolitionist activities had it not been for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Is it true that they have been passing a law forbidding people to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along? I heard they were talking of some such law, but I didn’t think any Christian legislature would pass it!

– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 9

The act underlined the illegality of harbouring fugitive slaves and ensured that anyone who did not aid in the capture of fugitive slaves was criminalised too. For Stowe, this was entirely at odds with the teachings of Christianity. The law may punish those who work against the slave trade, but Christian law was above that; “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” said the Bible, “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Stowe’s abolitionist philosophy is one of the natural rights of individuals – it is the philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke and of the founding fathers and a philosophy written into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It was clear to Stowe that slavery denied huge numbers of people these rights. She wrote in a letter to Lord Denman in 1853,

[A]s a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or
to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.

As a woman, Stowe could not effect change by voting or being elected to public office. But she could write. When Gamaliel Bailey, editor of abolitionist newspaper the National Era, offered Stowe $100 to pen a special antislavery piece, she already had a story in mind. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in the National Era beginning in May 1851. When she began writing, Stowe could not have anticipated the impact it would have.

Reading the book today, the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains troubling racist stereotyping in itself – I re-read it in its entirity recently and blogged the experience in more depth here on my own blog; this post forms a sort of companion piece.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin centres around the lives of a group of slaves working on an Kentucky plantation. The book opens with a discussion between owners Shelby and Haley over the sale of two slaves. Though Shelby’s wife is not happy, the sale nevertheless goes ahead.

The slaves in question are the eponymous Uncle Tom, a good man and devout Christian, and young Harry, the only surviving son of house slave Eliza. The narrative follows them as they leave Kentucky, Tom on a ship bound for Ohio, and Eliza and her son as escapees pursued by professional slave catchers. Throughout their journeys Tom and Eliza witness the cruelties and indignities of slavery: Eliza is refused help for fear of repercussions; Tom witnesses a suicide and hears of slave babies bred to be sold. When he is sold to a particularly cruel master Tom finds violence not only from owners, but among the slaves themselves, an indignity that suggests that those who are oppressed by the system lose both self-respect and any perspective of right or wrong.

While revealing the brutalities visited upon slaves from inhumane masters, the novel also relentlessly mocks the hypocrisies of so-called ‘benign’ slave holders, represented by Shelby, who, though they are not violent and cruel themselves, support those slave holders who are less kindly and keep the system running. Slaves were, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in life, under constant physical and psychological assault.

Stowe made sure, too, to implicate the world at large in the horrors of the slave trade. She directs the story to her readers, referring to ‘us’ and things ‘we’ think. Readers were therefore in cahoots with Stowe from the very beginning, so when she asks of her readers, ‘But sir, who makes the Trader?’ (ch. 12) readers would be bound into guilt, and with good reason. Not just in America but elsewhere too, households profited from the exploitation of slaves; they bought sugar, they milled cotton. Stowe could not have used better means to galvanise support among white American moderates.

The novel was released as a two volume book in 1852. The original print run of 5000 was woefully inadequate: in the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US, more than 1 million in the UK. Opinion was divided. According to Richard Yarborough, quoted in this paper by RS Levin, freed slaves viewed the novel as “a godsend destined to mobilize white sentiment against slavery just when resistance to the southern forces was urgently needed”, while for abolitionists it was a vindication. Readers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were more likely to find the novel sensationalist and unjust – slavery was a much bigger part of their way of life.

Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin support for the abolition movement grew. Minstrel shows and stage plays based on the book – ‘Tom Shows’ as they came to be known – became popular, bringing Stowe’s message to a wider audience, and transcending barriers of class and literacy. Inevitably, some Tom Shows took on a pro-slavery stance, but this does not seem to have diluted the effect of the work on the populace. The now famous author began speaking tours, even visiting the UK in her attempt to bring abolitionism to a wider and wider audience.

The abolitionist movement continued to grow. When Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency in 1860 it was on a platform of antislavery, so when eleven pro-slavery states seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 war seemed suddenly inevitable. Of course, slavery was not the sole cause of the American Civil War; there was a significant difference in culture, economy and industry between Northern and Southern states and disagreements over federal rule versus state autonomy too. Despite these factors, when the fighting began it became clear: this was a battle between pro- and anti-slavery states. When Stowe visited Lincoln in 1862 he is reputed to have said to her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which put an end to all involuntary servitude save for those convicted of a crime and freed 40,000 or so slaves that had not been granted their freedom in previous state-by-state laws.

In later years images from Margaret Mitchell’s adapted Gone With the Wind (1936) would supersede those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the popular imagination as the picture of the antebellum South. No doubt both have some degree of accuracy, but it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed the opinion of a nation.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

Monday 8th March, 1907. The Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons is closed as a precaution as the Dickinson bill receives its second reading. The bill, which would see the enfranchisement of around a million propertied women in the UK, is talked out. In protest, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) decide to march on Westminster.

Twelve days later, several hundred women gather to make their discontent known. Among them are local WSPU groups from Yorkshire and Lancashire, a ‘clog and shawl brigade’ of workers from cotton and worsted mills. The House of Commons is defended by more than 500 police.

Seventy-five women are arrested. The following day a photograph appears on the front page of the Daily Mirror of a young woman, flanked by a pair of police officers. Her skirts and shawl in disarray, her hair wild. She appears to be shouting. Her name is Dora Thewlis, a weaver in a Huddersfield mill. She is just sixteen years old.

When she appears in front of the magistrate, one Mr Horace Smith, he is aghast:

The child cannot be a delegate or anything else. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. You ought to be at school. It is really a shocking thing that you should be brought up to London to be turned loose […]. Where is your Mother?

Later:

Here is a young girl of seventeen [in fact she is 16] enticed from her home in Yorkshire and let loose in the streets of London to come into collision with the police. It is disgraceful for everybody concerned.

Like the prosecutor who, during the Chatterley trial, asked “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”, Smith reveals by his indignation just how out of touch the establishment is with the lives of working people. Says Jill Liddington in her book Rebel Girls:

First, men like Horace Smith had not the remotest understanding of child labour, let alone the half-time system widespread in the north. His pontification is tragically revealing about the dimensions of inequality. Second, Smith saw ‘young girls’ and ‘London streets’ as having only one possible reading: moral looseness and semi-prostitution. The word ‘entice’ says it all: Dora had been ‘enticed’ down onto the London streets, in her turn to ‘entice’ innocent young men. […] It remained unthinkable for respectable women to demand citizenship by taking to the streets.

Dora Thewlis was borne of an environment hostile towards working women; an environment that relied heavily upon the textile industry, but one in which trade unionism was heavily resisted by factory managers and owners and in which the Yorkshire Warp Twisters had fought two strikes,
successfully, to prevent women entering their profession. As an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who (according to her mother) had since the age of seven, ‘been a diligent reader of the newspapers, [able to] hold her own in debate on politics (Liddington, p 112), Thewlis was well aware of the inequity of society.

For the mill workers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the failures of capitalism were apparent in the hierarchies of the factories. Mill workers were encouraged by their physical environment to isolate themselves by specialism so that ordinary labourers were looked down upon by spinners and sorters, who in turn were sniffed at by the overseers. This segregation, inevitably, extended outside the factory walls, and for workers of different grades to socialise together was unusual. Outside of large factories small firms too held a paternalistic sway over the lives of their workers, fighting constantly to keep down costs and able to ruin the reputation of any worker that refused to toe the line. The ILP sought a number of economic reforms, summarised by Robert Haggard in this book as “an eight hour working day; the abolition of overtime and piecework; the prohibition of the employment of children; public provision for the sick, the disabled, the aged, widows and orphans [and] free, non-sectarian primary, secondary and university education”, as well as a fair minimum wage. The party was evangelical in its belief that the world could be a better place for everyone through socialism.

Ardently supporting the ILP, it was not surprising that Dora Thewlis would embrace suffrage with the same fervour, and she joined the Huddersfield branch of the WSPU as a founding member in December 1906.

So it was that Thewlis found herself arrested and remanded to Holloway. Once in prison, Thewlis was bathed, given a prison number and uniform and separated from her comrades. Inside the once belligerent, combative Thewlis grew lonely and wan, convinced she had been forgotten. Though she remained in Holloway only six days, Thelwis became a cause célèbre. Christened the ‘Baby Suffragette’ by the Daily Mirror, she was dogged by reporters at both ends of her journey back to Huddersfield. Portentously, no members of the local WSPU came to meet her.

Following her return home Thewlis regained a little of her spirit. “Don’t call me the ‘Baby Suffragette'”, she told one reporter, “I am not a baby really. In May next year I shall be eighteen years of age. Surely for a girl that is a good age?”. The sobriquet belittled Thewlis, just as Horace
Smith had, opening her up to ridicule both in the press and from her fellow suffragists. There was a feeling of alienation among the Huddersfield suffragists who felt attention had been drawn away from their cause by disputes over Thewlis’ age and Mr Smith’s comments about “enticement”.

By August of 1907 the image of young Thewlis being arrested had been turned into a picture postcard, and, though Dora herself had remained largely quiet on the matter, relations between the Thewlis women and the WSPU had become strained. It’s difficult to know exactly what caused the tension, though Dora’s mother Eliza, who tended to claim a greater role than she ought in the branch dealings, undoubtedly did not help the situation. A letter was dispatched to the Thewlis home asking Eliza Thewlis to work agreeably or resign from the branch.

All Thewlis and her cohorts wanted was to be granted the right to vote. The had to abide by the law of the land, they argued, so why could they not have a hand in creating it? It is worth noting that, despite the WSPU’s significant working class membership, they did not fight for universal suffrage, but the right for women to vote on the same terms as men. It was, in the words of one nameless critic, “not votes for women, but votes for ladies”; only a meagre few would meet the property qualification required by law. Dora Thewlis, with her socialist zeal and youthful indignation, would not be one of those women.

The WSPU, with their motto of “Deeds Not Words” was founded in 1903, in the wake of perceived inertia in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). They became increasingly militant, with a policy of breaking the windows of government buildings introduced in 1908, with
the first hunger strikes taking place the following year. In 1912 they began attacking the contents of post boxes, and the campaign of violence and arson escalated. The following year Emily Davison became a martyr to the cause, dying following head injuries sustained in what is likely to have been an attempt to grab the bridle of the King’s horse at the Derby.

It is frequently argued that such militancy did more to harm the suffragist cause than to progress it, and that the constitutional actions of Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS and the Women’s Freedom League did more to earn the enfranchisement of Women.

The Qualification of Women Act was passed in 1918, allowing female householders (or wives of householders), women with an annual household rent of at least £5, and female graduates of British universities to vote if they were over the age of 30. Thewlis, who had emigrated to Australia (where women had been granted the vote in 1901) before the outbreak of war, never saw the enfranchisement she fought for. She never returned to Britain, and died in 1976.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.