Mrs Charlotte Despard

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/charlotte-despard/tgGG9O36avMosg
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/resource/3229/the-womens-freedom-league
https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3203/what-were-the-suffrage-campaigners-fighting-for
https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/resource/3208/working-class-women-in-the-suffrage-movement

Family information: Her father was a naval captain. Her mother was committed to a 'lunatic asylum'. She married a wealthy radical Liberal, Maximilian Despard, in 1870. He died in 1890. Her sister Katherine Harley was an NUWSS member.

Additional Information: Charlotte briefly joined the Union of Practical Suffragists in 1901 and was especially interested in suffrage societies that wanted the vote for all classes of women. Involved in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), socialist and suffrage movements, she based herself in Battersea, London, in one of the poorest neighbourhoods. Given that the WSPU were pursuing a limited bill, enfranchising only some women, Charlotte was at first reluctant to join. However, when the WSPU strategy was endorsed by leading ILP figure Keir Hardie (and by many northern working class women), she conceded. In 1906, Charlotte was arrested taking a deputation from the Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall to the House of Commons, and was sentenced to 21 days in Holloway Prison. However, disagreements over the WSPU's political tactics, which were moving it away from its ties to the Labour Party and working class issues, started to cause divisions. So did the Pankhursts' increasingly tight grip on policy-making decisions. Charlotte, together with Teresa Billington-Greig, set up an alternative committee for those wishing to maintain Labour Party links within the WSPU and for those who wished for a more democratic constitution. This caused a split in the WSPU, and the breakaway group, headed by Charlotte, called itself the Women's Freedom League (WFL). The WFL were prepared to break the law to win the vote for women, but not 'moral' laws. In her elected leadership role as president, Charlotte lent all her energies and finances to the WFL. She was arrested again in 1909, leading a small deputation to the Prime Minister, and imprisoned. After five days she was released due to ill health. She favoured 'civil disobedience' as a method of protest and was keen on tax resistance. The Women's Tax Resistance League (WTRL) really formed under the wing of the WFL. Charlotte was one of the originators, along with Laurence Housman, of the suffrage census boycott of 1911, when suffragettes refused to correctly fill in the government's 1911 census or population survey, which was carried out every ten years (and still is). This was illegal. Some suffrage campaigners avoided the census altogether and so are 'missing' from population records that year. Charlotte herself refused to comply with the census at her home in 2 Currie Street, Battersea, London. Most WFL members stayed away from the violent militancy perpetrated by WSPU suffragettes. Unlike the WSPU (and, to a lesser extent, the NUWSS), Charlotte also steered the WFL away from supporting the war in 1914, instead seeing that it ploughed its energies into continuing the campaign for female suffrage and helping struggling working class communities in the East End of London.

Other Suffrage Activities: Charlotte has been described as a 'practical socialist', very much concerned throughout her life with improving the lives of impoverished women, and was involved in agitating for the Unemployment Relief Bill, largely through her association with the Labour Party. She stood in Battersea, London, in 1918, as a candidate for the extreme left wing of the Labour Party but was defeated.