Beatrice HarradenBeatrice Harraden - Suffragette Writer

24 Jan 1864 - 5 May 1936

by Chris Willis

Arguably one of the best-known Suffragette writers, Beatrice Harraden was a popular novelist who was heavily involved in the Suffragette tax resistance campaign. During the 1900s she became increasingly involved in the Suffragette cause. A friend of the Pankhursts, she was one of the first members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and a vice-president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League. Her short stories and factual reports were published in the Suffragette newspaper, Votes for Women. Her Suffragette play, Lady Geraldine's Speech was performed to raise funds for the WSPU.

Harraden was expert at using fiction as propaganda. She understood that readers of the popular press did not want to be preached at, and knew the effectiveness of what she later described as: "not a statement of principles or reasons but just a story of life that would illustrate the truth and stick in their minds". Harraden was the protégé of well-known journalist Eliza Lynn Linton, whose anti-feminist views had been given wide circulation in her regular columns in the popular press. They met after Linton had admired a story of Harraden's in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Belgravia magazine. Although the two women disagreed strongly on the suffrage question, Harraden shared Linton's belief in the value of popular writing to convey political points. Their friendship was fictionalised in Harraden's novel Youth Calling (1924), the story of a friendship between an elderly woman and a young woman writer. The novel is unusual in having no romance or adventure plot: it is simply the celebration of a friendship between two very dissimilar women.

To most of her readers, Harraden was best-known as the author of the best-selling sentimental romance, Ships that Pass in the Night (1894), which tells of a doomed love-affair betwen two patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium. This story caught the public's imagination, and the title became a by-word for a fleeting or doomed love affair. The title was also re-used in a somewhat different context as a chapter heading in Gertrude Colmore's Suffragette Sally, where the 'ships that pass in the night' are not lovers but Suffragettes who meet in Holloway Gaol. Harraden's fame and success as a novelist may well have helped attract publicity for her Suffragette work and writing, particularly after she became involved in well-publicised militant activity. Although at first she had not wholeheartedly supported militant action, she later argued in favour of it, telling a Suffragette meeting in Manchester in 1909 that:

"In a few years' time history will only tell us, and those who come after us, that a body of brave and self-sacrificing women, bent on obtaining the political emancipation of their sex, shirked nothing, feared nothing, and fought on in the face of every tradition, every hindrance, every scorn, every injustice, until they gained their citizenship, and, with their citizenship, the power of insisting in equal rights of men and women on the common battlefield of life."

This attitude is reflected strongly in her Suffragette fiction.

Harraden's Suffragette activities were not confined to writing. She was active in the tax resistance campaign. On 25 April 1913, the Suffragette newspaper Votes for Women reported that women had "demonstrated by tax resistance their refusal to consent to a Government in which they have no share": "On Tuesday afternoon an auction sale was held of goods belonging to Miss Beatrice Harraden, who in a spirited address pointed out to the crowd who gathered round the reason for her refusal to pay." The goods were sold at Gill's Auction Room, Kilburn, along with those of two other tax resisters, Dr Mabel Hardie and Miss Gibbs, and were bought back by friends. A planned protest meeting at the corner of Elgin Avenue was made impossible by a crowd of youths "who now seem to be the allies of the law" throwing rubbish. Harraden was injured in the eye by mud thrown at the aborted meeting. Votes for Women of May 2 1913 reported that 3-4,000 schoolchildren threw missiles and mud at the participants. The text of Harraden's statement at the sale is reproduced. She jokes that she has had had so many congratulations on her action that "I really might be going to be married instead of 'sold up'". She gives her reasons for not paying tax:

(1) Because it is obviously unfair and increasingly intolerable that a woman who earns her own living by direct use of her brain should be called upon to pay the tax on her earnings, and yet be denied any voice whatsoever in the choice of representatives to Parliament whose salaries she helps to pay by the direct use of her brain.

(2) I have refused to pay my income-tax because I consider that women should now use every opportunity in their power to protest against a Government which has persistently ignored, deceived and tricked the Constitutional Suffragettes, working quietly for the enfranchisement of women, and has goaded the militant Suffragists into crimes and deeds of disorder which, mark you, would never have been committed but for the coercion and repression of seven years of mismanagement and injustice.

(3) I have refused to pay my income-tax as a protest against forcible feeding - now universally pronounced to be torture - and as a protest against the new Bill - the Cat and Mouse Act - with its forcible feeding clause retrieved. I protest against it as an emanation from a cruel brain, and as an ignoble piece of legislation which is a dishonour to England.

Despite her activism, Harraden once told her fellow-author and Suffragette Elizabeth Robins that, "I always feel I've failed [Mrs Pankhurst] by not giving up absolutely everything for the cause". However, by continuing her commercially successful career as a novelist, she was arguably able to get the feminist message across to far more people than she would have done by going to prison or giving up her writing to work full-time for the Pankhursts.

A select bibliography

  • Ships that Pass in the Night. 1894.
  • In Varying Moods. (short stories). 1894
  • Hilda Stafford and The Remittance Man. Two Californian stories 1897.
  • The Fowler 1899
  • The Scholar's Daughter1906
  • Interplay1908
  • Out of the Wreck I Rise. 1914
  • The Guiding Thread. 1916.
  • Patuffa. 1923
  • Rachel. 1926
  • Search Will Find it Out 1928
  • Youth Calling. 1924

Some of Harraden's work in Votes for Women

  • Nov 11, 1910, p 86
    Review of Katherine Roberts: Pages from the Diary of a Militant Suffragette
  • Dec 9, 1910, p 159
    Text of unpublished letter to the Times in which Harraden criticises Winston Churchill for calling male supporters of suffrage "money-fed" and says that they are valued supporters.
  • Aug 18 1911, p 744
    Appreciation of the work of Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham Ladies' College
  • November 8, 1912, p 89
    Short Story: "The Death of the Duchess"
  • Jan 31, 1913, pp 258-9
    Report of a working women's deputation to London.
  • 1913, pp 553-4
    Report of Emily Wilding Davidson's funeral.
  • July 4, 1913, p 585
    Text of letter to the Daily Chronicle supporting Suffragettes who heckle speakers at political meetings.

Portrait of Beatrice Harraden courtesy of Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse

This site is under development. I would welcome any further information about Beatrice Harraden.

Some useful links:

Harraden e-texts

Information about the Suffragette movement

Some women's history resources on the Internet:

My homepage