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LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON
(thanks to Susannah Atkins for contributing this article)
“Endowed with a celestial sense of humour, boundless sympathy, and rare musical talent, she devoted the later years of her life to the political enfranchisement of women and sacrificed her health and talents in helping to bring victory to this cause”. Lady Constance Lytton Timeline LADY BETTY BALFOUR
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ady Constance Lytton, daughter of Robert, 1st Earl of Lytton, continued the struggle for the emancipation of women engaged in by her grandmother Rosina and her great-grandmother Anna Wheeler.
orn in 1869 and weak and sickly as a child, Constance was slow to take up the issue of women’s suffrage. A letter to her favourite aunt in 1893 reveals her ambivalence towards the idea. “On the subject of the Women’s Movement, I hardly know what I agree with,” she wrote, “I get so angry with the old-fashioned man’s woman, and so furious with the advanced woman who goes in for women’s superiority over men.” Her ‘conversion’ to the cause did not happen for a further fifteen years, when she met some members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) on a working girls’ holiday in Littlehampton. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Annie Kenney were, Constance explained later, instantly impressive “and their remarkable individual powers seemed illumined and enhanced by a light that was apart from them as are the colours and patterns of a stained-glass window.” She spent the next few months reading up about the women’s suffrage movement, attending WSPU meetings, taking in the Votes for Women journal and educating herself about the reasons behind their activism. In January 1909, at the age of 39, she joined the WSPU.
ith her energy, passion and family connections, Constance became a useful and influential member of the women’s suffrage campaign. She toured the country giving speeches, writing articles and lobbying her well-connected friends and family. On one occasion, she sent a personal message to the Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone asking for the Pankhursts to be released from prison. Hundreds of suffragettes were imprisoned during the militant campaign and the harsh conditions they endured were a cause a much anger for the women. Suffragettes were treated, not as political prisoners, but as third class prisoners and as such were put to work in gaol and often horrifically force-fed. Constance was imprisoned twice during 1909, but her ill health (a weak heart) and social status meant that she spent most of her sentence in the infirmary and was quickly released. This injustice infuriated Constance and she wrote to the Liverpool Daily Post in October 1909 to complain about the favourable treatment she had received.
n January 1910, Constance, determined to prove her theory that poorer prisoners were treated badly, travelled to Liverpool where she disguised herself as a working-class seamstress named Jane Warton. She joined in a suffragette protest and was sentenced to two weeks hard labour in Walton Gaol. Here she went on hunger strike and like many of her fellow suffragettes suffered the horrors of force-feeding. As Lady Constance Lytton, she had received numerous medical examinations and subsequent preferential treatment as a result of her weak heart. Jane Warton received no such health checks and was force-fed eight times. Once released Constance was determined to expose the terrible treatment ordinary suffragettes faced in prison. Although desperately weak, she immediately set about writing two accounts about her experience, one for The Times, and the other for Votes for Women. These letters received a great deal of public attention. Indeed, by the time of her fourth imprisonment in 1911, conditions had improved and suffragettes were being treated as political prisoners. Constance’s ordeal, however, had seriously affected her health. She suffered a series of strokes and was left paralysed down the right side of her body. Undaunted, she wrote, with her left hand, her own account of her ordeal, Prisons and Prisoners (1914), which was widely read and became influential in prison reform.
onstance never fully regained her strength and died in 1923 aged 54, but not before Parliament had passed a bill, in January 1918, giving women over 30 the vote. Inscribed on the mausoleum in Knebworth Park, her family has left the following epitaph:
mily Lutyens (1874-1964), the youngest Lytton sister, was also a source of support for Constance. She had joined the WSPU in 1907, before Constance. In the summer of 1908 she sold copies of Votes for Women on the beach in Sussex. By 1909, however, Emily was increasingly concerned about Constance’s militancy. Envious of Constance for her happy emersion in the WSPU, and concerned by her husband Edwin’s stern disapproval of the suffragettes, Emily resigned from the organisation in September 1909. Although unable to involve herself in the WSPU, Emily remained a loyal supporter of Constance throughout her militant years. Emily herself later immersed herself in theosophy, where she found contentment
he women’s younger brother Victor, Earl of Lytton (1876-1947) was a member of the House of Lords and became heavily involved in the political campaign for women’s suffrage. In 1909, Victor gave a significant speech at St James Theatre in London entitled ‘On the Militant Methods of the Women’s Social and Political Union.’ His main argument was that for the sake of democracy women should receive the vote. Victor worked tirelessly in an attempt to pass suffrage legislation through Parliament and was also hugely significant in the development of the (ultimately unsuccessful) Conciliation Bill. His personal papers reveal dozens of letters between himself and leading politicians in which he pleaded for the issue of women's suffrage to be taken seriously in Parliament. He was heavily involved, along with his sister Betty, in the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association and was an Honorary Vice President from May 1910. He was also involved in the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (MLWS) (established in 1907) and a firm supporter of the Hitchin and North Herts branch of the NUWSS.