Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → women’s suffrage movements → British women’s suffrage movement → Anna Maria & Mary Priestman

From the 27 June 1919 issue of The Vote:

The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain

(from W.F.L. Literature Department, 1s.; post free, 1s. 1d.)

Not long ago, at the final meeting of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, it was decided to present the famous John Hampden Banner (which did such magnificent service at so many women’s protest meetings against the Government’s unconstitutional practice of taxation without representation), to the Women’s Freedom League. We treasure this standard of former days, and now we are the grateful recipients of an edition of “The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain,” written by our old friend, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, with an introduction by another of our friends, Mr. Laurence Housman.

This little book is charmingly produced, and on its outside cover appear a figure of Britannia and the colours of the Women’s Tax Resistance League. Every reader of The Vote knows that it was the Women’s Freedom League which first organised tax resistance in the year 1909 as a protest against women’s political disenfranchisement, and all our readers should be in possession of a copy of this book, which gives a history of the movement, tracing it back to 1870, when two sisters, the Misses [Anna Maria & Mary] Priestman, had their dining-room chairs taken to the sale-room, because, being voteless, they objected to taxes being levied upon them. Dr. Octavia Lewin is mentioned as the first woman to resist the payment of licenses. It is refreshing to renew our recollections of the tax resistance protests made by Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Mr. [Mark] Wilks (who was imprisoned in Brixton Gaol for a fortnight), Miss [Clemence] Housman (who was kept in Holloway Prison for a week), Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison, Mrs. [Kate] Harvey (who had a term of imprisonment), Miss [Kate] Raliegh, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Saunderson, Dr. [Winifred] Patch, Miss [Bertha] Brewster, Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight (who was also imprisoned), Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, Miss Gertrude Eaton, and a host of others too numerous to mention, and last, but not least, Miss Evelyn Sharp, who, as Mrs. Parkes says, “has the distinction of being the last tax resister to suffer persecution at the hands of unrepresentative government in the women’s long struggle for citizenship.” The full list of tax-resisters appearing at the end of this pamphlet will be found to be of special interest to all suffragists.

I haven’t yet found a copy of this book on-line or available via interlibrary loan. I might be able to order photocopies of a microfilm version held by a library in Australia, but I’m too cheap and so I’m holding out for a better option. Any ideas?

Another source I’ve had trouble tracking down is Laurence Housman’s The Duty of Tax Resistance, which comes from the same campaign. The Vote printed excerpts from it in their 27 June 1913 issue:

The Duty of Tax Resistance

By Laurence Housman.

Two years ago Members of Parliament determined to place the payment of themselves in front of the enfranchisement of women; and now women of enfranchised spirit are more determined than ever to place their refusal to pay taxes before Members of Parliament. To withdraw so moral an object-lesson in the face of so shabby an act of political opportunism would be not merely a sign of weakness, but a dereliction of duty.

Nothing can be worse for the moral well-being of the State than for unjust conditions to secure to themselves an appearance of agreement and submission which are only due to a Government which makes justice its first duty. It is bad for the State that the Government should be able to collect with ease taxes unconstitutionally levied; it is bad for the men of this country who hold political power, and in whose hands it lies to advance or delay measures of reform, that they should see women yielding an easy consent to taxation so unjustly conditioned. If women do so, they give a certain colour to the contention that they have not yet reached that stage of political education which made our forefathers resist, even to the point of revolt, any system of taxation which was accompanied by a denial of representation. It was inflexible determination on this point which secured for the people of this country their constitutional liberties; and in the furtherance of great causes, history has a way of repeating itself. Our surest stand-by to-day is still that which made the advance of liberty sure in the past.

In this country representative government has superseded all earlier forms of feudal service, or Divine right, or the claim of the few to govern the many; and its great strength lies in the fact that by granting to so large a part of the community a voice in the affairs of government, it secures from people of all sorts and conditions the maximum of consent to the laws and to administration; and, as a consequence, it is enabled to carry on its work of administration in all departments more economically and efficiently than would be possible under a more arbitrary form of Government.

But though it has thus acquired strength, it has, by so basing itself, entirely changed the ground upon which a Government makes its moral claim to obedience. Representative government is a contract which requires for its fulfilment the grant of representation in return for the right to tax. No principle for the claim to obedience can be laid down where a Government, claiming to be representative, is denying a persistent and active demand for representation. People of a certain temperament may regard submission to unjust Government as preferable to revolt, and “peaceful penetration” as the more comfortable policy; but they cannot state it as a principle which will bear examination; they can give it no higher standing than mere opportunism.

It may be said that the general welfare of the State over-rides all private claims. That is true. But under representative government it is impossible to secure the general welfare or a clean bill of health where, to any large body of the community which asks for it, full citizenship is being denied. You cannot produce the instinct for self-government among a community and then deny it expression, without causing blood-poisoning to the body politic. It is against nature for those who are fit for self-government to offer a submission which comes suitably only from the unfit; nor must you expect those who are pressing for freedom to put on the livery of slaves, and accept that ill-fitting and ready-made costume as though it were a thing of their own choice and made to their own order and taste.

Representative Government man, without much hurt to itself, acquiesce in the exclusion from full citizenship of a sleeping, but not of an awakened section of the community. And if it so acts toward the latter, it is the bounden duty of those who are awake to the State’s interests to prevent an unrepresentative Government from treating them, even for one single day, as though they were asleep. They must, in some form or another, force the Government to see that by its denial of this fundamental claim to representation its own moral claim to obedience has disappeared.

That is where the great distinction lies between the unenfranchised condition of certain men in the community who have still not got the vote and the disenfranchised position of women. It is all the vast difference between the conditional and the absolute. To no man is the vote denied; it is open to him under certain conditions which, with a modicum of industry and sobriety, practically every man in this country can fulfil. To woman the vote is denied under all conditions whatsoever. The bar has been raised against her by statute, and by statute and legal decision is still maintained. There is the woman’s direct and logical answer to those who say that, after all, she is only upon the same footing as the man who, without a vote, has still to pay the tax upon his beer and his tobacco. The man is always a potential voter; and it is mainly through his own indifference that he does not qualify; but the woman is by definite laws placed outside the Constitution of those three estates of the realm from which the sanction of Government is derived. If it asks no sanction of her, why should she give it? From what principle in its Constitution does it deduce this right at once to exclude and to compel? We see clearly enough that it derives its right of rule over men from the consent they give it as citizens — a consent on which its legislative existence is made to depend. But just as expressly as the man’s consent is included in our Constitution, the woman’s is excluded.

From that exclusion the State suffers injury every day; and submission to that exclusion perpetuates injury, not to the State alone, but to the minds of the men and of the women who together should form its consenting voice as one whole. This submission is, therefore, an evil; and we need in every town and village of this country some conspicuous sign that among women submission has ceased. What more definite, what more logical sign can be given than for unrepresented women to refuse to pay taxes?

If Women Suffragists are fully awake to their responsibilities for the enforcement of right citizenship, they will not hesitate to bring into disrepute an evil and usurping form of Government which does not make the recognition of woman’s claim its first duty. The Cæsar to whom in this country we owe tribute is representative government. Unrepresentative government is but a forgery on Cæsar’s name. For Suffragists to honour such a Government, so lacking to them in moral sanction, is to do dishonour to themselves; and to offer it any appearance of willing service is to do that which in their hearts they know to be false.

From pamphlet published by The Women’s Tax Resistance League. 1d.

From the 22 October 1910 issue of The Vote:

Why Pay Taxes?

The employment of tax-resistance as a method of protest against disenfranchisement appears to be due, in the first instance, to Miss Charlotte Babb, whose goods were distrained upon in the early days of the suffrage agitation thirteen times because she refused to pay Imperial taxes. Following her heroic persistence, there was a series of isolated resistances to taxation by unrepresented women, of whom the best known are Miss Henrietta Müller and the Misses [Anna Maria and Mary] Priestman, of Bristol, who resisted taxation about 1885, and Mrs. [Dora] Montefiore, whose final resistance in 1906 gave occasion for the famous six weeks’ siege of her house at Hammersmith. There were other individual instances as well as these, but the Women’s Freedom League in 1907 made the first organised attempt to run a definite tax-resistance campaign. Instead of isolated instances we have now got a steadily-increasing body of yearly resisters, and the action of these women has been made use of to drive home to the public the concrete injustice of taxation without representation.

Last year a Tax-Resistance League came into existence, confining itself to the development of this one line of protest. This year, as a sign of further growth, the sister militant society has decided to adopt the tax-resistance policy as a means of bringing additional pressure upon the Government. These signs of the progress of this very practical anti-Government action are good to see; but just at this moment they are particularly to be welcomed, for the National Executive of the League has just decided to adopt and develop a further line of tax-resistance, in which we hope all the societies approving this general policy will concur.

So far, the strength of the tax-resistance movement has rested with the women who were spinsters or widows; but the new line of action will make the married women a more effective agent of protest. The most that can be done by the widow and spinster is to enter her protest, and thus delay the passing of her money into the Treasury. Except in the case of Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard — which is exceptional — no widow or spinster has successfully withheld the contribution demanded of her by the State; but with married women this is possible. She is enabled by the state of our present law not only to enter her protest, but actually to withhold her moneys, and so to deplete the Treasury coffers.

There are many anomalies with regard to married women upon our Statute Book, and a large number of them are due to the basic wrong done by our Common Law assumption that a married woman is the subject and property of her husband, having no independent existence apart from him. In spite of the Married Woman’s Property Acts this assumption is still acted upon to-day, old laws that ought to have been rendered null and void by the passing of the Acts, which gave the married woman the control of her own property still remaining on the Statute Book, are being applied by the authorities. The Income Tax Commissioners provide a case in point. This legal inconsistency places the woman at a disadvantage, sometimes the man, but if it is dealt with in the right way in this case of Income Tax the Government itself can be made to bear the burden.

It is our duty as suffragists to take advantage of every opportunity which may offer. Even when the initial cause of the opportunity is an insulting denial of the woman’s independence, we must still employ it. We must make this very insult to us a means of attack upon the Government which denies us liberty. We must turn the ridiculous survivals of coverture into weapons of enfranchisement. The existing law so stands that married women can escape the payment of Imperial taxes. Then let them take advantage of the law. Let them organise a depletion of the Treasury. Let them go tax free until women are enfranchised. This is the new tax-resistance policy which we have adopted, and which we mean to spread throughout the land.

Let us examine the position. The standard of Income Tax law is the Finance Act of 1842, upon which all our present Inland Revenue procedure is based. Section 45 of this Act deals with the position of married women, and declares that the income of a married woman living with her husband shall be deemed the income of the husband, and the same shall be charged in the name of the husband, and not in her name or of her trustee. So stands the law for the protection of the wife. The Income Tax authorities cannot legally apply to a married woman for the payment of any Imperial tax; they cannot cite her for non-payment, they cannot levy distraint upon her. She is not liable to Income Tax in any form whatsoever while living with her husband.

The husband is legally liable for the taxes levied upon his wife’s income, whether earned or unearned, and generally, with her co-operation, he has been able to satisfy the Income Tax authorities as to the extent of that income, and to hand over to the same body the taxes with which she provided him in respect of the claim made upon her through him. The authorities have been, as the man in the street would say, having it both ways. They have refused to recognise or deal with the woman, and yet they have insisted upon her husband acting as their agent in levying taxes upon her; but all the time since 1872 they and the husband have been acting illegally. The Married Woman’s Property Act took from the husband the old jus mariti by means of which he became possessor of all his wife’s goods and properties; it took away also his old right of administration of his wife’s property, and deprived him of any legal right to control, inquire into, or interfere with, his wife’s economic affairs. Therefore, every time a husband, acting with the compulsion of the law behind him, compelled his wife to reveal the extent and nature of her income he was breaking a bigger law and a more recent law than the one which he was obeying. The husband has no legal right of inquiry, no legal power of control, over the income of his wife. He cannot be forced to do what is illegal. He can make no return for his wife. He cannot be assessed for payment of taxes on an income that he cannot declare.

The plan of campaign is unfolded, and it is only necessary to indicate the details of procedure. These are simple. When the demand for a statement of the wife’s income is made for the Government by the husband, the wife must refuse to supply any information, and must refer her husband to the Married Woman’s Property Act (England, 1872; Scotland, 1877). This refusal and reference the husband will convey to the Revenue officials. In all probability the form will be returned once or twice, and, finally, a form will be sent direct to the wife. She will return this, calling the attention of the senders to the fact that she is a married woman living with her husband, and referring them to the Income Tax Act of 1842, section 45. If both husband and wife stick firmly to their guns, the authorities would seem to be able to do nothing.

The law allows everyone who pays Income Tax to claim redress for any undue and illegal levy made during the last three years. Therefore, a married woman’s payment during the last three years can be reclaimed, if she can prove that they were paid by herself or deducted from her personal income. This course should be followed wherever moneys are paid out by trustees and agents, or deducted from interest on investments. By this means not only this year’s taxes, but a portion of previous years’, can be withdrawn from the Treasury. The cumulative effect of this additional development of the tax-resistance campaign and the new impetus given to the old lines of resistance should go some considerable distance towards convincing the Chancellor of the Exchequer that women are preferable as allies and peaceful enfranchised citizens than as an army of sharpshooters interfering constantly with the smooth conduct of his financial army.

This is our plan. Why pay taxes? Married women, respond!

Teresa Billington-Grieg.

Also from the same issue:

Outdoor Meetings

Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, Secretary of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, held a very large gathering last Sunday morning at Regent’s Park at twelve o’clock. A part of her long and interesting speech was taken up in pointing out to the audience how we women could obstruct the Government by refusing to pay the Imperial taxes. She was listened to with deep attention, and many questions were asked.…

No Vote, No Tax. — “It was mentioned on Saturday at the Suffragist demonstration in Alexandria Park, Manchester, that many of the lady Suffragists have refused to fill up their income tax forms, or to answer the urgent notices posted to them in consequence. This plan is to be carried out all over the country as a protest against taxation without representation.” — Manchester Evening Chronicle.