Secretary, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, 98,
St. Martin’s-lane,
W.C. A silver
cake basket belonging to Miss [L.E.] Turquand, Press Secretary to the Free
Church League for Woman Suffrage, was sold at Sydenham. After a procession
with banners, a successful protest meeting was held. Mrs. Harvey’s house at
Bromley is still barricaded; nothing has happened.
For non-payment of Inhabited House Duty — the amount of which was seven
shillings — Miss Kate Raleigh’s goods were distrained on last week at
Uxbridge. Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda
purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of
Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he
accepted. Before taking his leave he expressed himself as, on the whole, in
favour of women’s claims to enfranchisement.
Miss Evelyn Sharp.
Following on the bankruptcy proceedings against
Dr. Winifred S. Patch, the
next victim is Miss Evelyn Sharp, the brilliant writer and speaker, whose
long service to the Woman Suffrage cause is widely known and honoured. At
the first meeting of “creditors” — again the only creditor is the Government,
but dignified by a plural — Miss Sharp entirely disputed the claim of £56
19s.
10d. in respect of unpaid
income-tax, in view of her political status as an unenfranchised woman, and
the unconstitutional procedure of levying taxes without representation. For
three weeks a bailiff has been in possession of Miss Sharpe’s bed-sitting
room; early this week, however, all her furniture, books, and other
possessions, except her bed and bath, were removed, including even her
typewriter, which is certainly a tool of her craft. An added indignity and,
we say, illegality, is that her letters have not only been opened but
detained for a week. It is expected that the public examination will take
place early in .
The Women’s Freedom League expresses its warm appreciation of the action of
these Suffragists in defending the principle of “No Taxation Without
Representation.”
Miss Sharp again appeared at the Bankruptcy Court
morning to complete her
examination. She had no opportunity of explaining why she had previously
refused to pay her Income-tax — all this was done by the prosecution. She was
asked if she was a writer; if she had refused to pay her tax because she was
an unenfranchised woman, not because she wished to evade payment; and now
that the political status of woman was assured her objection to the payment
of this tax was removed? To all of these question Miss Sharp smilingly said
“Yes.” The Registrar concluded the proceedings by hastily informing her that
her examination was completed, and at once asked for the next case. He seemed
to be quite relieved that it was all over.
(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 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 , 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 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.
When the Tax Collector called on morning he was met with Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison’s formula for tax collectors since she was made the victim of an organised riot in — “Not at home.”
On this occasion the maid returned to say he had come with a warrant and a bailiff to leave in possession, and must be admitted.
Mrs. Harrison then gave instructions for the tradesmen’s entrance and windows to be locked and bolted, and herself opened the inner front door, closing it behind her and keeping her hand on the handle.
The Tax Collector, who was standing with the bailiff inside the outer front door, asked if he was addressing Mrs. Darent Harrison, and hoped she would allow him to execute his trying task and produced his paper.
Mrs. Harrison asked and was told the names of the local magistrates who had signed the warrant, and explained that her house could only be entered by force.
She had been looking forward to paying her taxes within a very short time, and had been on the point of writing to Somerset House to say so; but as they had not scrupled in war time, and when the measure of justice for which she was fighting was almost certain to be on the Statute Book within a month or two, to come with warrants, bailiffs and all the old hateful methods of coercion, they could only be met by the same old spirit of revolt against tyranny and injustice.
The Tax Collector protested that he could not employ force against a woman — that was quite out of the question.
Mrs. Harrison then suggested that if he did not intend to stand there till he or she collapsed he must either employ force or call in the police to do so.
He scoffed at the idea of sending for the police, but finally sent the bailiff to see if he could find any.
But no police were to be found.
The bailiff was next sent to get his dinner, and when he returned he reported “still no police anywhere to be found.”
It was a complete impasse.
They had been facing one another for three hours, and the Tax Collector seemed equally determined to “do his duty” and not to be guilty of even a technical assault on an elderly woman.
It was only after being taunted with cowardice — with fear of the consequences of meeting moral with physical force — that he finally made an effort to get control of the handle of the door, and so with the assistance of the bailiff to force his way in.
Mrs. Harrison at once told the maids, who had been watching for some time through the glass door, that she was quite ready for luncheon, while the men disappeared into the drawing-room, which the bailiff has occupied ever since.
Mrs. Harrison has not seen him again, but she hears the Tax Collector has left a paper on the piano on which is written something about 5s. per day.
Miss [Kate] Raleigh at Uxbridge
Because of her refusal to pay Inhabited House Duty, Miss Raleigh’s goods were sold by public auction at Uxbridge afternoon.
Miss [Florence] Underwood protested in the sale-room against these goods being sold to pay the tax while women were still disenfranchised.
Miss Raleigh had no objection to paying taxes, but the protest was made because justice was being delayed to women.
Women had not yet got the Parliamentary vote.
There had been no delay in the collection of taxes from women, the warrant in this particular case having been issued with unusual punctuality, but although the clause for the enfranchisement of women had passed through the House of Commons with such a huge majority, there had been no attempt on the part of the Government to give speedy effect to that clause.
We were told that votes for women might be on the Statute Book within a few weeks.
Why, then, could not the authorities delay this sale?
By taxing women who believed that taxation without representation was tyranny, the Government was breaking its truce with women, and by delaying justice to women it was breaking one of the provisions of the Magna Charta, which enacted that justice should not be sold, delayed or denied to anyone.
Miss Evelyn Sharp.
On , the adjourned public examination of Miss Evelyn Sharp before the Registrar was again adjourned, until .
When asked why she had refused to make a statement of her affairs she replied that it was for the same reason that she had resisted the payment of the taxes which the Government claimed from her.
Miss Evelyn Sharp again appeared before the Registrar at Bankruptcy Buildings last morning, and her case was once more adjourned, this time until , in spite of the fact that she told the Registrar that she needed no further time for reflection, and was prepared to take the consequences of her refusal to make a statement of her affairs, on the ground that she was a voteless woman, and considered that taxation without representation was tyranny.
We cannot condemn too strongly the petty persecution of Miss Sharp by the authorities.
They have taken away her furniture and have refused to sell it, although the Official Receiver declared in court that its sale would cover the amount of the tax and the cost of the proceedings; they intercept all her correspondence, which they open, and read, and return to her at their leisure, and keep her in the position of an undischarged bankrupt, unable to transact business of any kind.
We understood that the Government had declared a truce with suffragists, but while it is dilly-dallying with women’s chances of enfranchisement in the Representation of the People Bill, it is apparently as eager as ever to persecute suffragists for their principles whenever an opportunity occurs.
On , Dr. [Winifred] Patch, of Highbury (Women’s Freedom League), made her second appearance at her public examination in the bankruptcy proceedings brought against her by the Inland Revenue Department, adjourned from .
The crowd of suffragist sympathisers was far larger than on the previous occasion, and included Mrs. Despard, Dr. and Mrs. Clark; Miss Evelyn Sharp, Mrs. Juson Kerr, Mrs. [Barbara] Ayrton Gould, Miss [Bertha] Brewster, Miss Smith Piggott, Miss [Agnes Edith] Metcalf, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Miss [Kate] Raleigh, Mrs. Julia Wood, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Miss Gertrude Eaton, Mrs. Mustard, Mrs. Tanner, Miss [Sarah] Benett, and many others.
To vary the proceedings Dr. Patch offered this time to make an affirmation, and answer any questions which seemed to her to merit a reply.
These were not very numerous.
Dr. Patch then stated her position:—
I do not acknowledge the authority of the Court, for it is being employed by the Crown not to fulfill its proper function of adjusting equitably the claims of creditor and debtor, but to enforce an unconstitutional demand, as did the Court of the Star Chamber 250 years ago.
It is to the British Constitution that the British Empire owes its place among the leading nations of the world, and it is the duty of her children to whom her honour is dear to keep her true to those principles.
I was a tax resister before the outbreak of the war.
The political truce with the Government was tacitly accepted by suffragists, and this would have prevented me from beginning tax resistance after war broke out.
I have paid no taxes for many years, and it is a breach of faith of the Government to have just started proceedings against me now.
By taking my money which is at my bank you only prevent me from putting it into War Loan, as I intended to do.
As regards the money left to me by my brother, who fell a few months ago, gallantly fighting for our country, I do not know whether you wish to take this from me.
I am a suffragist, I love my country, but I claim the right to give to my country in my own way what she has no right to take from me by force until women are represented in the Councils of the nation.
I ask that the judgment of bankruptcy against me be annulled.
The Court adjourned the proceedings for another fortnight, pending the receipt of the signed statement of particulars from Dr. Patch, which the authorities are so anxious to add to their documents.
Further developments will be announced.
Luncheon to Dr. Patch at Headquarters
After the proceedings at Bankruptcy-buildings, Dr. Patch was entertained at headquarters to luncheon, for providing which the Minerva Cafe added to its crown of laurels.
Mrs. Despard presided over a large gathering of supporters.
She expressed, amid applause, the warm appreciation and admiration of all for Dr. Patch’s service to the great cause of Votes for Women.
Dr. Clark praised the ability she has displayed in her plucky action, and declared that no class which possesses power gives in without a struggle.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes pointed out the heavy cost at this time of her sacrifice for conscience’ sake, and hoped that a memorial would tell future generations of Dr. Patch’s service to the cause of Votes for Women.
After short speeches from Miss Evelyn Sharp and Mrs. Mustard, Dr. Patch thanked everyone for their support, and used the words of the late Professor Kettle as expressing the attitude of unenfranchised women:
Bound in the toils of hate we may not cease, Free, we are free to be your friends.
