Evelyn
Sharp, the ninth of eleven children, was born in 1869. Her father,
James Sharp, was a slate merchant. Evelyn only had a couple of years
of conventional schooling, but successfully passed several university
local examinations.
Against the wishes of her family, Sharp moved to London
where she wrote and published several novels including All
the Way to Fairyland (1898) and The
Other Side of the Sun (1900).
In 1903 Sharp, with the help of her friend, Henry
Nevinson, began to find work writing articles for the Daily
Chronicle, the Pall Mall Gazette
and the Manchester Guardian, a
newspaper that published her work for over thirty years.
Sharp's journalism made her more aware of the problems of working-class
women and she joined the Women's Industrial
Council and the National Union of Women's
Suffrage Societies. In the autumn of 1906 Sharp was sent by the
Manchester Guardian to cover a
speech by Elizabeth Robins. Sharp was converted
by Robins' arguments for militant action and she joined the the Women's
Social and Political Union.
Evelyn's mother was unhappy about her daughter joining the WSPU
and made her promise not to do anything that would result in her being
sent to prison. In November, 1911 her mother absolved her from that
promise and Evelyn immediately became active in the militant campaign.
Later that month she was imprisoned for fourteen days for breaking
government windows.
Sharp was an active member of the Women Writers
Suffrage League and in August 1913 she was chosen to represent
the organisation in a delegation that hoped to meet with the Home
Secretary, Reginald McKenna,
at the House of Commons to discuss the
Cat and Mouse Act. McKenna was unwilling
to talk to them and when the women refused to leave the building,
Mary Macarthur and Margaret
McMillan were physically ejected and Sharp and Emmeline
Pethick-Lawrence were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison.
Sharp left the Women's Social and Political Union
in 1912 in protest against the expulsion by Emmeline
Pankhurst of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
and Frederick Pethick Lawrence. The breakaway
group formed the United Suffragists and Sharp edited its journal,
Votes for Women.
Unlike many members of the women's movement, Sharp was unwilling to
end the campaign for the vote during the First World
War. A pacifist, Sharp was active in the Women's
International League for Peace during the conflict.
After the Armistice Sharp,
now a member of the Labour Party, worked
as a journalist on the Daily Herald.
In 1933 Sharp's friend Margaret Nevinson
died. Soon afterwards she married Margaret's husband, Henry
Nevinson. Sharp's autobiography, Unfinished
Adventure, was published in 1933. Evelyn Sharp died in
1955.
(1)
Evelyn Sharp, Unfinished Adventure (1933)
At first, all I saw in the enfranchisement of women was a possible
solution of much that subconsciously worried me from the time when,
as a London child, I had seen ragged and barefoot children begging
in the streets, while I with brothers and nurses went by on the way
to play in Kensington Gardens. Later, there were agricultural labourers
with their families, ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, in the villages
round my country home, and after that, the sweated workers.
I made spasmodic excursions into philanthropy, worked in girls' clubs
and at children's play hours, joined the Anti-Sweating League, helped
the Women's Industrial Council in one of its investigations. When
the early sensational tactics of the militants focussed my attention
upon the political futility of the voteless reformer, I joined the
nearest suffrage society, which happened ironically to be the non-militant
London Society.
(2)
Evelyn Sharp was converted to the need for militant action by a speech
made by Elizabeth Robins at Tunbridge Wells
in the autumn of 1906.
Elizabeth Robins, then at the height of her fame both as a novelist
and as an actress, sent a stir through the audience when she stepped
on the platform. The impression she made was profound, even on an
audience predisposed to be hostile; and on me it was disastrous. From
that moment I was not to know again for twelve years, if indeed ever
again, what it meant to cease from mental strife; and I soon came
to see with a horrible clarity why I had always hitherto shunned causes.
(3)
Evelyn Sharp believed that the role played by the Men's
League for Women's Suffrage was very important in the struggle
for the vote.
It is impossible to rate too highly the sacrifices that they (Henry
Nevinson and Laurence Housman) and H. N. Brailsford, F. W. Pethick
Lawrence, Harold Laski, Israel Zangwill, Gerald Gould, George Landsbury,
and many others made to keep our movement free from the suggestion
of a sex war.
(4)
Jane
Sharp, letter to her daughter (November, 1911)
Although
I hope you will never go to prison, still, I feel I cannot any longer
be so prejudiced, and must leave it to your better judgment. I have
really been very unhappy about it and feel I have no right to thwart
you, much as I should regret feeling that you were undergoing those
terrible hardships. It has caused you as much pain as it has me, and
I feel I can no longer think of my own feelings. I cannot write more,
but you will be happy now, won't you.
(5)
Evelyn Sharp, Unfinished Adventure
(1933)
My opportunity came with a militant
demonstration in Parliament Square on the evening of November 11,
provoked by a more than usually cynical postponement of the Women's
Bill, which was implied in a Government forecast of manhood suffrage.
I was one of the many selected to carry out our new policy of breaking
Government office windows, which marked a departure from the attitude
of passive resistance that for five years had permitted all the violence
to be used against us.
(6)
In
November 1911 Evelyn Sharp was sentenced to fourteen days in Holloway
Prison.
When
the doctor asked me if I minded solitary confinement, I surprised
him by saying truly that I objected to it because it was not solitary.
You might be left alone for twenty-two out of twenty-four hours, but
you could never be sure of being left for five minutes without the
door being burst suddenly open to admit some official. Yet this threat
of interruption, while it destroyed solitude, which I love, never
took me from the horror of the locked door, just as one never lost
the irritating sense of being peered at through the observation hole.
(7)
Evelyn Sharp, Unfinished Adventure (1933)
When militants and non-militants alike hastened to offer war service
to the Government, no doubt many of them felt, if they thought about
it at all, that this was the best way of helping their own cause.
Certainly, by their four years' war work, they did prove the fallacy
of the anti-suffragist' favourite argument, that women had no right
to a voice in questions of peace and war because they took no part
in it.
Personally, holding as I do the enfranchisement of women involved
greater issues than could be involved in any war, even supposing that
the objects of the Great War were those alleged, I cannot help regretting
that any justification was given for the popular error which still
sometimes ascribes the victory of the suffrage cause, in 1918, to
women's war service. This assumption is true only in so far as gratitude
to women offered an excuse to the anti-suffragists in the Cabinet
and elsewhere to climb down with some dignity from a position that
had become untenable before the war. I sometimes think that the art
of politics consists in the provision of ladders to enable politicians
to climb down from untenable positions.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
