Glasgow’s campaign for votes for women ran on both of the movement’s rails. The constitutional societies — decades of petitions, drawing-room meetings and gigantic orderly processions through the city — built the argument; from 1906 the militant Women’s Social and Political Union built the pressure, its Glasgow branch among the most active in Britain, run from Sauchiehall Street tearooms and funded in part by the wealthy Janie Allan, a shipping heiress who went to prison and hunger strike alongside the mill girls.
Militancy in Glasgow escalated as it did everywhere after 1912: windows smashed on Sauchiehall Street, acid on golf greens, and arson and bombing of empty buildings — the city’s most notorious attempt being the device planted in 1914 at the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens, which damaged the great glasshouse Glaswegians have never quite forgiven or forgotten. Suffragette prisoners in Duke Street gaol hunger-struck and were released and re-arrested under the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act, their treatment radicalising sympathisers faster than the militancy alienated them.
The campaign’s wildest Glasgow night came on 9 March 1914 at the St Andrew’s Halls, when Emmeline Pankhurst — a wanted ‘mouse’ under the Act — appeared dramatically on the platform before thousands. Police stormed the hall to take her; the suffragette bodyguard met them with Indian clubs, revolvers firing blanks, and barbed wire concealed in the platform flowers; and the audience joined a general mêlée that Glasgow papers called a battle without exaggeration. Pankhurst was carried off bruised to Holloway; Glasgow’s outrage at the police conduct filled meetings for weeks.
Among those radicalised stood the movement’s great Glasgow figure: Helen Crawfurd, a minister’s wife turned WSPU militant — imprisoned repeatedly, hunger-striker, window-smasher — who carried her organising genius directly into the next fight: she was a leader of the 1915 Rent Strike alongside Mary Barbour, and afterwards of Red Clydeside’s peace and socialist movements. In Glasgow the suffrage campaign didn’t end so much as change target: the tenement army of 1915 was, in real measure, the suffrage movement in its working clothes.
The vote came in 1918 for women over thirty and 1928 on equal terms; Glasgow’s first women councillors and MPs followed, and the campaigners’ longer legacy — women as organisers of the city’s politics, from Barbour’s army to the housing campaigns of every later generation — runs through the rest of this section.