Ruth Selman

Woman of the Day militant suffragette and lifelong feminist Margaret Haig Thomas, Viscountess Rhondda, born OTD 1883 in London. She used every single opportunity she could to advance the cause of equality for women from all walks of life. As a hereditary peer, she won a famous test case - to sit and vote in the House of Lords - but the Lord Chancellor overruled the decision, a ruling that held for 36 years. Her mother, Sybil, was an active suffragist but Margaret joined the Women's Social and Political Union four months after her marriage in 1908, describing it as “the very salt of life…a draught of fresh air into our padded, stilted lives…It gave us hope of freedom and power and opportunity” - and brought militancy to South Wales. Margaret organised the first ever WSPU meeting in Newport and invited Emmeline Pankhurst to speak. Emmeline was not able to go so she sent her daughter Sylvia instead. Margaret’s new husband refused to let Sylvia in the house. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall. That marriage was doomed from the start. He was a fox-hunting Tory with traditional views about a woman’s place. She was an anti-hunting Liberal with a mind of her own. In 1922, Margaret made the headlines when Helena Normanton, the first woman barrister heard in the High Court, successfully obtained for her a decree nisi on the grounds of his desertion and misconduct. From 1908 until 1914, Margaret went on protest marches, confronted prime minister HH Asquith by jumping on his car and in 1913, tried to set a Royal Mail postbox in Newport on fire with a chemical bomb. She was fined £10 (£964 in today’s money) but refused to pay and was sent to dilapidated HMP Usk. She refused to let her husband bail her out, went on hunger strike, and had to be released under the Cat and Mouse Act after five days. (See footnote in the attached post). Her vow on release: “I shall campaign for the suffrage cause until the franchise is given to women.” In 1917, Margaret survived the sinking of the Lusitania. She had to unhook her skirt to swim even though she didn’t know how to swim and passed out from hypothermia in the icy waters, clinging to a wicker chair. When she came to after being rescued by the crew of the Bluebell, she overheard a woman upbraiding the captain of the Lusitania for the lack of organisation and discipline on board during the sinking, which had led to her baby’s death.  A sailor bringing her a cup of tea apologised for the woman’s behaviour, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid that lady is hysterical.” Margaret retorted, “On the contrary, that woman is the only one aboard the Bluebell who is NOT hysterical.” It hardened her resolve. “What it did do was to alter my opinion of myself. I had lacked self-confidence…and here I had got through this test without disgracing myself. I had found that when the moment came I could control my fear.” Margaret threw herself into a flurry of initiatives designed to advance and promote opportunities for women during WW1. She took on a series of leadership roles to recruit women for agricultural work and as workers for the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps to serve in France; she appealed to the “parents of South Wales to realise their great responsibilities and allow their daughters to go.” She was the only woman member of the Staff Investigation Committee set up to look at the admin staffing (almost all women, of course) in the Ministry of Munitions and was concerned about women war workers being let go from their jobs when men returned from the Front. She formed the Women's Political and Industrial League in 1919 to lobby for equal employment opportunities. “Nothing in the whole conduct of the War has been more striking than the readiness and the ability of the women in nearly all the belligerent nations to render invaluable service to their respective countries and nothing has been stranger than the slowness of various Governments to realise the vast capacity of the resources upon which they might draw.” Margaret inherited her father’s title in her own right in July 1918. In 1920, she petitioned for the right to receive a writ of summons to Parliament so she could sit and vote in the House of Lords, basing her claim on the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act 1919. The House of Lords Committee for Privileges initially found in her favour. Margaret suspected it wouldn’t stand: “I am not in the House of Lords yet, in spite of the Committee of Privileges, and I am afraid the Lord Chancellor is going to move against me.” She was quite correct. The Lord Chancellor overruled the decision and it was not until 1963 that hereditary women peers in their right were allowed to sit in the House of Lords. Margaret did not live to see it. She died in 1958, aged 75. She did, however, see full suffrage granted to women on the same basis as men. “I think the war, awful as it has been, did a wonderful thing for women. It brought about a revolution for them which one may well imagine centuries might have otherwise been needed to encompass. But now women have seen what they can do; they have learned to have confidence in themselves to undertake the most amazing and difficult tasks.”