Teresa Billington-Greig

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Teresa Billington-Greig
A head and shoulders photograph of Teresa Billington-Greig
Born(1876-10-15)15 October 1876
Preston, United Kingdom
Died21 October 1964(1964-10-21) (aged 88)
London, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
Alma materManchester University
OccupationWriter, suffragist
Notable work
The Militant Suffrage Movement
The Consumer in Revolt
Spouse(s)
Frederick Lewis Greig
​
​
(m. 1907)​

Teresa Billington-Greig (15 October 1876 – 21 October 1964) was a British suffragette who helped create the Women's Freedom League in 1907. She had left another suffrage organisation – the WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union) – as she considered the leadership too autocratic. In 1904, she was appointed by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) as a travelling speaker for the organisation. On 25 April 1906, she unveiled a 'Votes for Women' banner from the Ladies Gallery during the debate in the House of Commons. In June 1906, she was arrested in a fracas outside of H. H. Asquith's home and as a result was the first suffragette to be incarcerated in Holloway Prison.

She founded the Women's Billiards Association in 1931. Her publications include The Militant Suffrage Movement (1911), which contained criticism of suffragettes' tactics, and The Consumer in Revolt (1912), which explored links between consumerism and feminism. She died of cancer on 21 October 1964. Her archives are held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics.

Early life[]

Teresa Mary Billington was born in Preston, Lancashire on 15 October 1876.[1][a] Her mother, Helen Wilson, ran a small shop, with two other partners, that was subsidisdised by her own father, who managed Preston's first department store. At her own father's behest, Wilson married William Billington, who became involved with the running of the shop. After the business failed, the family moved to Blackburn where William Billington joined a boiler-making company.[2] Her parents were Roman Catholics, but Teresa Billington became an agnostic whilst a teenager.[3] Having left school aged 13, became an apprentice in the hatmaking trade. Realising that at home she would not have the opportunity to study, she ran away from home aged 17 and approached her grandfather for a job at his department store, which he refused, and it was agreed in the family that she would stay with her uncle George Wilson's family in Manchester.[4] In Manchester, she took night classes and qualified to become a teacher.[5] She taught at a Roman Catholic school in Manchester, studying at the Manchester University Settlement in her spare time. Billington joined the Municipal Education School service where her objection to teaching about the Bible led her to consider a formal protest. However, in 1903, she encountered Emmeline Pankhurst through the Education Committee. Pankhurst persuaded Billington to avoid protesting, because it could have interfered with her completing her degree, and found her a position in Jewish school. Also in 1903, Billington joined, and became an organiser for, the Independent Labour Party.[3][6] In April 1904 she founded and became honorary secretary of the Manchester branch of the Equal Pay League of the National Union of Teachers.[7]

Women's Social and Political Union and the Women's Freedom League 1904–1910[]

In 1904, she was appointed by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) as a travelling speakers.[3] She went to London, together with Annie Kenney, whom she had inspired with her "sledgehammer of logic and cold reason" as a speaker,[8] to work on increasing support for the movement. In 1905, Keir Hardie asked to her become the second full-time organiser for the WSPU's activities with the Labour Party[9] Billington organised publicity and demonstrations, including on 25 April 1906, unveiling a 'Votes for Women' banner from the Ladies Gallery during the debate in the House of Commons to jeers and shouts.[10] In June 1906, Billington was arrested in a fracas outside of H. H. Asquith's home and accused of striking and kicking a police officer who arrested her. Billington claimed that the police officer had grabbed her aggresively, causing her bruises, and an inflammation to her throat. She refused to recognise the authority of the magistrates' court as women had played no part in defining the laws that it operated by. She was sentenced to a fine of £10 or two months in prison, and refused to pay the fine or have it paid for her. She became the first suffragette to be incarcerated in Holloway Prison. However, against her wishes, she was released within days after her fine was paid anonymously.[11][12] Later that month, she travelled to organise the WSPU in Scotland, when her oratory impressed and influenced Janie Allan.[13] She met Frederick Lewis Greig (1875/6–1961) in Scotland, and married him on 8 February 1907, in Glasgow. They agreed to adopt a common surname of Billington-Greig and to be equals in the marriage.[1] Before that she had helped WSPU canvassing against the Liberal candidate in the Huddersfield by-election with Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, impressing local activist Hannah Mitchell.[14] However, she became unhappt that her suggestions for the direction of the organisation were being dismissed, and disputes with the Pankhursts preceded her parting ways with the WSPU.[15] Billington-Greig's surviving notes writings from 1906 to 1907 demonstrate her views being refined, with her theory coming to encompass a demand for full equality between the sexes, and a rejection of poor tactics to achieve positive outcomes.[1]

In September 1907, Emmeline Pankhurst suspended the WSPU constitution and took direct control of the Union alongside her daughter Christabel Pankhurst. On 14 September, Billington-Greig, Edith How-Martyn and Charlotte Despard, Alice Abadam, Marion Coates-Hansen, Irene Miller, , and signed an open letter to Emmeline Pankhurst, explaining their disquiet with the way the organisation was run. The dissenters, and a significant number of other members, left the WSPU went on to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL) whose motto was "Dare to be Free".[16][17] Billington-Greig became the National Honorary Organising Secretary for the League, but resigned in December 1910 when she felt that the WFL memebership was overly influenced by militant tactics, such as "raids" on Parliament organised by the Pankhursts, who Billington-Greig believed were focused on suffrage at the expense of securing wider freedoms for women.[1][18]

A banner composed three vertical stripes, the lowest of which has "WFL Dare to be Free" written on it
Women's Freedom League colours and motto, 1908

Later career[]

For the next three years after leaving the WFL, Billington-Greig worked as a freelance journalist and speaker, and was not engaged with activist movements.[1][19] Her daughter Fiona was born in December 1915. During World War I and again in 1923, Billington-Greig substituted for her husband at the billiard company where he was a manager, and in 1936 she worked briefly as an organiser for the Business and Professional Women's Club.[1][20][21] In 1931, she chaired the founding meeting of the Women's Billiards Association, and became the first vice-chairman, and acting honorary secretary, of the organisation.[22]

She re-joined the Woman's Freedom League in 1937, and continued to be involved when after the Second World War it became known as . She was also a member of the Six Point Group, and was meanwhile working on a history of the suffrage movement.[23] She compiled suffragette biographies as well as writing on the movement's general history. Her articles critical of the policy of the suffrage movement include "Feminism and Politics," published in the Contemporary Review in 1911, in which she wrote, "there is no feminist organization and no feminist programme. And though the first is not essential, the second is."[24] Her book The Militant Suffrage Movement was published in 1911. Historian Brian Harrison has described The Militant Suffrage Movement as "the most penetrating contemporary comment on the suffragettes", noting that it is an unusual combination of participant observation and analysis.[25] She made similar criticisms in an unpublished document, "The Feminist Revolt: An Alternate Policy," claiming that "[t]he militant movement has kept to a straight narrow way and lest it should touch life it has cloaked itself with artifice and hypocrisy."[26] In place of the militant methods then common (attacks on property, for example), she recommended that suffragists try new tactics: "On one matter [a] protest could be made within the Police Court, on another outside, in public meetings and the public press ... Strikes and boycotts could be employed on new feminist lines."[27] Her short book The Consumer in Revolt (1912) explored links between consumerism and feminism.[28] According to historian Matthew Hilton, "Billington-Greig aimed to add consumption to the arenas around which women could organise".[29] Her work was widely read and discussed in the United States.[30]

She died of cancer on 21 October 1964 in London.[1][31] Her archives are held at The Women's Library (previously known as the Fawcett Library) at the Library of the London School of Economics. Papers were donated to Fawcett Library following her death, and these were complemented by further documents from her daughter Fiona Billington-Greig in 1997.[23][32]

Posthumous recognition[]

Harrison wrote that Billington-Greig "achieved rather little in relation to [her] talents",[33] and, like Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald, suggests that her lack of ability to compromise and co-operate may have limited her ability to effect change.[34][7] Billington-Greig herself felt that she had failed in her work,[1][35] but D. Thom writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that:

"She had retained her feminist principles throughout. While believing that the unity of all women through their womanly activities, above all as consumers, was the way forward, she never ceased to believe in the power of women through independent organization to make cultural change ... Despite her own sense of frustration and failure, she has inspired substantial critical commentary."[1]

Highlighting some of Billington-Greig's later political involvements, June Hannam and Myriam Boussahba-Bravard call her achievements "impressive", noting that she worked to get women selected as political candidates as well as being involved in groups for women electricians, the Women's Billiards Association, and being the main earner for her family in the 1930s after her husband lost his job.[36] Billington-Greig herself was disappointed with the scale of her accomplishments. In the introduction to The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig (1987) McPhee and Fitzgerald wrote of how Billington-Greig "lived to see her work forgotten, the organizations she had founded abandoned, a new generation indifferent, and the feminist revolution that she had devoted her life to still in the future", and express their hope that the book will "deny her claim to personal failure".[37] Her name and picture, with those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters, are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018.[38][39][40]

See also[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Billington-Greig believed that she was born in 1877, and that date appears in other sources. See note on p.295 of McPhee, FitzGerald and Billington-Greig (1987).

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i "Greig, Teresa Mary Billington". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/39074. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 2.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c "Teresa Billington-Greig". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 26 October 2017.
  4. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, pp. 2-3.
  5. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 47.
  6. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 47-49.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 4.
  8. ^ Atkinson 2018, p. 21.
  9. ^ "Teresa Billington-Greig". Working Class Movement Library. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  10. ^ Atkinson 2018, p. 43.
  11. ^ "Arrests of suffragists - Miss Billington in prison for two months - fight with the police". London Daily News. 22 June 1906. p. 7.
  12. ^ "Notes and news". Birmingham Daily Mail. 28 June 1906. p. 2.
  13. ^ Atkinson 2018, p. 308.
  14. ^ Atkinson 2018, p. 54.
  15. ^ Harrison 1987, pp. 49-51.
  16. ^ Murphy, Gillian (17 October 2018). "Dare to be Free – the Women's Freedom League". London School of Economics. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  17. ^ Nym Mayhall, Laura E. (July 2000). "Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1908-1909". Journal of British Studies. Cambridge University Press. 39 (3): 340–371.
  18. ^ Harrison 1987, pp. 51-52.
  19. ^ Harrison 1987, pp. 59-56.
  20. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 21.
  21. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 527.
  22. ^ "Proposed Formation of Women's Association". Sheffield Daily Telegraph. 12 May 1931. p. 8.
    "Women's Billiards. Association Formed to Control the Championships". Lancashire Evening Post. 1 October 1931. p. 10.
    "(Untitled Article)". Staffordshire Sentinel. 21 May 1931. p. 8.
    "Women's Billiard Association formed". The Billiard Player. No. June 1931). p. 2.
  23. ^ Jump up to: a b "Papers of Teresa Billington-Greig". archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk. JISC. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  24. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 226.
  25. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 45.
  26. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 244.
  27. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 245.
  28. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 60.
  29. ^ Hilton, Matthew (March 2002). "The Female Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain". The Historical Journal. Cambridge University Press. 45 (1).
  30. ^ Pliley, Jessica (2016). "Vice queens and white slaves: the FBI's crackdown on elite brothel madams in 1930s New York City". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 25 (1): 137+. doi:10.7560/JHS25106.
  31. ^ "Mrs T. Billington-Greig". The Times. 22 October 1964. p. 17.
  32. ^ "Women's Library finds home". BBC News. 1 February 2002. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  33. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 15.
  34. ^ Harrison 1987, p. 72.
  35. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, pp. 23-24.
  36. ^ Hannam, June; Boussahba-Bravard, Myriam (2006). "A Woman's Right to Be Herself: The Political Journeys of Three British Suffrage Campaigners". In Litzenberger, Caroline; Groth Lyon, Eileen (eds.). The Human Tradition in Modern Britain. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 155–170. ISBN 978-0-7425-3734-7.
  37. ^ McPhee, FitzGerald & Billington-Greig 1987, p. 1.
  38. ^ "Historic statue of suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett unveiled in Parliament Square". Gov.uk. 24 April 2018. Retrieved 24 April 2018.
  39. ^ Topping, Alexandra (24 April 2018). "First statue of a woman in Parliament Square unveiled". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 April 2018.
  40. ^ "Millicent Fawcett statue unveiling: the women and men whose names will be on the plinth". iNews. 24 April 2018. Retrieved 25 April 2018.

Bibliography[]

  • Atkinson, Diane (2018). Rise up, women! : the remarkable lives of the suffragettes. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781408844045. OCLC 1016848621.
  • Harrison, Brian (1987). Prudent revolutionaries : portraits of British feminists between the wars. London: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198201192.
  • McPhee, Carol; FitzGerald, Ann; Billington-Greig, Fiona (1987). The Non-Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington-Greig. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0710212321.

External links[]

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