Ethel Smyth and Emmeline Pankhurst

I have been reading the memoirs of Ethel Smyth, a British lesbian composer and part-time militant Suffragist.  In Ethel's methodical way, she decided to commit exactly two years of her life to the Suffrage Movement, and during this time she became a comrade-in-arms, literally, to Emmeline Pankhurst--undertaking to instruct her in the fine art of rock-throwing, so that she could make the desired impact on 10 Downing Street, the home of the Prime Minister.

During this smashing campaign, both Ethel and Emmeline were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison, where they were assigned adjoining cells and where a sympathetic matron would allow them to take tea together and occasionally "forget" to fetch Ethel back to her cell.

Emmeline and Ethel became very close friends, and they continued to stay in touch after 1913, when Ethel's self-appointed term of service expired and she returned to the world of music.  In 1914, Ethel rendezvoused with Emmeline in France during one of Mrs. Pankhurst's periodic flights from arrest in order to recover from the debilitating effects of another hunger strike--this time her tenth!   Under the infamous "Cat-and-Mouse Act," she would have been subject to immediate re-arrest, even though bed-ridden, had she remained in England.

And then war was declared.  Ethel joined the French army as a radiographer, and Emmeline returned to England, where she placed her considerable charismatic powers at the service of the British government, becoming a spokesperson for the government she had devoted so many years of her life to tearing down.

It was during this period that Ethel published a volume of her early memoirs, a large portion of which was devoted to her first lesbian passion, a relationship with one Lisl Herzogenberg.  Lisl, a married woman, had come to Ethel's rescue during her student days in Germany, when she was experiencing a nervous breakdown.  Lisl moved into Ethel's rooms and cared for her during the crisis, bathing her and feeding her.  Later, she "adopted" Ethel into her home. 

The two women maintained a passionate friendship for seven years.  The friendship came to an abrupt and traumatic end over Ethel's first romantic involvement with a man--who happened to be married to a mutual friend.  Both the husband and wife had told Ethel that theirs was an entirely open marriage, and Ethel, young and naive, had taken them at their word.  Even though their dalliance had been entirely platonic, Ethel was cast in the unsavory role of the "other woman" and socially shunned.  Under pressure from others (most notably Lisl's mother, who despised Ethel), Lisl cut off all contact with her.  A few years later, Ethel found out that she had died.  It was the great tragedy of Ethel's life, and she gave it that weight in her memoirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst, however, had no patience with what she considered self-indulgent sentiment.  On reading Ethel's memoirs, she remarked that readers might feel that the whole affair was just a "tempest in a teapot."  Ethel, in her later remembrances about her relationship to Mrs. Pankhurst, noted that, although she laughed at the time, still "between reader and writer a gulf was fixed."  Sure enough, their friendship ended shortly after.

Reading this narrative reminded me of my own experience with heterosexual radical activists.  There was always this "gulf fixed."  For these women, there was a sharp dividing line between their personal lives--usually petrified into social routines associated with long-standing marriages, and their political lives, teeming with activity.  They looked down on us lesbians, whose personal lives were very much in the forefront of our experience-- and inextricable from our commitment to women's causes.

That this priority might play itself out in unstable relationships, heady crushes, profound inquiries into the nature of desire, and bitter factionalizing came with the territory.  Women loving women in the most intimate sense were breaking far newer ground than those who marched with signs or circulated petitions.  While others asked for liberation, we were attempting to determine what that might look like.  And not afraid to look foolish in the process.

Ethel Smyth was working out the most basic algebra of her liberation with Lisl.  Wildly unmothered, she had needed to detach from her mother, a woman whose brilliant youth had been cut short by seven more-or-less consecutive pregnancies, and whose subsequent behaviors towards her children--not surprisingly--were indicative of serious emotional disturbances.  Ethel, through her own form of "hunger strike," had finally obtained permission to study music in Germany, and here she was confronted with the suffocating social strictures for "unattached" females, as well as the brutal misogyny of the music world. 

That Ethel was able to find the nurturing and the shelter so critical to her survival was a miracle.  That she found it in the bosom of a heterosexual marriage was profoundly subversive.  That she and Lisl were able to sustain the intensity of their love for seven years in the face of both their dependency upon male privilege is astonishing.  And it was the devastation of the final break which released Ethel forever from any and all concessions  to conventional morality. 

When I think of Mrs. Pankhurst's hunger strikes, her violence against her own body, and her total capitulation to the worst extremes of patriarchy--namely war, I am called to reconsider the definition of militancy, of radicalism.  It was Ethel's fearless quest to feed herself, to feast on the love of another woman, even in the heart of their respective heterosexual prisons, which inspires me with hope for a revolution.