No vote, no tax Print E-mail
Written by Anna Milford, 2005   
Among many forgotten campaigns of the Rights for Women Movement was one to withhold taxes until women were granted greater rights over their own money. Anna Milford looks back at these resolute campaigners with gratitude.
Until 1870 a wife had no separate, legal existence apart from her husband, being deemed under his protection in a legal state of 'coverture'. It was indeed impossible to outlaw females since they were never within the law. As soon as a bridegroom uttered the hollow vow "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," he acquired everything his bride possessed - from houses and businesses to furniture, clothes, stocks and shares.

As a mother she would have no right even to custody of her children. Only with the husband's express permission could a wife make a will leaving any of her erstwhile possessions to named beneficiaries. He, on the other hand, could bedeck his mistress in his wife's jewels, and then leave them to her in his will.

The few married women with earnings or investments had little claim to their own money and no privacy in financial affairs. The publisher of Elizabeth Gaskell's best-selling novels Cranford, Mary Barton and North and South sent all royalty payments to her husband, and the Inland Revenue despatched any tax rebates in the same direction since her tax appeared on his tax return.

The only females individually assessed for income tax were single adults and widows.

Queen Victoria's home was indeed her castle and she was exempt from income tax, but this most devoted of wives recoiled from the "mad, wicked folly of Women's Rights". As for Florence Nightingale, an independent spinster of considerable means who enjoyed rights unknown to her married sisters, she professed herself "brutally indifferent" to the cause.

Many men held the twin beliefs that there are "no good women, only women who have lived under the influence of a good man" and that it was wise to seek a "ladylike, sensible, useful housekeeper sort of wife". Unlike a housekeeper, however, she received no wages, but was merely doled out pin money. No wonder some women chose to go to the bad by taking up the 'oldest profession'.

The passing of successive Married Women's Property Acts 1870 &1882 finally gave those wives fortunate enough to own property and assets the right to hold them in their own names. However, the Treasury continued to exact taxes from their spouses as before. Twenty-five years later the plight of most wives was still one of near servitude, as Cicely Hamilton's impassioned Marriage as a Trade makes clear.

Inevitably it was from among those women personally affected that the tax protestors were drawn, and a score of them met in London in 1909 with the single-minded aim of starting "an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance". Their sole action was to be non-action - through non-payment of taxes.

Ten ladies comprised the committee, and within a few months the League set up in permanent offices in St Martin's Lane, which also provided a flat for the Secretary.

Back in 1875, Martha Merrington had made history by being elected to the Poor Law Board of Guardians for Kensington. So many women followed her example that by 1900, by which time the property qualification had been lifted, there were over a thousand such guardians. This 'concession' was seen by those opposing "Votes for Women" in general as more than enough female emancipation.

It was not enough for League members. With impeccable logic, since they were entitled to vote in local government elections, they continued paying household rates but ignored demands from central government for Imperial taxes, servants' licences, dog licences and income tax, which had been introduced a century before to pay for the Napoleonic Wars. (Early in her reign Victoria did pay income tax, re-introduced in 1842, but ceased to do so after a few years. The Inland Revenue finally re-imposed it on her great-great-grand-daughter, the Queen).

Recruitment drives were held up and down the country and there was a brisk sale of pamphlets such as The Duty of Tax Resistance by Laurence Houseman and the Married Women's Taxation by founder member Ethel Ayres Purdie. The rallying cry of the League was a variant on the rebellious American Colonists' "No Taxation without Representation". Postcards of a defiant Britannia and the motto "No Vote, No Tax" sold at 7d a dozen and recruiting pamphlets at 8d a dozen.

Scores of demands from the Inland Revenue piled up unpaid in members' homes, and when these were followed by final demands they too went unpaid. Instead, under the heading and slogan of the League, a pre-printed letter was despatched:

"To [the appropriate tax collectors]. I regret that the heavy sacrifices I feel called upon to make for the cause of Women's Enfranchisement render it impossible for me to subscribe to the object to which you draw my attention. You will recognise that the delay in passing a Women's Enfranchisement Measure imposed a heavy tax upon the resources of all warm supporters of the movement. Signed...."

Nobody loves the tax man, so the League quickly gained recognition from the popular press, always ready to back an underdog even in snide, patronising mode.

Bailiffs at the door

The ladies were not allowed to get away with their resistance for long. When threatening letters failed, the Inland Revenue sent in the bailiffs to seize a defaulter's furniture and despatch it for public auction to cover the outstanding tax. Further runs of the printing press alerted members when and where a fellow Resister's goods and chattels were to be auctioned off: they then turned up in force to buy back their colleagues' goods and chattels.

"The Princess Sophia Duleep Singh's Goods will be sold for Tax Resistance on Tuesday 25th at Hicks, Station Road, Ashford. Meeting to be held in the Auction Rooms after the Sale. Please come and bring friends to support the Protest Meeting at 4 o'clock Waterloo. 2.10 to Ashford - 2/6d return."

After removing the same effects for the third or fourth time, bailiffs came to recognise the ladies involved. Some of these genial men, often prompted by their own wives, listened sympathetically to the arguments and sometimes even left a few sticks of furniture behind.

The auctioneers too were impressed and many allowed use of their premises for protest meetings after the sales. One announced to a full hall that, "If I had to pay rates and taxes and had not a vote I should consider it a great disgrace on the part of the Government, but I should consider it a far greater disgrace on my part if I did not protest against it."

By no means all those campaigning for the vote joined the Tax Resistance League but when the House of Commons shot itself in the foot by voting that MPs should be paid, the League rushed out a further recruiting pamphlet. The last two paragraphs claimed:

"The delay of justice always produces fresh injustice, and so we have this year the added grievance that women are to be forced to contribute to the payment of members of Parliament while, at the same time they have no election of these members, and no means of calling them to account for action of which they disapprove. In the face of that violation of the spirit of English Liberty we say that Tax Resistance is the most Constitutional line of Action for women to take. We believe it will also prove the most effective".

Whether it would have proved "the most effective" or not was never put to the test, for within days of the outbreak of war in August 1914 an Emergency Meeting was held in St Martin's Lane to consider the League's position. At a further meeting on 26 August the Resolution was put, and passed with a small majority: "That in view of the National Crisis the League should temporarily suspend activities, and recommend that Resisters pay their taxes when called upon." (To their eternal, unsung credit, all the rival suffrage and suffragette groups also suspended activities 'for the duration'.)

The League's staff were dismissed, the premises let and a few committee members agreed to keep a 'watching brief' on franchise matters during the years of suspension.

In July 1918 with victory just around the corner, and with it the hoped-for granting of the franchise, a final winding-up meeting was held. The £7 left in the petty cash, and the £4 raised by the sale of the office typewriter, went towards the costs of publishing a short history of the Women's Tax Resistance League by the Secretary, Margaret Kineton Parkes.
 
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