“We Want a Mrs. Pankhurst”: World War I and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Jamaica

After a contentious year-long campaign marked by raucous demonstrations, heated public meetings, and widely-circulated petitions, propertied women in Jamaica won the right to vote in May 1919. The nearly 3,000 elite and middle-class women who were enfranchised by the Women's Suffrage Bill were the first women in the colonial Caribbean to win the franchise and forcefully challenged gendered conceptions of citizenship in the region. Historians have traditionally argued that the enfranchisement of women in Jamaica was a consequence of the successful suffrage movement in wartime Britain. While Jamaica's major women's organizations certainly monitored the achievements of activists in the metropole, the local suffrage movement drew upon homegrown discourses of imperial loyalty and patriotism and spread through a dense, island-wide network of middle-class women's social welfare organizations. This paper analyzes the grassroots initiatives of the Women's Social Service Club (WSSC), Jamaica's largest women's suffrage organization, within the context of the tremendous social and political upheavals engendered by the First World War. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean colonies volunteered to fight for the Allies in the First World War and over 10,000 men from Jamaica served in the newly-formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Official appeals to patriotism and duty during the wartime recruitment and fundraising efforts explicitly linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting gendered conceptions of the loyal colonial subject. As men embarked for the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, local women became the primary target of anxious colonial bureaucrats, social commentators, and military officials in a moment of ever increasing change. Yet, during the war years, elite and middle-class women skillfully employed the language of patriotic motherhood to argue for the right to vote and unprecedented social welfare schemes for the postwar period.