Written by Susan Pares
My grandmother, Margaret Ellis Dixon, was born on this day, 28 March, in 1878, into a middle-class family in Colchester. She died in London on 22 September 1963. Her origins thus were not in Liverpool or Merseyside. She spent some twenty years there (bar a period during the Second World War when she worked there for the government Censorship Department). Those years, however, were pivotal in directing her towards the course she was to follow for the rest of her life, as an independent woman claiming the right and duty to live as a full citizen of society.
(Image Above - Margaret Pares, date and place unknown. Copyright Pares family, private collection)
Margaret dated the place and start of her suffrage and feminist activity to Liverpool, in 1904. In 1901, she had married my grandfather, Bernard Pares, and together with their first child, my father, the family had moved to Liverpool, probably in 1903, where Bernard took up his first appointment as a university history lecturer. His great passion was Russia, its history and people, and he devoted the entirety of his career to that cause. For her part, Margaret produced five more children between 1904 and 1911, though she lost a twin daughter to whooping cough when the baby was eight months old. There was a household with domestic staff to run in the three homes they successively inhabited, first in Garston, then in Upper Parliament Street and finally Gambier Terrace (within reach of the university).
(1911 Census Return for 18 Gambier Terrace, Liverpool - Margaret is listed as head of household)
Census Return Accessed via Find My Past
Some meeting, perhaps with Eleanor Rathbone, whom Margaret clearly regarded as a mentor, must have sparked her enthusiasm for the suffrage cause. I have found nothing – no diaries, no letters – that might record her involvement, so can only surmise that she was a moderate and probably joined the Liverpool Society for Women’s Suffrage (LSWS, affiliated to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies).
(Above image credit - Museum of Liverpool)
The LSWS had shops in Bold Street and Lord Street and used the Yamen Rooms in Bold Street for social and fundraising events. In 1918, Margaret emerged as the honorary secretary of the LSWS, which suggests some immersion in its activities. She is so named on an illuminated scroll presented to Eleanor Rathbone on 8 July 1918 by the LSWS to mark the passing of the Representation of the People Act on 6 February of that year. (The scroll, together with a wrought silver box, a cheque and a list of subscribers are all displayed in the Museum of Liverpool, accession number MMM.1999.22.3.)
Fortunately, a range of publicly held archives and printed sources, notably at the Women’s Library at LSE in London, tells us about the type of work that the LSWS, and other suffrage societies, was engaged in, and, by extension, possibly Margaret as well. The Common Cause, the NUWSS’s journal from 1909 to 1920, details the constant campaigning, through meetings, speakers, house-to-house canvassing and the opening of offices and shops, to encourage the formation of new societies.
Funds and subscriptions to The Common Cause were continually sought. Gathering support from women was the crucial aim, but the other important target in a constituency was its male Member of Parliament. It was essential to know his views on female suffrage and where these were judged to be unfriendly to attempt his conversion to a more helpful attitude through continuous lobbying.
Between 1907 and 1910, two by-elections, both in the Liverpool Kirkdale ward, and two general elections, both in 1910, brought Liverpool suffragists out to question male candidates on their position on female suffrage, to organise many outdoor meetings, some held over the midday dinner break at the docks and in the evening to largely friendly audiences of dockers, and to confront male voters at the polling stations, on occasion in heavy rain, with requests that they give their signatures in support of petitions for female enfranchisement. Taking to the streets in (peaceful) demonstrations was a further way to exert pressure.
(Members of LSWS outside 1910 election office - 19 Kirkdale Road. Photo courtesy of University of Liverpool)
On 18 June 1910, women’s suffrage associations in Liverpool and Merseyside gathered in the city centre in support of the Conciliation Bill (an earlier attempt at pro-enfranchisement legislation). There was plenty for someone of Margaret’s interests to do.
(Women's suffrage campaigners outside of Liverpool Central Library in 1910. Photograph courtesy of Lancashire Archives DDX 1137/5/24)
Throughout these years, however, Margaret was increasingly locked in a bitter dispute with her husband, largely over his regular visits to Russia in pursuit of research and contacts. (In 1907, he was involved in establishing the first department of Russian Studies in a British university.) These yearly absences would have exacerbated clashes of temperament and expectations. From 1907, according to Bernard, Margaret began to demand a separation. Solicitors’ negotiations and her father’s interventions did not change the situation, and in 1913, Bernard left the family home.
In 1914, Margaret presented a petition for restitution of conjugal rights to the High Court, implying desertion. (This was one of the remedies open to her under the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.) For the next four years, her case dragged on with exchanges of claims by each spouse (the court minutes can be viewed in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice, at the National Archives). Bernard’s absence in Russia for most of the First World War on British government missions delayed proceedings. Finally, in December 1918, after dismissal of Margaret’s case, the couple consented to a deed of separation, seemingly a private agreement carrying legal force. Though still regarding themselves as married, they spent the rest of their lives separately. It came at some personal cost to Margaret, who experienced friction and family estrangement and had no fixed home in old age.
(Margaret Pares, her sister Maud Dixon and her children, c. 1911-12, place unknown. Copyright Pares family, private collection)
At the age of forty, Margaret found herself partly responsible for five children aged seven to sixteen, and for the education of her two daughters. She had settled her family in West Kirby in the Wirral and following the Representation of the People Act, moved quickly to secure a vote for herself. This she seems to have achieved by entering Bernard as qualified to vote in both parliamentary and local elections in the new registers, thereby enabling her to register herself as the wife of a qualified male voter, as permitted under the 1918 Act, even though I cannot be sure that he ever lived in the house in West Kirkby. Resourcefulness and determination were qualities she had honed during her years in Liverpool and which allowed her to embark on an independent life.
By late 1923, she had settled in London and started her involvement in a number of women’s groups working to build on the gains of the 1918 enfranchisement. She became a special juror and for over nine years did voluntary work as a school manager and in care committee work in a poor part of north London. In 1946-47, she travelled to India to participate in an Indian women’s conference. Her experiences had perhaps hardened her, and she could be difficult and demanding, but I realise, as the years go by, how much she has guided and inspired me to do the hard work, and I am happy to pay her this birthday homage.
About Author : Susan Pares
Susan Pares worked first in the Civil Service and subsequently as a freelance editor and writer, with a special interest in East Asia. More recently she has turned to family history. Together with her husband she has co-authored a number of books on East Asian subjects and, singly, a memoir of her great-aunt who worked during the First World War with Quaker relief in France and Poland.
She is married, with one daughter, two stepsons and several grandchildren and lives in London.