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.124Tax resistance proved to be the longest-lived form of militancy, and themost difficult to prosecute.More than 220 women, mostly middle-class, par-ticipated in tax resistance between 1906 and 1918, some continuing to resistthrough the First World War, despite a general suspension of militancy.Suf-fragettes resisted payment of two general categories of tax: the first includedproperty tax, inhabited house duty, and income tax; the second, taxes andlicenses on dogs, carriages, motor cars, male servants, armorial bearings,guns, and game.125 Contemporaries had several theories regarding tax re-sistance’s appeal.Suffragette speaker and sympathizer Laurence Housmancited the clarity of tax resistance’s logic as a primary reason for its popular-ity.126 Suffragettes’ tax resistance also cut across organizational lines.The formation of the Women’s Tax Resistance League in 1909 brought women to-gether from numerous organizations, including not only the WSPU, WFL,and NUWSS but also the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, Conservativeand Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, Church League for Women’sSuffrage, Free Church League, Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, Actresses’Franchise League, Artists’ Franchise League, and the Women Writers’ Suf-frage League (see figure 3.4).127Resisting the census provided a further opportunity to withhold consentthrough repudiating the law, one that brought militants together at a timewhen the WSPU’s violence threated to alienate them from other groups.128The WFL initiated the protest in early February of the census year 1911, urg-ing women to refuse to fill out census forms, thereby rendering the census“ineffective and unreliable for practical purposes.”129 The leadership of theWSPU had originally intended to abstain from the protest but was forced, ac-cording to Laurence Housman, by the “restiveness of its own rank and file tocome in, give the protest its official blessing, and as a result make it doubly ef-fective, and safe.”130 Indeed, the census protest proved successful.No arrestswere made in connection with the protest, and only one prosecution was reg-istered, against WSPU members who had spent census night on Wimbledon60s ta g i n g e xc l u s i o n , 19 0 6 – 19 0 9f i g u r e 3.4Miss G.Eaton,tax resister, withgoods seized by thegovernment forpayment of taxes.Museum of London.Common.Charges were brought against them not for resisting the censusbut for damaging the turf of the Commons.131 Census resistance was popu-lar among suffragettes for many reasons, not least because it involved lessrisk to participants than did tax resistance.A government prosecution fortax resistance could drag on for years, and the level of vigilance necessary tooutwit the bailiffs may easily have proved too much for most women to main-tain.The highly symbolic census resistance, though it required advancedplanning, could be executed in one night, with minimal impact on partici-pants’ lives.WFL planning for the protest included the provision of detailedinformation on how to resist registration without incurring fines or imprison-ment.132 Census resistance brought the women’s suffrage movement togetherto disrupt the machinery of the state, and not merely against the Liberal gov-ernment, thereby enlarging the moral scope and enhancing the persuasive-ness of the women’s cause.In the period between 1906 and 1909, suffragettes articulated resistancewithin the constitutional idiom, creating new identities and fields of struggle.Suffragette militancy confirmed the profound Victorian fear that womenwould slip the reins of domesticity, femininity, and constitutionality throughtheir exercise of political rights.Through their creative dramas of exclusionand participation, militants demonstrated that women’s citizenship was a61t h e m i l i ta n t s u f f r a g e m ov e m e n tprocess in the making
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