Why Titanic was a turning point for women’s rights…and how it showed me the gap between the rights of well-off women versus the poor

By Julie Cook

Their hands were red-raw from doing their stoker husbands’ laundry. Their waists were pinched and aching from the daily use of corsets and their expressions in the rare photographs that exist of them speak of an empty hopelessness.

These were the Titanic wives – the women who had married the working class crew men who set sail on the mighty ship. In an era of steam ship power, of all that was big and fast and, arguably, ‘masculine’ about the world, women, by contrast, suffered in silence.

My great-grandmother Emily Bessant was one such woman. Aged 38 when Titanic set sail she was living through a seismic time – a time when Suffrage was reaching fever pitch; when the newspapers were filled with stories of ‘terror’ women chaining themselves to railing, smashing windows and going on hunger strikes to try and gain women the vote.

Better off women might have been more vocal. They had the means.

But Emily did not. She was married to my great-grandfather, William Bessant, aged 40. He was a stoker on steamships and in 1912, he signed on to Titanic as a stoker in order to feed Emily and their five children.

Both had been agricultural workers before their marriage but afterwards, and after a life of almost perpetual pregnancy, Emily could not work.

So he was her breadwinner.

It was days after Titanic had set sail, that Emily heard the terrible news.

Titanic had struck an iceberg. Hundreds of local men from Southampton had died and were lost at sea. She ran down to the White Star Line offices to queue with hundreds of others, desperate to see if William was on the list of survivors.

His name never appeared.

A few days later a telegram arrived. William was lost at sea.

What followed was a time of great grief for Emily and the hundreds of other widows in Southampton. Five-hundred and forty-nine men from Southampton died as crew on Titanic. Hundreds of women and children were left not only without husbands and fathers but they were left without a breadwinner. Suffrage may have been reaching fever pitch, but these women had no rights. No vote. No voice. No income.

A few months later, after hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations poured in from around the world The Titanic Relief Fund was born. It had collected a sum of £412,000 – over £30m today. And yet, as my research to write my book about Emily and the widows like her showed me, this money would not reach the women in a fair way.

The Fund decided the awards to Titanic widows would have a class system – class A for the wives of officers, down to class G for the wives of stokers.

Emily was in class G and would receive 12 shillings and sixpence a week – around £60 today.

But the Fund did not entertain the idea of giving these women a lump sum. They were considered to be too helpless to manage their own finances – despite many of them being the heads of their households while their men were at sea.

Instead their money would be handed out in piecemeal way – weekly. The Titanic Relief Fund minute books, which I spent hours poring over in the archive in Southampton, show every single minute detail of where the Fund money was spent.

Some wives were so malnourished without their husbands’ income, they were given emergency donations of ‘nourishing food.’

Others were given grants for much-needed spectacles of false teeth.

But these women also had to behave in a certain way. A ‘Lady Visitor’ was appointed by the Fund in a social-worker type role to visit the houses of the Titanic widows to ensure she was coping and looking after her family. But there was a subtext of judgement attached. If women were found to be drinking, for example, they were struck off the Fund for a few weeks and told to enter ‘a house for inebriates.’

The women had to behave, and be pious widows if they still wanted their money.

Meanwhile, early feminists were vocal in the press about how Titanic marked a watershed in women’s rights. Many suffragettes complained that men sacrificing their own lives on Titanic so women could claim a space in the lifeboats set back the women’s rights movement years. One such woman, Lady Aberconway, who founded the Liberal Women’s Suffrage Movement wrote a letter asking whether ‘women and children first’ was a useful idea at all. Was ‘chivalry’ a positive thing if it kept women still shackled in their place in society?

Men argued, however, that women ought to have been grateful their lives were spared in the place of the men on Titanic.

The better-off, more articulate women of course could debate such arguments. But for women like Emily, living hand to mouth, in damp, rented accommodation, rights were the last thing on their minds. Survival was.

The women who carried on quietly like Emily received their weekly hand-outs from the Fund. Those who drank, neglected their children or were found with new men were discussed openly in Titanic Relief Fund meetings. Inebriates were struck off until they could prove they had stopped drinking. Those accused of neglect had to show they could care for their children. Women who remarried had their charitable hand-outs stopped: after all, they now had a man to provide for them.

Emily never did remarry. She struggled on, brought up her five children and eventually scraped together enough money to start a sweet shop, something I find incredible during a time of such difficulty, poverty and grief.

One hundred years separate me and her. Although we have a huge way to go in women’s equality, my life, comparatively, has been blessed with opportunity and a chance to have a voice.

This is why I wrote my book The Titanic and the City of Widows it Left Behind. It was to recognise the poor crew who died and how they are often overlooked in favour of the rich in first class, but it was also to give the women left behind their voice; to show how much they suffered, and how quietly, behaving themselves for fear of not receiving their hand-outs to keep food on the table.

If I could meet Emily now I’d like to tell her how proud I am of how she kept her family together. And how whether she believed it or not, she and women like her helped, in their own silent way, to fuel the debate about women’s rights.

The Titanic and the City of Widows it Left Behind is published by Pen and Sword Books

Available in hardback or Kindle format