Edge Hill's Ethel Snowden : Exploring the Narratives of Her Life 1881-1903.

Abstract

Ethel (Annakin) Snowden (1881-1951) was a Socialist, a campaigner for women’s suffrage, for temperance, and a lifelong believer in pacifism.  In 1900, at just 19 years of age, she secured a place at the first non-denominational teacher training college for women in England and Wales, Edge Hill College, Liverpool (established 1885).  Unfortunately, Ethel left no personal diaries or letters for posterity, so little is known of her personal teacher training experiences.  Yet, between 1907-26, Ethel would go on to author four books and four pamphlets.  In this article, I draw on two of these The Woman Socialist, 1907 and The Feminist Movement, 1913.  Additionally, she later gained a reputation for being a powerful and passionate speaker, her “inspirational style” was referred to as “sparkling with epigram, bright with humour and satire, and sympathetic with pathos and feeling” (Cross, 1966: 68).

Interestingly, the archives at Edge Hill University do not contain any hint of Ethel’s powerful and passionate rhetoric in the years 1900-02, yet her activities in the city of Liverpool do give an insight into the activist she would become.  For these reasons I aim to set Ethel’s formative experiences in the context of national, cultural, and religious occurrences of the period 1881-1903, and feature some of the personalities Ethel knew most closely.  A ‘topical life history’ approach is most fitting for this purpose in that it is only this phase of Ethel’s life that I intend to explore at this time (Denzin 2009: 222).  Where I am unable to present a neat chronological account, as the archival and secondary evidence available is fragmentary, I attempt a form of historiography (Gottschalk 1945 in Denzin 2009: 246) in reconstructing past events.  I also aim to give voice to Ethel Annakin, through secondary sources and through her aforementioned publications, irrespective of their later publication date.

In this way I can portray a story that notices the silences, that notices what is told as well as what is not told, and importantly a story that ‘attend(s) to the contradictions’ (Munro 1998 12-13).  For example, given the resolute, dedicated and renowned nature of her lifelong work we may ask why Ethel Snowden is not more celebrated and why her influence is largely absent from contemporary publications.  Perhaps her marriage to Philip Snowden (later Viscount Snowden) MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Labour Government (1924) overshadowed her own importance to women’s socialist history.  What becomes clear is that from her activist beginnings Ethel Annakin always fought to eradicate social injustices whenever and wherever she perceived them, confirming that the years 1881-1903 were fundamental to her later endeavours as a member of the Fabian Society, the Independent Labour Party, and The Women’s Peace Crusade.