Annie Besant together with Matchgirls Strike Committee in 1888 (Pic: Wikimedia Commons)
A Dirty, Filthy Book: Annie Besant’s Fight for Reproductive Rights, by Michael Meyer is a new biography of socialist activist Annie Besant.
It is a racy, pacy account of her extraordinary life.
As Michael Meyer writes, Besant “took aim at and subverted such seemingly intractable Victorian tenets as the Church, marriage, sex, class and imperialism.”
Besant was arrested twice by the British state, once in London for distributing birth control information, and once in India for opposing the British Empire.
And she paid a huge personal price for fighting for women’s right to bodily autonomy.
Annie Wood was born on 1 October 1847 in London. She married Frank Besant, an evangelical Anglican, in 1867.
In 1873 Besant left her husband, taking her daughter Mabel. Besant began to write for the paper of the National Secular Society led by Charles Bradlaugh.
She gave her first public meeting in 1874 when she spoke on “The Political Status of Women” in Covent Garden.
Besant and Bradlaugh became celebrities in 1877 when they published Fruits of Philosophy by birth-control campaigner Charles Knowlton in a cheap edition.
They were arrested and found guilty of obscenity charges. Their trial became a cause célèbre, pushing sex and morality to the forefront of public debate.
Frank Besant used the publicity surrounding the trial to have his wife declared an unfit mother. He took custody of Mabel.
Besant joined the Fabian socialists, and supported Irish Home Rulers in her newspaper articles. In 1887 she agreed to speak at a protest by the unemployed in Trafalgar Square. The rally was brutally attacked by police and hundreds were arrested in what became known as Bloody Sunday. Besant threw herself into organising legal aid for the jailed workers and their families.
Besant supported the match women’s strike of 1888 after writing an article about conditions at the Bryant & May match factory. She became a Marxist and joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1888.
In that year, Besant stood for election to the London School Board. She topped the poll in Tower Hamlets, with over 15,000 votes.
She wrote, “Ten years ago, under a cruel law, Christian bigotry robbed me of my little child. Now the care of the 763,680 children of London is placed partly in my hands.”
Besant was also involved in the London dock strike of 1889. But she was turning from Marxism to Theosophy – a religious movement based on Hinduism and Buddhism.
In 1890, Besant first travelled to India and joined the Indian National Congress.
In 1902 she wrote that “India is not ruled for the prospering of the people, but rather for the profit of her conquerors.”
In 1914, World War I broke out and Britain demanded support from its Empire. Echoing an Irish nationalist slogan, Besant declared, “England’s need is India’s opportunity”.
In June 1917, Besant was arrested and interned at a hill station. She was freed in September and in December she became president of the Indian National Congress.
She continued to fight for India’s independence until her death in 1933.
This biography gives a vivid sense of Besant’s complexity, her courageous resistance to the stultifying codes imposed on women and her determination to remain true to her radical beliefs. “Rather than waiting for change to happen”, Michael Meyer writes, “The audacious Annie Besant liberated herself.”
