In March 1912, Ethel Smyth stood side by side with activist Emmeline Pankhurst outside the office of MP Lewis Harcourt, a well-known anti-suffragist. Calmly and with accuracy, the two women threw a series of bricks through his office windows, sending shards of glass flying everywhere. 

This calculated action was part of a coordinated campaign whereby over 100 suffragettes smashed windows across London. Nearly all were arrested and dragged away while screaming and shouting suffragette slogans. Among them was Smyth, who was sentenced to two months in Holloway prison. When her friend Thomas Beecham visited her there, he recalled that the women exercising in the courtyard were marching and singing with Smyth, who conducted them from her cell window using her toothbrush. 

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Smyth’s name rarely comes up in conversations about suffragettes. Yet in the 1910s, she was deeply involved in every aspect of women’s fight for the right to vote in Britain. Tall and often donning tweed suits and men’s hats while riding her bicycle, she was an eye-catching figure on the streets of London. In the words of fellow suffragist and writer Sylvia Pankhurst, there was “little about her that was [traditionally] feminine.” Nevertheless, she attracted admirers of both sexes wherever she went. 

Smyth transcended social and gender norms almost from birth. A talented and passionate musician, she had her ambitions and work dismissed as frivolous because she was a woman.

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Smyth was also an unapologetically queer woman who had passionate affairs with numerous women, including the Irish novelist Edith Somerville and the royal courtier and women’s rights advocate Lady Mary Ponsonby. She also developed an intimate friendship with Virginia Woolf, though it is unclear if the relationship ever became more than that. Woolf once wrote of Smyth, “Let me fasten myself upon you, and fill my veins with charity and champagne.” Others with whom she was intimately involved included the queer author Violet Trefusis, the American painter Romaine Brooks, and the artist Renata Borgatti, although once again, it is not clear whether the attachments became physical.

Defying the expectation of the age, Smyth wrote opera and chamber music, which was far beyond the scope of the composition of parlour music usually available to women. When she met Pankhurst in 1910, she turned her talents to supporting the suffragette cause, composing music, writing essays, and, of course, smashing windows. 

Resisting the “male machine”

Born in Sidcup, England, in 1858, Smyth was not a typical Victorian child and was despaired of by her military father. She was passionate about music from a young age, but the field was male-dominated, and women’s skills were dismissed. Smyth was fiercely ambitious, and although her father disapproved, he eventually relented and allowed her to attend the Leipzig Conservatoire in Germany. She was determined that the music she wrote should not be relegated to parlour music to be played by women in their drawing rooms for the entertainment of men. Instead, she aimed to write great and dramatic operas. 

In later recollections, Smyth denounced the world of the Conservatoire as a “male machine” but welcomed the chance to learn. While there, she met and was dismissed by the composer Johannes Brahms, but the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky recognized her as a rare talent and encouraged her, writing that “Miss Smyth can seriously [be considered] to be achieving something valuable in the field of music creation.” She also met Clara Schumann, the wife of composer Robert Schumann, who likewise recognized her ability. She became friends with musician Heinrich von Herzonbery and his wife, who was herself a composer and pianist. 

Smyth produced a large body of music, and upon her return to England, she slowly began to receive recognition for her talent. Her Mass in D was performed in the Royal Albert Hall in 1893 to widespread acclaim. Her opera The Wreckers premiered in 1906 and became one of her most famous works.

Throughout her life, Smyth would say that she composed best when she was happiest. Her sweepingly dramatic compositions indeed reflected the turbulence of her personal life, and she had plenty of drama to draw on. 

Remarkably explicit & never ashamed

In 1910, Smyth heard Pankhurst speak at a meeting at the home of writer Anna Brassey, and she immediately joined the suffragette cause. She quickly became enamoured with Pankhurst and the two formed the “deepest and closest of friendships.” 

Smyth certainly felt a romantic attachment to Pankhurst, although whether this was reciprocated in any way is unclear (though Virginia Woolf tells us in a letter that “they shared a bed”). From an early age, Smyth had been aware that she was attracted to women, as well as sometimes to men, writing that “from the first my most ardent sentiments were bestowed on members of my own sex.” In her memoirs (published in 1919 under the title Impressions That Remained), she is remarkably explicit when talking about her relationships with women. She’s never ashamed, and she never shies away from the reality of her desires. 

She also had as a lover the American poet, writer, and philosopher Henry Brewster, but she steadfastly refused to marry him, knowing that she was primarily attracted to women. She mused on the nature of desire, asking him, “I wonder why it is so much easier for me… to love my own sex passionately rather than yours?” In the early to mid 1880’s, she ended up in a menage a trois with Brewster and his wife, Julia, which led to scandal when the situation resulted in a publicized divorce petition. In later life, she also had a romantic relationship with the musician Violet Gordon-Woodhouse. 

In 1911, Smyth wrote the suffragette anthem, The March of the Women. It was described in January 1911 by the WSPU suffragette newspaper as “at once a hymn and a call to battle,” with its first performance celebrating the release of suffragettes from prison after the Black Friday protest. Soon afterwards, Smyth took up window-smashing. 

Smyth remained a dedicated suffragette. She ultimately fell out with the Pankhursts over their support of the war effort, though she played her part by working as a radiological assistant in France.

Despite the scandals surrounding her personal life, Smyth’s music was well respected, and in 1922, she became a Dame of the British Empire, with her work recognized by an honorary Oxford University degree. She died peacefully in 1944. 

Smyth is not well known today, largely because her openness about her sexuality meant that her life and work were unacceptable to the mid-20th century British establishment. Her memory lived on in those who knew her, though. 

In Smyth’s eulogy, Author Vita Sackville-West described her as follows:

“Wild welcomer of life, of love, of art.
Your hat askew, your soul on a dead level, 
Rough, tough, uncomfortable, true
Chained to the iron railings of your creed” 

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