Women's Tax Resistance League

The Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL) was from 1909 to 1918 a direct action group associated with the Women's Freedom League that used tax resistance to protest against the disenfranchisement of women during the British women’s suffrage movement.

Dora Montefiore proposed the formation of the league in 1897, and it was formally established on 22 October 1909. The league’s activities peaked in the years before World War I but were largely deflated in 1914 by the onset of that war, when the league membership passed a resolution to temporarily suspend their tax resistance.

Members saw themselves in a tradition of British tax resistance that included John Hampden. According to one source: “Tax resistance proved to be the longest-lived form of militancy, and the most difficult to prosecute. More than 220 women, mostly middle-class, participated in tax resistance between 1906 and 1918, some continuing to resist through the First World War, despite a general suspension of militancy.”

League member and author Beatrice Harraden said in 1913:

The least any woman can do is to refuse to pay taxes, especially the tax on actually earned income. This is certainly the most logical phase of the fight for suffrage. It is a culmination of the Government’s injustice and stupidity to ask that we pay an income tax on income earned by brains, when they are refusing to consider us eligible to vote.

The league was formed three years ago with the slogan: “No vote, no tax.” It is non-partisan—an association of constitutional and militant suffragists, recruited from various suffrage societies for the purpose of resisting taxes.

In several cases, the government seized and sold at auction items owned by the resisters. The League used these occasions as opportunities for demonstrations and publicity, for instance the “Siege of Montefiore” in 1906:

The house, surrounded by a wall, could be reached only through an arched doorway, which Montefiore and her maid barred against the bailiffs. For six weeks, Montefiore resisted payment of her taxes, addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.

Among the members were Lilian Hicks, Beatrice Harraden, Dora Montefiore, Flora Annie Steel, Edith Zangwill, Cicely Hamilton, Anne Cobden-Sanderson, Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford, Elizabeth Wilkes, Winifred Patch, Kate Harvey, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Charlotte Despard, Clemence Housman, Kate Haslam, Amy Hicks, Mrs. Darent Harrison, Mrs. How Martyn, Mary Sargant Florence, Louisa Matilda Fagan, Margaret Kineton Parkes, Mrs. Bormann Wells, Garrett Anderson, and Stanton Coit (a member of “the men’s branch”).

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