The British Women's Suffrage Campaign 1866-1928

Revised 2nd Edition

Harold L. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317862246
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

This Seminar Study was the first book to trace the British womens suffrage campaign from its origins in the 1860s through to the achievement of equal suffrage in 1928. In this second edition, Smith provides new evidence drawn from the authors research on how the main post-1918 womens organisation (the NUSEC) worked with Conservative Party women to persuade the Conservative Party to endorse equal franchise rights.

Smith focuses on the actions of reformers and their opponents, with due attention paid to the campaigns in Scotland and Wales as well as the movements in England. He explores why womens suffrage was such a contentious issue, and how women gained the vote despite opponents fears that it would undermine gender boundaries.

Suitable for students studying the Suffrage Movement, modern British history and the history of gender.

Part 1

BACKGROUND

1

Introduction

In terms of its stated objective, the women’s suffrage campaign was a success story: the principle of women’s suffrage was conceded in 1918, and equal franchise rights followed in 1928. The campaign brought into being Britain’s largest women’s movement, and heightened expectations of gender reform. But from the beginning of the campaign, many women had wanted something more than equal access to a male-controlled political system; they wished to change the system to reflect women’s values. Although the first stage of suffrage reform was followed by a surge of legislation that women’s groups had sought, by 1928 it had become apparent that this vision of a radical transformation of gender structures would not be achieved in the near future (Smith in Smith, 1990). While equal franchise provided women the opportunity to participate, parliamentary politics remained a male-dominated political system. This book attempts to explain how the women’s movement succeeded in gaining suffrage reform, but was only partially successful in its efforts to eradicate broader gender barriers.

Ray Strachey’s study, The Cause (1928), was the first serious attempt to write the history of the women’s suffrage campaign, but its Whiggish account of the inevitable triumph of a just cause did not capture the public imagination (nor that of the historians) to the extent that Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette Movement did when it appeared in 1931. Pankhurst’s book did more than any other volume to shape interpretations of the suffrage campaign for the next 40 years: the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was at the centre of the story and the Pankhurst women were the central characters. When the BBC prepared a documentary on the women’s suffrage campaign in the 1970s, it (and the accompanying book, Shoulder to Shoulder by Midge Mackenzie) concentrated on the WSPU and the Pankhursts.

Pankhurst, Sylvia (1882–1960): Emmeline Pankurst’s daughter. Although she remained in the WSPU when her mother and her sister Christabel broke with the ILP, she disagreed with their policy and sought to link feminism and socialism. Expelled from the WSPU by Christabel in 1914, she formed her own organization, the East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Women’s Social and Political Union: Established in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst. It used militant methods which led its members to be called ‘suffragettes’ to distinguish them from the constitutional suffragists. Its journal, Votes for Women, reached a peak circulation of almost 40,000 in 1909–10.

While the public remains fascinated by the Pankhursts, the suffrage movement’s historiography has undergone a dramatic transformation during the past two decades. The publication of Sandra Holton’s Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–1918 in 1986 was a turning-point. The use of new archival material by Holton, Jo Vellacott (1993), and David Rubinstein (1991) significantly altered our understanding of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and its contributions to franchise reform. Scholarly attention shifted to the innovative strategy of the NUWSS in allying with the Labour Party as the key to gaining suffrage reform, and away from the heroism of individual suffragettes.

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies: Established in 1897. Although Millicent Fawcett was not formally elected president until 1907, she was viewed as the NUWSS’s leader from its beginning. In 1909 the NUWSS began publishing its own journal, The Common Cause, which had a circulation of 10,000 by 1912.

While scholarly work on the British women’s suffrage campaign was already reviving when this book’s first edition was completed in 1997, that was only a prelude to the flowering of research that occurred during the following decade. Since 1997 historians have provided (to mention only a sample of the important new work): two full-length biographies of Emmeline Pankhurst (Purvis, 2002; Bartley, 2002); a collective biography of the Pankhursts (Pugh, 2001); a perceptive analysis of the suffrage campaign’s political context to 1914 (Pugh, 2000); an impressively researched study of Eleanor Rathbone that sheds new light on both the NUWSS and its successor, the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) (Pedersen, 2004); significant studies of the regions demonstrating the importance of the campaign outside London (Cowman, 2004; Liddington, 2006; Crawford, 2005b; Hannam in Purvis and Holton, 2000); and two important studies of the suffrage issue during the First World War (Gullace, 2002; Grayzel, 1999). Several important collections of essays have also contributed to the reassessment of the suffrage movement (see the Guide to Further Reading), as well as Elizabeth Crawford’s impressively detailed encyclopedia of the suffrage campaign (Crawford, 1999), and a steady stream of articles, especially in the Women’s History Review.

Pankhurst, Emmeline: (1858–1928): Founded the WSPU in 1903 and always its spiritual leader although her daughter Christabel assumed greater responsibility for directing the WSPU campaign after 1910. Repeatedly imprisoned during the suffrage campaign, she inspired many women to join the suffrage movement by her willingness to sacrifice her life if necessary for the cause.

Rathbone, Eleanor: (1872–1946): Rathbone became the Liverpool Women’s Suffrage Society’s secretary in 1897, and later became a member of the NUWSS executive. Elected President of the NUSEC in 1919, Rathbone directed the campaign for equal franchise in the 1920s.

National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship: The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies changed its name to the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship in 1919 to reflect its expanded reform programme. Eleanor Rathbone was its president from 1919 to 1928. It was primarily responsible for conducting the feminist campaign for equal franchise in the 1920s.

This new work has not merely provided us with more details about the suffrage campaign, but in several areas has challenged the old paradigm and offered a new conceptual framework. In the following pages I have attempted to provide both an overview of the various stages of the campaign and also a guide to the historiography, drawing special attention to the areas in which it has been altered by recent research. Since the history of the suffrage campaign remains hotly contested ground, I have attempted to point out the main areas of controversy at appropriate places in the text. Due to space limitations, I have had to prune rigorously and, in some instances, to delete topics that deserved inclusion. I would hope that readers will consider this volume the starting point of their investigation into the women’s suffrage movement rather than the end.

Part 2

ANALYSIS

2

The Victorian Suffrage Campaign, 1866–97

The British women’s suffrage campaign used to be portrayed as part of the nineteenth-century movement for a more democratic franchise which also sought to extend the suffrage to disenfranchised men. While acknowledging this connection, historians now view the campaign as part of a specifically women’s protest against a gender system that disadvantaged females. Women sought the vote not only to gain equal citizenship rights, but also as a means to the political power necessary to transform gender structures. Accompanying this changed perspective has been a shift in how historians view the relationship between the suffrage campaign and other women’s reform movements. While earlier studies considered the suffrage campaign to be separate from other Victorian female reform movements, it is now regarded as part of a broader reform impulse seeking to eliminate restrictions on women’s educational and employment opportunities, gendered pay scales, the sexual double standard, and the legal authority husbands held over their wives (Levine, 1990).

ORIGINS

Women’s suffrage became a matter of public concern during the early nineteenth-century discussion of franchise reform. In response to James Mill’s claim in 1820 that there was no need to extend the suffrage to women because their fathers and husbands would protect their interests, William Thompson and Anna Wheeler presented a case for women’s right to vote in An Appeal of One Half the Human Race … (Thompson and Wheeler, 1825). In the debate on the 1832 Reform Bill, Henry Hunt introduced a petition to grant the vote to unmarried women who met the bill’s property requirements. Parliament responded by passing legislation which for the first time explicitly restricted the suffrage to men; the Reform Act specified that it enfranchised ‘male persons’.

During the following decades there were several attempts to revive the issue. The Chartist movement included women in the 1838 People’s Charter, although later versions changed the demand to adult male suffrage. In 1851 Anne Knight, a Quaker and anti-slavery campaigner, assisted Chartist women in establishing the Sheffield Female Political Association which drafted the women’s suffrage petition introduced in the House of Lords later that year.

The organized women’s movement originated with the group of women who met at Langham Place in London in the 1850s and 1860s. Led by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes, it became an important source of proposals for gender reform in education, employment, and politics which they conveyed to a wider audience through their periodical, the English Woman’s Journal. Members of this group established the Married Women’s Property Committee in 1855 that successfully pressed for legal reform to grant married women property rights (Herstein, 1985). The English Woman’s Journal encouraged interest in women’s suffrage by printing articles on it in the 1860s. Women from the Langham Place circle were prominent in the Kensington Society, a debating group formed in 1865, which advocated women’s suffrage among other reforms; it later became the London Society for Women’s Suffrage (LSWS).

An organized women’s suffrage movement emerged when a new reform bill became a possibility in the mid-1860s. John Stuart Mill included women’s suffrage in his election programme when he was elected to Parliament in 1865. At Bodichon’s request Mill agreed to introduce a women’s suffrage amendment if the women’s groups would prepare a petition [Doc. 1, p. 117]. Suffrage societies were quickly formed in London and Manchester; Mill presented their petition with 1,499 signatures to Parliament in 1866. When Disraeli’s 1867 Reform Bill was considered by the House of Commons, Mill proposed substituting the term ‘person’ for ‘man’, but his amendment was rejected by a vote of 194 to 73.

During the 1860s suffragists often based their claim for the vote on the ground that qualified women had voted in the past, and that in 1850 Lord Brougham’s Act specified that the term ‘man’ in all legislation was to be taken as including women unless it expressly excluded them. On this basis Lydia Becker encouraged women who met the 1867 Reform Act’s property qualifications to attempt to register to vote. In November 1868 this view was rejected by the Court of Common Pleas in the Chorlton v. Lings decision, thus forcing the suffrage movement to seek legislation granting women the vote (van Wingerden, 1999).

Becker, Lydia (1827–1890): After serving as secretary of the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage, Becker became the first secretary of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. She remained its leader and edited the Women’s Suffrage Journal until the late 1880s.

Ray Strachey’s portrayal of the Victorian suffrage campaign as a London-based movement, dominated by moderate women drawn from the social élite, has been revised by recent studies (Strachey, 1928). Sandra Holton finds the roots of the women’s suffrage movement in mid-nineteenth century northern radicalism, and stresses the continuity between it and the Edwardian militant suffrage movement. The women who initiated the women’s suffrage movement tended to be religious dissenters, often Unitarian or Quaker, to have been active in radical political groups such as the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League or the anti-slavery movement, and to have connections with male radicals seeking a more democratic franchise (Holton, 1996).

Strachey presented the suffrage campaign as a socially conservative movement of respectable ladies by separating it from the reform efforts concerned with sexuality. Judith Walkowitz, however, considers the demand for the vote to have been fueled by women’s growing outrage against the sexual double standard (Walkowitz, 1980). The 1864 Contagious Diseases Act (extended in 1866 and 1869) required women suspected by the police of being prostitutes to have a medical examination to determine if they had venereal disease. Women were outraged by this for several reasons. The Acts did not require that men be examined, thus implying that women were solely responsible for spreading venereal diseases. It deprived women of civil liberties, since a woman could be suspected of prostitution merely by walking in certain sections of a town. Finally, the legislation applied only to towns with military bases and seemed designed to protect the sexual double standard by enabling men to frequent prostitutes without fear of disease. The Acts thus seemed a blatant example of the tendency of an all-male Parliament elected solely by male voters to legislate in men’s interests at women’s expense.

Recent writing has also shifted attention away from the London Society to the more radical Manchester Society. The latter was established by Elizabeth Wolstenholme in 1866, prior to the formation of the London Society, and it became the dominant suffrage society in the early years of the campaign. Following the creation of suffrage societies in Edinburgh, Bristol, and Birmingham, it was the Manchester Society which in 1867 was responsible for bringing the local suffrage societies together in the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS), a loose federation intended to facilitate joint action for reform (Holton, 1996). From 1872 until about 1885 the Manchester Society’s annual income was usually two to three times greater than that of the London Society (Pugh, 2000).

National Society for Women’s Suffrage: Established in 1867 by representatives of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage and the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage following the defeat of the women’s suffrage amendment to the 1867 Reform Bill. It was a loose federation intended to coordinate the efforts of the regional suffrage societies. Lydia Becker, the Manchester Society’s secretary, became its secretary.

Strachey’s depiction of the suffrage leaders as conservatives is also misleading. Radical suffragists played key roles in the Manchester Society from the beginning. Wolstonholme, the society’s first secretary, was notorious for her advanced feminism. Ursula Bright and her husband, Jacob Bright (the younger brother of John Bright), were prominent members, while Richard Pankhurst, a radical lawyer, joined shortly after it was formed. Pankhurst drafted the first women’s suffrage bill which Jacob Bright introduced in Parliament in 1870.

The Manchester Society’s importance is also suggested by the fact that its secretary, Lydia Becker, was the suffrage campaign’s first national secretary. Originally part of the Manchester Radical group, Becker was active in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s and was a member of the Married Women’s Property Committee until 1873. She founded the Women’s Suffrage Journal in 1870, and edited it until her death in 1890. She became the NSWS’s parliamentary secretary shortly after it was formed and directed the parliamentary campaign during the following decades.

The women who established the suffrage organizations in the 1860s were not political neophytes. Some had participated in the anti-slavery campaign, while others had been active in the Anti-Corn Law League. Suffragists drew upon their experience with these pressure groups in choosing to organize on a non-party basis and in relying on private members’ bills which could be supported by backbenchers from all parties. While this approach had worked for pressure groups earlier in the century, the increased role of party in late-Victorian Britain made it less effective. Brian Harrison considers this strategy to have been a major reason for the failure to achieve reform prior to 1914 (Harrison, 1983).

Success in securing the vote in local elections encouraged reformers to anticipate an early concession of the parliamentary franchise. Jacob Bright’s amendment to the 1869 Municipal Corporations (Franchise) Act granted women the right to vote in local elections on the same basis as men. This enfranchised unmarried women ratepayers; a married woman normally could not vote because her husband was legally the ratepayer. It set a precedent that led to women being granted the right to vote for the local school boards established by the 1870 Education Act. By 1892 there were 503,000 women eligible to vote in local elections in England, Scotland and Wales; they would have comprised at least ten per cent of the parliamentary electorate if women had been permitted to vote in national elections with the same qualifications (Pugh, 1985).

IDEOLOGY

The belief that the suffrage movement’s ideology was based on liberal equal rights doctrine has been replaced by a more complex interpretation. Although some women did use equal rights language derived from liberalism, many did not. Some women rejected equal rights ideology because it implied that women wishe...