women's suffrage uk essay

MA in American History: Apply now and join us for courses this spring!

• AP US History Study Guide
• History U: Courses for High School Students
• History School: Summer Enrichment
• Lesson Plans
• Classroom Resources
• Elementary Curriculum
• Spotlights on Primary Sources
• Professional Development (Academic Year)
• Professional Development (Summer)
• Book Breaks
• Inside the Vault
• Self-Paced Courses
• Browse All Resources
• Search by Issue
• Search by Essay
• Become a Member (Free)
• Monthly Offer (Free for Members)
• Program Information
• Scholarships and Financial Aid
• Applying and Enrolling
• Eligibility (In-Person)
• EduHam Online
• Hamilton Cast Read Alongs
• Official Website
• Press Coverage
• Veterans Legacy Program
• The Declaration at 250
• Black Lives in the Founding Era
• Celebrating American Historical Holidays
• Spanish Influence on American History
• Donate Items to the Collection
• Search Our Catalog
• Research Guides
• Rights and Reproductions
• See Our Documents on Display
• Bring an Exhibition to Your Organization
• Interactive Exhibitions Online
• About the Transcription Program
• Civil War Letters
• Founding Era Newspapers
• College Fellowships in American History
• Scholarly Fellowship Program
• Richard Gilder History Prize
• David McCullough Essay Prize
• Affiliate School Scholarships
• Nominate a Teacher
• State Winners
• National Winners
• Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
• Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize
• George Washington Prize
• Frederick Douglass Book Prize
• Our Mission and History
• Annual Report
• Contact Information
• Student Advisory Council
• Teacher Advisory Council
• Board of Trustees
• Remembering Richard Gilder
• President's Council
• Scholarly Advisory Board
• Internships
• Our Partners
• Press Releases

History Resources

Women's Suffrage Spring 2006

Past Issues

71 | The Jewish Legacy in American History | Summer 2024

70 | World War II: Portraits of Service | Spring 2024

69 | The Reception and Impact of the Declaration of Independence, 1776-1826 | Winter 2023

68 | The Role of Spain in the American Revolution | Fall 2023

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era | Summer 2023

66 | Hispanic Heroes in American History | Spring 2023

65 | Asian American Immigration and US Policy | Winter 2022

64 | New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers | Fall 2022

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America | Summer 2022

62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds | Spring 2022

61 | The Declaration of Independence and the Origins of Self-Determination in the Modern World | Fall 2021

60 | Black Lives in the Founding Era | Summer 2021

59 | American Indians in Leadership | Winter 2021

58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters | Fall 2020

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography | Summer 2020

56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond | Spring 2020

55 | Examining Reconstruction | Fall 2019

54 | African American Women in Leadership | Summer 2019

53 | The Hispanic Legacy in American History | Winter 2019

52 | The History of US Immigration Laws | Fall 2018

51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights | Summer 2018

50 | Frederick Douglass at 200 | Winter 2018

49 | Excavating American History | Fall 2017

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity | Summer 2017

47 | American Women in Leadership | Winter 2017

46 | African American Soldiers | Fall 2016

45 | American History in Visual Art | Summer 2016

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination | Winter 2016

43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam | Fall 2015

42 | The Role of China in US History | Spring 2015

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality | Winter 2015

40 | Disasters in Modern American History | Fall 2014

39 | American Poets, American History | Spring 2014

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad | Winter 2014

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives | Fall 2013

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses | Summer 2013

35 | America’s First Ladies | Spring 2013

34 | The Revolutionary Age | Winter 2012

33 | Electing a President | Fall 2012

32 | The Music and History of Our Times | Summer 2012

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars | Spring 2012

30 | American Reform Movements | Winter 2012

29 | Religion in the Colonial World | Fall 2011

28 | American Indians | Summer 2011

27 | The Cold War | Spring 2011

26 | New Interpretations of the Civil War | Winter 2010

25 | Three Worlds Meet | Fall 2010

24 | Shaping the American Economy | Summer 2010

23 | Turning Points in American Sports | Spring 2010

22 | Andrew Jackson and His World | Winter 2009

21 | The American Revolution | Fall 2009

20 | High Crimes and Misdemeanors | Summer 2009

19 | The Great Depression | Spring 2009

18 | Abraham Lincoln in His Time and Ours | Winter 2008

17 | Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era | Fall 2008

16 | Books That Changed History | Summer 2008

15 | The Supreme Court | Spring 2008

14 | World War II | Winter 2007

13 | The Constitution | Fall 2007

12 | The Age Of Exploration | Summer 2007

11 | American Cities | Spring 2007

10 | Nineteenth Century Technology | Winter 2006

9 | The American West | Fall 2006

8 | The Civil Rights Movement | Summer 2006

7 | Women's Suffrage | Spring 2006

6 | Lincoln | Winter 2005

5 | Abolition | Fall 2005

4 | American National Holidays | Summer 2005

3 | Immigration | Spring 2005

2 | Primary Sources on Slavery | Winter 2004

1 | Elections | Fall 2004

Sisters of Suffrage: British and American Women Fight for the Vote

By barbara winslow.

In England, the organized suffrage movement began in 1866, when a number of prominent women’s rights reformers gathered some 1,500 signatures on a petition to Parliament requesting the right to vote. Signers included John Stuart Mill, who had successfully run for Parliament on a platform that included votes for women. From 1870 to 1905, a period often referred to as "the doldrums," suffragists did not make significant headway in mobilizing either widespread support or popular enthusiasm for extending the suffrage. But with the explosion of "militancy," beginning in 1905, hundreds of thousands of women pushed women’s suffrage to center stage, challenged conventional notions of women’s role, and confronted the government in never-before-dreamed-of acts of mass militancy and civil disobedience. English women won limited suffrage in 1918, and then in 1928, the majority of English women won the right to vote.

There are many commonalities and links between these histories of suffrage. English and American suffragists had a long history of relationships and organizational connections with each other. The idea of a women’s rights convention was first formulated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott while they attended the World Anti-Slavery Conference in London in 1840. Stanton and other US women’s rights reformers remained in contact with their English sisters. In the twentieth century the links continued. Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia Pankhurst, leaders of the militant wing of the English suffragette movement, made a number of visits to the United States. American women, including Harriot Stanton Blatch, Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns, worked with the Pankhursts and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and introduced the WSPU’s ideas of militancy and pageantry to the US women’s suffrage movement.

Along with the longstanding political and social relationships between the British and US movements, there were similarities both in the circumstances that these movements faced and in their styles and approaches. One similarity was that in both countries suffrage was based on gender. In the period before the American Revolution, propertied women in a few colonies could vote, but when the US Constitution was ratified, states specifically gave men the vote. (New Jersey briefly granted property-owning women the vote but rescinded it soon afterwards.) In England the reform bills of 1832 and 1867 respectively excluded women.

In both countries, to be sure, suffrage was based on class, race, nation, and religion as well as on gender. Another similarity is that suffragists in both countries were outside the political establishment. They had to campaign alone, without support from national leaders—presidents and prime ministers—or from the major political parties—the Democrats and Republicans in the US and the Liberal, Conservative, and Labour Parties in Britain. Suffragists in both countries (and overwhelmingly in the United States) were white and middle class, and their arguments for women’s suffrage reflected their class position. In the first phase of the two campaigns, the arguments for suffrage focused on equality; in the latter part of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth century, women’s unique contribution to nation- and empire-building was put forward as an argument for suffrage. Both suffrage movements sought the vote for privileged women, ignoring at best, opposing at worst, suffrage for working-class and colonized women—and in the United States, for African American women. Another common thread was the impact of World War I on women and the struggle for suffrage. Many historians have noted that women’s war work convinced a number of men (who were voters) that women’s enthusiastic participation in the war effort had earned them the right to vote.

Thus, the US and British woman’s suffrage movements clearly shared many features. But there were also several important differences. First, in England, unlike the United States, suffrage was by 1866 based on property as well as gender. The Liberal and Conservative Parties were not interested in expanding suffrage at all; the radical and labor movements, which did argue for expanding adult suffrage, ignored women. To these groups, "adult suffrage" was the code word for "adult male suffrage." However, the political argument for women’s suffrage, Votes for Women, meant voting rights on the same basis as men. Thus, given the exclusion of non-propertied working-class men from the electorate, Votes for Women in England meant votes for propertied women.

In the US, where race was more divisive than class, the franchise had been extended to almost all white male citizens by 1836. The struggle to extend the franchise to African Americans was a central demand of African American abolitionists. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed the franchise to African American men, but specifically excluded women. After 1870, issues of race and racism shaped the US women’s suffrage movement. While African American women supported and organized for suffrage, they were denied admission into the major suffrage organizations and meetings; meanwhile, suffragists used arguments of white racial supremacy as a rationale for giving women the vote.

Second, England had a parliamentary government, and therefore, the strategy and tactics of the suffragists were based on convincing the party in power to introduce and pass legislation. The militant wing of the suffrage movement, led by the WSPU, vowed to campaign against all parliamentary candidates of the political party in power if women’s suffrage legislation was not enacted. In the US, a representative republic, there were no national elections that would simultaneously determine the ruling party of both the executive and the legislature—and thus suffragists did not have the same kind of centralized power base to which they could appeal. In addition, each state was responsible for determining its own suffrage status. So suffragists had to adopt two strategies: One was to ignore the federal government and campaign on a state-by-state basis. This appealed in part to conservative and southern women, who could maintain racially exclusionary suffrage laws in their particular states. The other approach was to campaign for an amendment to the Constitution—a federal approach. This entailed convincing Congress as well as campaigning on a state-by-state basis. In the end, it took a federal amendment to enact women’s suffrage in the United States.

A final difference was the degree of militancy in the two movements. The history of the twentieth-century English suffrage movement is dominated by the militant leadership of the WSPU. Hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets, demonstrated, heckled politicians, chained themselves to Parliament, blew up buildings, smashed windows, went to jail, and endured the torture of forced feeding; in short they disrupted Edwardian England in a way not seen in the country since the days of the Chartist agitation. The mass militancy of women no doubt was a major factor in forcing the Liberal government to grant women’s suffrage in 1918.

There was no equivalent to this level of militancy in the United States. This is not to say that there weren’t mass demonstrations, picketing, and pageantry. Alice Paul’s Congressional Union continued the struggle for suffrage during World War I, with members demonstrating and chaining themselves to the White House, and suffering arrest, prison, and forced feedings. However, this militancy and disruption were not on the same scale as English militancy.

For all the commonalities and differences, in both countries, the hope for social peace was an overriding factor in winning women’s suffrage. Both countries had experienced growing social unrest before World War I, and it was thought that enfranchising women just might placate a significant section of the population, and bring it into the workings of the state. Finally, in both the US and Britain, the struggle for women’s suffrage was, in the words of leading suffrage historian Ellen Dubois, "a concrete reform and a symbol of women’s freedom, widely appreciated as such by supporters and opponents alike."

Barbara Winslow   is a historian who teaches in the School of Education and for the Women’s Studies Program at Brooklyn College, The City University of New York. Her publications include  Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism  (1996) and  Clio in the Classroom: Teaching US Women’s History in the Schools  (2009), co-authored and co-edited with Carol Berkin and Margaret Crocco. She is the founder and director of the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism, 1945 to the Present (chisholmproject.com) and is currently completing a biography of Shirley Chisholm as well as writing about the Seattle Washington Women’s Liberation Movement.

Stay up to date, and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter.

Learn how the Institute impacts history education through our work guiding teachers, energizing students, and supporting research.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

The women’s march: how the Suffragettes changed Britain

• The women’s march: how the Suffragettes changed Britain on x (opens in a new window)
• The women’s march: how the Suffragettes changed Britain on facebook (opens in a new window)
• The women’s march: how the Suffragettes changed Britain on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• The women’s march: how the Suffragettes changed Britain on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Lucy Lethbridge

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Next week we mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which began the process of giving all women the right to vote in British general elections. Receiving royal assent on February 6 1918 and finally passed in November of that year, just after the armistice, it was, on one level, a partial victory. Practically the entire male population over 21 was now enfranchised but women’s suffrage was still limited to those over 30, and still subject to property and other qualifications. It would be another decade before the sexes were brought into full democratic equality.

Nonetheless, the shift in attitude represented by the 1918 Act was profound. Only a few years before, women had been excluded from participation, as voters or officers, in any layer of democratic government. They couldn’t stand for or vote on local council elections, governing bodies or parish councils; they couldn’t even be churchwardens. When John Stuart Mill, author of The Subjection of Women and MP for Westminster, had put forward a bill in 1868 to extend suffrage to women, he was greeted with derisive laughter in the Commons. A year later, there were 255 petitions calling for suffrage presented, listing tens of thousands of names.

As the social historian Jane Robinson points out in Hearts and Minds , her excellent account of the suffragist movement, the Liberals worried that expanding the vote to property-owning women would mean more votes for Tories, while the Tories’ concern was that any expansion of the franchise to the working classes would pick up votes for the Liberals. The suffrage movement itself incorporated a wide range of political affiliations but by 1912 all groups had pledged to back candidates for Independent Labour — the only party with a manifesto of support for women’s suffrage.

So the history of the women’s suffrage movement is about women but also about men, about the power of collective organisation, about class (showing how its boundaries can be blurred in a common cause), and about expectations of power, where it lies and where it should or could lie. It incorporates changing attitudes to marriage and family, radical explorations of what it means to be feminine and masculine and what, if anything, that might entail in terms of legislation and social organisation. And attached to it are other 20th-century movements that speak of change and new freedoms such as pacifism, vegetarianism, bicycling, interests in psychology and religious non-conformism.

The Cambridge academic Patricia Fara recounts in A Lab of One’s Own how some anti-suffragists co-opted Darwinian evolution theory to underpin their argument that women were hard-wired to enhance the species by the development of skills in choosing a mate of superior moral capacity. An anti-suffrage postcard reproduced in Hearts and Minds offers an even more telling example of how women were commonly viewed: a feminine head filled only with gossip, chocolate, romance, fashion, babies and (for reasons unclear) small dogs.

By the early 20th century, the women’s suffrage campaign incorporated myriad groups and sub-groups, a thicket of bewildering acronyms. Many suffragists emerged from campaigns for improvements in labour conditions and pay. Selina Cooper, one of the best-known Suffragist speakers, was a mill worker from Lancashire who began her career in activism by campaigning for lavatory doors for women at work. There were suffrage groups for, among others, Catholics, Unionists, trade unionists, Unitarians, actresses, Temperance advocates, Tories and Liberals, as well as innumerable local campaigns. The social cross-section they represented was remarkable, as was the spirit of political and social debate that thrived under the suffrage umbrella.

By 1907, the year that women won the right to vote and to stand for election in local councils, two main factions had emerged to dominate the campaign. They were the Suffragists and the Suffragettes, the constitutionalists and the militants. The Suffragists went under the colours of red, green and white and the Suffragettes (the name was first coined, mockingly, in the Daily Mail, but they cannily made it their own, pronouncing it with a hard “g” as in “get the vote”) under the still-familiar purple, green and white. And for the Gists and the Gettes, there were two very different leaders, both veteran activists for women’s rights: Millicent Fawcett of the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) and Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the breakaway WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) with their slogan “Deeds not words”.

Then as now, it was the Suffragettes who hogged the headlines but the Suffragists put in much of the unsung spadework: petitioning, pamphleteering, fundraising and being heckled while selling publications on the street and speaking in provincial village halls. The aim of Robinson’s book is to put Fawcett and the NUWSS back at the centre of the story, reminding us particularly of the Suffragists’ Great Pilgrimage of 1913, when 50,000 women from all over Britain trekked to London in a show of solidarity. This was the Suffragists’ answer to the firebombing and hunger-striking tactics of the Suffragettes.

Tramping an average of 20 miles a day in all weathers, the great crowd was the result of awesomely impressive nationwide organisation. It wasn’t the first time that women had descended on London for the vote. In 1907, thousands had headed for a rain-sodden Hyde Park in what became known as the “Mud March”. In 1912, a group known as “the Brown Women” had walked from Edinburgh to London to gather support for a petition to the prime minister (one shinned up a telegraph pole to get a signature from an engineer at the top).

The Pilgrimage distracted the sceptical public from the stone-throwing Suffragettes — although the Suffragists were themselves used to insults and being pelted by missiles (in Nottingham dead rats were thrown at them). Advice to campaigning speakers was to wear cardboard under one’s clothes, moulded in bathwater to the shape of the body as armour against stones, eggs or worse. The Suffragists were more open to male supporters than the Suffragettes and men pepper the accounts of supporters met along the way.

To say I enjoyed making fires sounds rather awful. But it was really lovely to find that you’d been successful; that the thing really had burned down

Memoirists quoted by Robinson convey the esprit de corps that the Great Pilgrimage engendered, described by Vera Chute Collum of the Watling Street Pilgrims as “one hundred tan-faced women swinging along in easy comradeship”. But it is difficult not to reach for adjectives such as “cheerful”, “redoubtable” and “doughty” to describe them. The Suffragists themselves understood their image problem — and it was suggested in headquarters that the Pilgrims refrain from wearing tweed lest it reinforce the stereotype of frumpiness.

Militants and constitutionalists joined forces in the call to boycott the census of 1911 and in their support of a Tax Resistance League that advocated withholding taxes and refusing to pay the fines incurred. Where they diverged was in the violence against property practised by the Suffragettes, who by 1913 were creating havoc by throwing stones through windows, setting buildings alight, locking themselves to railings, posting lighted rags into letterboxes and slashing pictures in public art galleries.

In 1910, a surge of public sympathy and government embarrassment had followed newspaper photographs of police violently attacking women gathered to protest against prime minister Herbert Asquith’s refusal (finally, after the WSPU had suspended its activities to wait for his decision) to allow a third reading of a watered-down suffrage bill. Black Friday, as it became known, was a watershed in Suffragette history: in the official inquiry that followed, Florence Sotheran, quoted by Robinson, gave her account: “It was this officious pummelling of the spine . . . when they held you helpless which wore you out so . . . Once I was thrown with my jaw against a lamp-post with such force that two of my front teeth were loosened.”

Suffragettes went about their campaign with a furious inventiveness chronicled in historian Diane Atkinson’s compendious, multi-biographical Rise up Women! During Mass at Brompton Oratory, they shouted during the gospel reading and were set upon by the congregation; a Scottish activist tried to blow up Robert Burns’s birthplace; a debutante, while being presented at court, challenged the king about force-feeding in prisons. The prisons overflowed with Suffragettes on hunger strike and Atkinson gives us grim accounts of tied hands and legs, the horribly painful forced insertion of nasal and throat tubes, vomiting, forced enemas and steel gags.

For all these terrors, the struggle could be exciting for women whose lives had up till then been circumscribed by social expectations. Lilian Lenton was an enthusiastic arsonist: “To say I enjoyed making fires sounds rather awful. But it was really lovely to find that you’d been successful; that the thing really had burned down and you hadn’t got caught.” Lady Constance Lytton was so annoyed to find that her rank meant that she was often released early from prison that she adopted a pseudonym, Jane Warton, and inscribed the words “Votes for Women” on her flesh with a hatpin.

Suffragette Jessie Stephenson thought Fawcett’s Suffragism a “mushy old institution, dry as bones”; for their part, the Suffragists viewed the Pankhursts’ call to “martyrdom” as dangerously emotional and the devotion inspired by Emmeline and her daughter Christabel “idolatrous”. Autocratic and dismissive of dissent, the Pankhursts were masters of the use of spectacle for media coverage. Suffragette pageants invoked warrior women and female martyrs such as Joan of Arc or Boadicea; there was much dressing up in medieval-style armour.

The death of Emily Davison under the hooves of the King’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby remains the most potent historical example of Suffragette martyrdom. At her funeral procession thousands of WSPU members dressed in white and holding lilies followed a coffin covered with a flag decorated with the broad arrow of a prison uniform. An editorial in the Suffragist Common Cause was appalled: “Who is responsible for this piteous waste of courage and devotion? . . . All who believe in the enfranchisement of women and do nothing to make their belief a reality, are in some sense responsible for the desperation to which unbalanced enthusiasts have been driven.”

The outbreak of war brought the Suffragists back into the ascendancy, the public by now weary of the Suffragettes. The tactical split in both groups was now between pacifism and militarism. Pankhurst advocated the end of suffrage campaigning for the duration of the war — and put her oratorical skills into anti-German rhetoric and appealing for men to join up. She and Christabel, always highly tuned to a powerful symbolic gesture, presented white feathers to non-fighting men. Suffragist Florence Lockwood found it hypocritical: “We are sick to death, we suffragists, of being told by men what we may do, ought to do, what is ‘womanly’. In the name of common sense let us not copy the folly and set out to tell men what they may do and ought to do — what is ‘manly’.” Yet when Pankhurst mobilised 30,000 to march down Whitehall crying “Work, Work, Work” for the right for women to go to the front, it earned her an approving editorial in The Times, the newspaper that had once described the Suffragettes as a “shrieking sisterhood”.

Millicent Fawcett encouraged the continuation of the suffrage campaign alongside a commitment to war work. It was the formidable skills of organisation and strategic thinking that the campaign had nurtured in its members that laid the foundations for the wartime achievements of so many women — achievements impressive by any standards. This is the period covered by Fara’s interesting study of a range of women engineers, inventors and scientists from the suffrage movement, showing how women who had taken science degrees were finally enjoined to put them to practical use, and how others found that war work acted as a forerunner to glittering careers; this in an age when a female graduate of any kind was a rarity.

So rich is the variety Fara presents that it seems invidious to make a selection — but Elsie Inglis, for example, was a Suffragist doctor who defied the advice of the War Office and opened (in three weeks) a 600-bed hospital in Paris staffed — doctors, nurses and administrators — entirely by women, except for the cooks. After apprenticeship in a shipyard, Victoria Drummond became a ship’s engineer awarded an MBE for exceptional courage under fire. Harriette Chick at the Lister Clinic created a diet including dried eggs and Marmite that would treat soldiers with beriberi. Many women entered the relatively new science of psychotherapy and were in the forefront of the treatment of shell-shock. As Fara points out, this was a condition that until 1918 had been viewed as akin to the “hysteria” traditionally attributed to women; a symptom of that irrational feminine mental constitution thought to render one half of the population quite unsuited to any stake in the democratic process.

As the Western Times reported of a rousing Suffragist speaker in Totnes during the Pilgrimage: “Well, opponents could laugh now, but the Suffragists would laugh last. They were going to win, let there be no mistake about that; they would get the vote as surely as the sun would rise on the morrow.”

Hearts and Minds : The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote , by Jane Robinson, Doubleday, RRP£20, 400 pages

Rise up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes , by Diane Atkinson, Bloomsbury, RRP£30, 688 pages (published in the US in April)

A Lab of One’s Own : Science and Suffrage in the First World War , by Patricia Fara, OUP, RRP£18.99/$24.95, 352 pages

Lucy Lethbridge is author of ‘Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain’ (Bloomsbury)

Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe . Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

Promoted Content

Follow the topics in this article.

• Gender politics Add to myFT
• Life & Arts Add to myFT
• Books Add to myFT
• Non-Fiction Add to myFT
• History books Add to myFT

Sign Up Today

Start your 14 day free trial today

"Saving South" - with Dan Snow in association with BFI

• 20th Century

The Hard Fought Battle of Women’s Suffrage in the UK

History Hit

17 dec 2018.

Woman’s suffrage in the UK was literally a hard-fought battle. It took a century of persuasion, decades of protest and even the horrors of the First World War for it to happen, but finally – on 6 February 1918 – David Lloyd-George’s government enfranchised 8 million British women over 30.

As Time Magazine would comment 80 years later, this move,

“shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back”.

Stunted progress

In the early 19th century, Britain had been the birthplace of some of the world’s first gender equality movements as writers like Mary Wollstonecraft began to question the role of women in society.

Mary Wollstonecraft.

It was a question that was given increasing thought by liberal male thinkers too as the century wore on, most famously John Stuart Mill, who wrote an essay called The Subjugation of Women  in 1869.

When elected to parliament Mill campaigned to a change in the franchise laws, but met with a largely stony response from an all-male parliament.

As a result, despite increasing attention and support for their bid to gain voting rights, women’s concrete political position had changed little by the turn of the century.

Two major events changed this:

1. The rise of Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragette movement

Emmeline Pankhurst.

Before Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU) protest had largely been confined to intellectual debate, letters to MPs and pamphlets, but the charismatic woman from Manchester mobilised larger numbers and new more headline-grabbing tactics in the first decade of the new century.

Though not always clever (they attempted to burn down David Lloyd-George’s house despite him supporting women’s suffrage) or dignified, their new shock tactics won the WSPU (or suffragettes as they were now known) greatly increased press coverage and awareness to their cause.

Dan talks to Fern Riddell about Kitty Marion, one of the most militant suffragettes, and her struggles.  Listen Now.

Their cause was taken up by many people of both genders once they’d seen the lengths that these women were willing to go to.

The ultimate symbolic moment was the death of Emily Davidson in 1913 after she was trampled while trying to interfere with the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

As these public protests and marches grew ever more dramatic, the government knew that something would eventually have to be done. The following year, however, the issue was dwarfed by World War One .

2. World War One

During the fighting, the suffragettes recognised both the gravity of the situation and the opportunity that it presented to women, and agreed to work with the government.

As the war dragged on, more and more men disappeared to the front and industrial production came to increasingly dominate domestic issues, women became heavily involved in the factories and other jobs that were now open to them.

Far from slowing things down as some managers may have feared, this proved to be an immense success, and eased the burden on a country where young men were in short supply by 1918.

Having worked with the government and made a large contribution to the effort, Lloyd-George – who was now Liberal Prime Minister – knew that he had good grounds for finally changing the law.

The  Representation of the People Act 1918

The war was far from over when women over 30 who met certain property rights were historically given the vote on 6 February 1918, but it was the first sign of the new Britain that would emerge from it.

David Lloyd Geoge circa 1918.

With all the complacency of Imperial hegemony shaken terribly, nothing would ever be the same again.

The qualifications on age and property were based on the concerns that many MPs had that due to the serious manpower shortage in the country, universal female suffrage would mean that their share of the vote would go from 0 to an overwhelming majority overnight, and so complete equality would take another ten years.

Britain elected its first female Prime Minister – Margaret Thatcher – in 1979.

Nancy Astor – The UK’s first female MP.

You May Also Like

What Really Happened at Agincourt?

Gladiators Mini Series Coming to Dan Snow’s History Hit

How European Artists Shaped the Image of the Witch

Why Chillingham Is Known as Britain’s Most Haunted Castle

Jack O’Lanterns: Why Do We Carve Pumpkins for Halloween?

The Origins of Halloween: Celtic Roots, Evil Spirits and Pagan Rituals

The First Ever Documentary Feature was an Antarctic Survival Story

The Adventures of Mrs. Chippy, Shackleton’s Seafaring Cat

New 3D Images Reveal the Antarctic Wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship

Frank Hurley’s Photographs of Shackleton’s Disastrous Endurance Expedition

Roaming Historical East Sussex on the 1066 Country Walk

‘By Endurance We Conquer’: Who Was Ernest Shackleton?

• Skip to main content
• Skip to after header navigation
• Skip to site footer

Our History

Empowering through health, wellness and historical knowledge

Women’s suffrage movement in Britain

In the nineteenth century, women had no place in national politics. They were not eligible to run for Parliament and were not even allowed to vote. The assumption was that women did not need to vote because their husbands would handle political issues. A woman’s role was seen as child-rearing and taking care of the home.

Women were not officially banned from voting in Great Britain until the  1832 Reform Act  and the  1835 Municipal Corporations Act

Voting for women was part of a gradual improvement in women’s rights that had been going on throughout the 19th century. The movement also campaigned for the right to divorce a husband, the right to education, and the right to have a job such as a doctor. Many women, however, saw the vote as a vital achievement that would give them a say in the laws affecting their lives.

Because of the Industrial Revolution, many women had full-time employment, which allowed them to discuss political and social issues in large organised groups.

The movement to gain women’s votes had two wings: the suffragists and the suffragettes. The suffragists originated in the mid-nineteenth century, while the suffragettes came into being in 1903.

It was in 1866 that organised campaigns for women’s suffrage first appeared, and in 1888, women began to be allowed to vote in local elections. When parliamentary reform was being debated in 1867, MP  John Stuart Mill  became the first person in the history of Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debates. The amendment was rejected by 194 votes to 73.

The suffragists

In the wake of this defeat, the London Society for Women’s Suffrage was formed. Similar Women’s Suffrage groups were formed all over Britain. In 1897, seventeen of these individual groups joined together to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett.

The NUWSS wanted the vote for middle-class property-owning women. They believed they would achieve their goal using peaceful tactics—nonviolent demonstrations, petitions, and lobbying MPs. Fawcett believed that if the organisation was seen to be intelligent, polite, and law-abiding, then women would prove themselves responsible enough to participate fully in politics.

The leadership of the suffragists was exclusively middle-class, but some of the more radical members recognised early on that the movement needed the support of working-class women. The issue of the franchise was drawing women from various sections of society together and giving them an identity that they had lacked until that time.

By 1900, there was already evidence that many Members of Parliament had been won over. Several Bills in favour of women’s suffrage gained considerable support in Parliament, though not enough to pass. Some believed it was only a matter of time before women would gain the vote.

The suffragettes

The suffragettes, a name given to them by the Daily Mail newspaper, were born out of the suffragist movement. Emmeline Pankhurst, a member of the Manchester suffragist group, had grown tired of the middle-class, respectable and slow tactics of the NUWSS. In 1903 she decided to break with the NUWSS and set up a separate society. This became known as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).

Mrs Pankhurst believed it would take an active organisation of young working-class women to draw attention to the cause. The suffragettes’ motto was “deeds, not words.”

Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel disagreed with other members of the WSPU’s executive board in 1907, forcing the organisation to split into two groups. Those who left formed the Women’s Freedom League, while the Pankhursts and their supporters established a greater hold on the WSPU’s workings.

The three groups disagreed over tactics, but their message was consistent, and they regularly worked together. Despite opposition, the argument for women’s suffrage seemed to be winning support. By 1909, the WSPU had branches all over the country and published a newspaper called Votes for Women, which sold 20,000 copies each week. The NUWSS was also flourishing, with a rising membership and an efficient nationwide organisation.

Until 1912, the campaigning was largely within the law, mainly chaining themselves to railings and disturbing the peace. From 1912 onwards, they became more militant and violent in their methods of campaigning. Activism grew to include planting bombs, smashing shop windows and acts of arson. They disrupted communications networks by cutting telephone and telegraph wires and burning post boxes.

Law-breaking, violence and hunger strikes all became part of this society’s campaign tactics.

Many culturally significant buildings and items were attacked, including paintings, statues, and even the jewel house of the Tower of London Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus was slashed in the National Gallery. Glasgow Art Gallery had its glass cases smashed in 1912, and in 1914, mummy cases were defaced in the British Museum. At Kew Gardens in London, an orchid house was attacked, and its tea room was burned down.

Bombs and incendiary devices were detonated at churches, banks, railway stations and even Westminster Abbey. Saunderton railway station and Croxley station near Watford were destroyed. On 21 May, a bomb exploded at the Royal Astronomical Observatory in Edinburgh, and that summer a bomb was planted outside the Bank of England. In November 1913, a 3-inch pipe bomb exploded in the Glass House of Alexandra Park in Manchester. Another bomb damaged the home of Chancellor David Lloyd George.

The rough treatment of many suffragettes arrested and jailed during the course of their protests also won increasing sympathy and support from the public.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the whole suffrage movement immediately scaled down and even suspended some of its activities in the face of a greater threat to the nation. The commendable behaviour also proved that the women were far from unreasonable.

At the end of the war, in 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave women over 30 the vote, which was extended to all women over 21 in 1928.

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

You May Also Like…

Queen Amina of Zaria: The legendary warrior queen of West Africa

The Freedom Riders: A challenge to segregation in America

Chad’s Civil Wars

The 1832 Paris Uprising

Browser does not support script.

Votes for women: the history of women's suffrage and lessons for today

06 February 2018

• International

Reflecting on the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, King's academics Dr Anna Maguire and Dr Alice Evans reflect on the events of the past, and how they can inform contemporary activism.

Dr Anna Maguire from King's History department  discusses key milestones and events in the suffrage campaign, linking the Representation of the People Act of 1918 to the suffrage movement's roots in the 1860s - although the Act only allowed a select group of women to vote.

Dr Alice Evans , Lecturer in the Social Science of Development, discusses four key drivers of the women's suffrage movement across the world, including the importance of seeing women in employment, the inspirational impact of social mobilisation for demonstrating that change is possible.

Images courtesy of the Museum of London, The Women’s Library – LSE and the Imperial War Museum. Music: “Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.

In this story

Alice Evans

Senior Lecturer in the Social Science of Development

Latest news

7 November 2024

Making the USA a Bitcoin Superpower

One of Donald Trump's campaign trail stops was the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, where he…

King's data analysis behind NHS stroke campaign

The NHS has launched a major new campaign to urge the public to call 999 immediately if anyone…

Shakespeare's poems take centre stage in new yearbook by King's academics

Dr Hannah Crawforth and Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Readers in Early Modern Literature in the…

King's Business School's Executive MBA included in the Corporate Knights 'Better World' MBA ranking

Sustainable business magazine Corporate Knights has rated the King’s Business School Executive MBA…

• United Kingdom

What 100 Years of British Women’s Suffrage Says About Women’s Rights Today

I n her 1914 autobiography , renowned suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst wrote “Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.” But, just as Pankhurst fought for her rights despite that sentiment, many women around the world today are fighting for theirs, as part of the sweeping global movement spearheaded by women standing against sexual harassment in recent months.

On Tuesday, the U.K. marks the 100th anniversary of British women gaining the right to vote. While it may seem like distant history, the centenary is a cause for both celebration and reflection on the parallels between international women’s movements of the past and of the present.

Here are three lessons of that century-old fight that still apply today:

Protest is powerful

The passage of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 only allowed certain women over the age of 30 to vote, which applied to 40% of women across the country, amounting to some 8.5 million people. Yet years of groundwork had gone into this achievement, with the power of the protest playing a crucial role.

As the 2015 film Suffragette depicts, women turned to militant-style tactics to attract attention to their cause. While the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies faction used peaceful methods, the Women’s Social and Political Union held firmly the belief in “ deeds, not words .” These protest tactics were most commonly used in the years leading up to the First World War, when suffragettes went on hunger strikes, chained themselves to railings and heckled government meetings.

“There are some parallels between that period and now in the sense that women are saying ‘enough is enough,'” says Nicoletta Gullace, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.

On Black Friday, as Nov. 18, 1910, became known, suffragettes rushed the House of Commons but were brutally pushed back by police. The clashes lasted for six hours, with some reports suggesting police used sexual violence against demonstrators.

Another key moment in the suffragette movement came when Emily Wilding Davison fatally stepped out in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Davison’s funeral procession attracted huge crowds of suffragettes in London, and brought their cause to the world’s attention. Gullace tells TIME that these marches bear similarity with the women’s protest marches of today in the era of President Donald Trump, with banners and hats serving as “sartorial markers that unmistakably link that pre-war moment to the anti sexual assault protests we see now.”

A movement can be global

Both the women’s suffrage movement and the current #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have taken on global dimensions, and just as the reckoning against sexual harassment has been expressed differently in countries across the world, the international women’s suffrage movement was similarly nuanced.

Conversation in recent years has turned to the diversity of the British suffragette movement, particularly in terms of race and sexuality . Sumita Mukherjee, a historian of the British Empire and Indian subcontinent, tells TIME that Indian women were actively involved in the British movement, and would go on to play significant roles in the Indian suffrage movement. British women post-1918 did start looking outward and thinking about suffrage around the world, but Mukherjee says that this must be taken in context with the “complicated history around imperialism and the objectification of women of color in the movement.”

Certainly, British women were not in isolation in their fight for the vote; women across the Commonwealth, Asia and the United States also faced parallel challenges. The exchange of ideas between women’s suffrage activists on an international level were facilitated by forums such as the Paris Peace Conference and the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, which held regular conferences and was founded by British suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett along with others.

The fight continues

Women’s right to vote in the U.K., granted by the 1918 Act, also enabled them to run for political office for the first time. A century later, as TIME recently reported, a record number of women are currently running for office in the U.S., politically energized since Trump’s election in 2016.

“The legacy of the right to vote is not just the fight for political equality, but it’s connected to so many issues around the world such as violence against women and girls and the gender pay gap,” says Mukherjee, on the importance of political representation.

Women’s suffrage leaders drummed up mass support without the use of social media enjoyed by campaigners today. The similarity between the two lies in their emphasis on solidarity.

“The suffrage campaign was a long campaign, taking 52 years from 1866 to 1918, because it was ultimately about changing people’s attitudes about women,” says Gillian Murphy, Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship, and who looks after the Women’s Library collection at the London School of Economics Library . “This is something that we are still dealing with today if we think about the whole issue of violence against women and what is and what is not acceptable behavior.”

As this milestone anniversary is commemorated, women the world over are still facing a lack of political representation , as well as other social and economic inequalities. A century on, the words of Emmeline Pankhurst remain strikingly relevant: “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

• How Donald Trump Won
• The Best Inventions of 2024
• Why Sleep Is the Key to Living Longer
• Robert Zemeckis Just Wants to Move You
• How to Break 8 Toxic Communication Habits
• Nicola Coughlan Bet on Herself—And Won
• Why Vinegar Is So Good for You
• Meet TIME's Newest Class of Next Generation Leaders

Contact us at [email protected]