British women got the vote in 1918. They also got the vote in 1928. And in 1843, 1640, 1422 and several other dates.

It’s complicated. The interesting stuff usually is. Let’s start with the earliest date I have. I’m pretty sure it’s not the beginning of the story but it’ll do.

1422 – 1437

The right to vote at this point belonged to a narrow group of people, and we’re talking about  voting for members of the House of Commons, of course. The House of Lords was for lords and they didn’t need electing, all they had to do was get themselves born to the right family in the right order and in possession of a Y chromosome, so stick them in a drawer and forget about them for now. 

We can also forget about Britain. As a political entity, it didn’t exist yet. We’re talking about England. I tell you, keeping track of this country stretches its language to the breaking point.

The counties (otherwise known as the countryside) sent representatives to Parliament, and that was relatively straightforward. Towns, villages, and hamlets, though, needed a royal charter making them parliamentary boroughs. No charter, no representatives in the Commons. Each of them sent two, no matter their size or population density.

Starting in 1429, anyone in the counties who owned property worth 40 shillings or more could vote, and that had to be freehold property, but let’s not get into that. Sorry, this post is full of things not to pay attention to. Focus on the right to vote depending on property ownership. Do not look at the man behind the curtain.

In the boroughs, voting still depended on property but it was wildly inconsistent. It might be only the mayor and town governors who had the right to vote or it might be anyone who had the freedom of the city, which was a larger group but still far from everyone. 

Freedom of the city? That’s another thing not to get into. It’s a feudal hangover that hasn’t completely gone away even now. I’ve heard that raw egg’s good for a hangover. It doesn’t cure anything but it takes your mind off your original problem.

The voting we’re talking about wasn’t the kind we’re used to. The local bigshot selected the candidates and the lesser folk got to vote for them, and one of the candidates he selected just might be the bigshot’s own good self. Who, after all, was more qualified? If there was any competition, as a rule it went on behind the scenes and before the actual election. So voting was more a process of ratification than selection. 

The vote was public, not secret. 

How did women come into this picture of ideal democracy? In small numbers, but historians are beginning to find a few. In seven Yorkshire elections held between 1422 and 1461, one historian discovered Joan Beaufort (countess of Westmorland), Maud Clifford (countess of Cambridge), Maud Neville (Lady Mauley), Elizabeth Pigot, Lady Elizabeth Roos, and Margaret Vavasour. 

How come they got to vote? They were wealthy, they were the widows of men who’d had the right to vote, and they sent lawyers to the county sheriff’s court, where the indentures were drawn up. (Indentures weren’t necessarily about apprenticeship. They were legal contracts.) And they hadn’t remarried. That was crucial because starting with the Norman invasion (1066; you’re welcome)English law held that married women couldn’t own property in their own names, and if only property owners could vote and married women couldn’t own property– 

You figured out where that’s going, right?

Women with husbands turned over those troublesome things like owning and voting to their men. 

Thanks, guys. That was not only kind of you but selfless.

So let’s go out on a limb and say these un-remarried widows were stepping into the positions their husbands had held and were acting for them post mortem. 

Still, women weren’t barred from voting. That didn’t happen until 1832. That was also the year the first petition supporting women’s right to vote was presented to Parliament. But we’ll get to that later.  

Tradition was probably another factor keeping women from voting. A woman would need to be pretty powerful–not just personally but financially–to override that.

 

1640

Let’s go to Heytesbury, in Wiltshire, where thirteen people were on a list of voters and two of them were women: Elizabeth Crayford and Agnes (or Agnete) Tarry. Again, both were widows and neither had remarried. Their property was their own.

An article from The History of Parliament is interestingly unclear about how to interpret the fact of the two women being able to vote:

“The explanation as to why their ‘voices’ were formally heard in 1640 has not yet presented itself. Were the successful candidates more than usually anxious in 1640 to secure sufficient votes? Was the presiding sheriff or the sitting bailiff ignorant of the usual rules? Was there in fact a tradition of suffrage among customary tenants that was no respecter of gender? If so, was this confined to Heytesbury? Some time ago Derek Hirst drew attention to an instance of women at the polls in Suffolk, also in 1640: on that occasion their participation was barred, but seemingly for considerations of potential dishonour rather than of illegality (The Representative of the People? (1975), 18–9). This example raises even more questions about electoral practice, but both examples provide that essential motivation for vigilance when casting my eye down those lists of names.”

 

Women who didn’t get to vote

Just because we find a few women who did vote, though, let’s not get carried away. They’re the exceptions. Other seventeenth-century women who tried were less successful, possibly because their status was lower, although as single women with property they met the local requirements. You know how it is: There are property owners and then there are property owners. 

As time went on, women “increasingly found themselves excluded from parliamentary elections on grounds of propriety and social convention, or what was sometimes termed ‘decency’ and ‘nature.’ This is well illustrated by two examples. In the Suffolk election of 1640, a number of widows were stopped from voting by the sheriff, although he admitted that ‘they might in law have been allowed.’ He forbade them to poll, he explained, ‘conceiving it a matter verie unworthie of any gentleman’ and ‘most dishonourable’ for ‘an election to make use of their voices.’ In the borough of Richmond in 1679, similar scruples led to the female owners of qualifying burgage properties being refused the vote. It was agreed that ‘no widow should vote, it being against common right; but that widows should have power to assign their right to other persons.’ On this basis a Mr Wharton acquired no less than ‘30 assignments’ and ‘did then and there vote’. Proxy voting, as this example suggests, became customary in some constituencies before 1832, with men or attorneys exercising the franchise on behalf of qualifying females. It is the names of these men, of course, who appear in surviving printed pollbooks.” (That’s from the same article I quoted just above and, what the hell, will again here.)

If any sober historian’s looking through lists of voters for women’s names, that would be enough to drive her or him to drink.

 

1832

The 1832 Great Reform Act broadened the franchise, got rid of rotten boroughs (tiny places that sent MPs to Parliament while large industrial cities were massively underrepresented), and while it was at it, defined voters as “male persons,” closing the loopholes those few women voters had been wriggling through. It also ended their right to vote by proxy.  

Did I ever mention that progress is seldom straightforward? Or that roses are red except when they’re other colors?

The same law also disenfranchised tens of thousands of people who had been able to vote. 

 And created a registration system complicated enough that local registrars struggled to keep up and accidentally allowed a few women to register. So there were still a few names for our formerly sober and now pie-eyed historian to find, and new reasons to drink: Some names could belong to either sex (Alex, Evelyn, Glen, Hillary) and spellings hadn’t been standardised. 

Registering, though, wasn’t voting. Voting had to be done in person, and after 1832 it was rare for a woman to slip through far enough to cast a vote. 

Lily Maxwell managed it, though: she voted in a Manchester by-election in 1867. A clerical error let her register, the local branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage took up her cause, along with the Liberal candidate, and a befuddled polling clerk let her vote. Publicity followed and more Manchester women tried to register, with a few managing to vote in 1868. 

Before you cheer too long or too loud, a court soon ruled that no, women were not entitled to vote.

 

Non-parliamentary elections

Ah, but all that was about elections for parliament. There were also municipal elections, parish elections, vestry elections, poor law union elections, board of guardians elections, coroners elections, and town or improvement commissioners elections. And each one had its own rules over who could vote, based on local custom, local rules and, of course property ownership, taxes, residence, and status as a freeman.

Freeman? We skipped that when it showed up in the form of freedom of the city, but okay, let’s talk about it: It grew out of feudal law but came to mean a man (or sometimes a woman, apparently) “possessing the full privileges and immunities of a city, borough or trade gild to which admission was usually by birth, apprenticeship, gift or purchase.” 

But it is a side issue. Really.

In some of those elections, women could vote. Since different rules governed different elections, the list of voters was different for each. You can see why the local officials drawing up the lists might’ve felt overwhelmed. You can see why he might’ve joined our pie-eyed historian down at the pub. You can also see why the occasional woman showed up on a forbidden list.

Our picture of electoral mayhem isn’t complete until we catch up with one more variant: In 1843 in St. Chad’s parish, Lichfield, some women not only had the right to vote but had more than one vote in the election of assistant overseer. The more wealth you had, the more votes you got. The system wasn’t unique to St. Chad’s, and in places, the drive to open the vote to a wider group of men was posed as a conflict between less affluent men and wealthy women. 

When in doubt, be careful not to blame the people in charge. It’s safer and it’s still satisfying.

I have no idea what the assistant overseer assisted in overseeing. I trust both he and the voters did. 

In 1835 the vote in municipal elections was restricted to “male persons.” That held until 1869, when women taxpayers were once again allowed back in. As long as they were unmarried. That opened the door to single women who had property voting in elections for school boards (1870), county and borough councils (1888) and parish and district councils (1894), at which point married women were added. By 1900, 14% of the local government electorate was female.

 

1918 and 1928

In 1918, women over 30 gained the right to vote if they or their husbands met a property qualification and women were allowed to run for Parliament. In 1928 women finally gained equal voting rights with men: Anyone over 21 could now vote and we live in the best of all possible worlds. 

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And with that out of the way, let’s talk about the important stuff: Notes was chosen as one of Feedspot’s 100 top UK blogs. 

What’s Feedspot? An aggregator for blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and anything else you can think of. Bowties, maybe. Exotic pasta shapes. Don’t ask me. I publish a blog but this isn’t my world. Basically, it helps you find blogs.  A lifetime’s worth of blogs. But Notes is its top choice, amazingly enough, so I shouldn’t make too much fun of it, although when I asked what the criteria were, freshness was one, so here’s me being fresh. 

The other criteria were relevancy, authority, and social media followers. Since you’re here, don’t you just have good taste?