Tag Archives: women’s suffrage

A quick history of women’s right to vote in Britain

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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.

Irrelevant photo: north Cornish coast

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. 

*

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?

Suffragists, sufragettes, and votes for women

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English women’s fight for the right to vote began in the nineteenth century, and it started out politely enough. Bills were introduced in Parliament. Bills were defeated in Parliament. 

What could be more polite than that?

In 1897, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies gathered local groups into a national organization and by 1914 it had 54,000 members. Most of them were respectable and middle class, and it’s not too much of a leap to assume that the campaign made a huge difference in individual women’s lives and in how they saw their role in the world. We can make a wild guess and say that many a couple argued about it over their respectable breakfast tables. Or didn’t argue and just let the tension build. 

They also made the issue part of the national conversation.

Irrelevant photo: a red hot poker. Not, obviously, a real one. A flower.

The organization was efficient and nonviolent and the members were, for the most part, dedicated. And you know what? Women kept on not getting the vote. 

Their work played out against a complicated background involving political parties and a lot of wrestling over not just whether women should vote but which men should. So as usual, we need a bit of background: 

From as early as the 1830s, the Chartists, a working-class movement, had been pushing to open the vote up to all men. They presented petitions to Parliament: 1.25 million names on the first one, 3 million on the second, and nobody I checked with says how many on the third. In response, Parliament blew a raspberry and ignored them.

Before the First Reform Bill (that was in 1832) only 3% of adult males could vote. Your right to vote (or not vote) depended on how much you earned and what your property was worth.

After the bill, the vote was broadened but not to all men. Shopkeepers, tenant farmers, and small landowners got the vote. That’s in the counties. In the boroughs, householders who paid at least £10 a year in rent could vote and so could (gasp) some lodgers. 

What’s the difference between counties and boroughs? Beats me, but that comes from Parliament’s own website, so it must be right. It’s probably about the difference between cities and the countryside, but don’t take my word on that. I’m a stranger here myself. The point is that more people could vote, but only a safely respectable kind of more. And since women had come into the conversation they were, for the first time, specifically excluded. 

Isn’t progress a wonderful thing?

The Second Reform Act in 1867 did more of the same, doubling the number of men who could vote in England and Wales from 1 million to 2 million.

Leave Ireland and Scotland out of it, will you? This is complicated enough already.

By 1885, 8 million people out of a population of 45 million could vote–two-thirds of adult men. (Any numbers that don’t add up here can be blamed on women and children being left out of the accounting.)

So when women started pushing for the vote, the first question that popped its divisive little head up like a jack-in-the-box was, Which women? If all women had the vote, then presumably all men should as well. Or should only women who could meet the same property qualifications as men vote? Or how about unmarried women who met the qualifications, since married women were–or so the argument went–represented by their husbands. Or should it be only married women, since unmarried women were at best faintly embarrassing.

Or only women with those huge, amazing hats.

And this is where party politics came into it, because different choices were to the advantage of different parties. 

And if that wasn’t complicated enough, the women’s suffrage movement  was pulled between the women who wanted a single focus for the organization–votes for women–and those who wanted to address other issues too, because wasn’t the purpose of voting to have an impact on issues?

As women’s suffrage gained momentum, the Conservative Party could see the value of having propertied women vote: Well, of course they’d vote Conservative. And you could see why both non-propertied women and working-class (and presumably non-Conservative) men might oppose that. If the country allows only a small group of campaigners into the hall and they go in, closing the door on the rest of them, the people left outside might well ask themselves why they’d bothered supporting the ones who went in and didn’t return that support.

In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed–the forerunner of today’s Labour Party. Its goal was to represent the interests of the working class–a tough job at a time when large parts of the working class were still disenfranchised. 

In those conflicting currents, the suffragists bobbed around, lobbying politicians and campaigning for candidates who supported women’s suffrage, getting their hopes raised and crushed with each new bill. But the question of whether women should vote was, increasingly, an issue that couldn’t be ignored. Even people who made fun of it couldn’t ignore it. The Liberal and Conservative parties formed party women’s groups. They weren’t where the power lay, but they involved women in the machinery.

In 1894, women who met the same qualifications as men gained the right to vote in local elections.

In 1897, a women’s suffrage bill that had looked promising was defeated. You probably know what follows when a movement with a lot of momentum runs into a wall. Either it collapses or it explodes.

It exploded. The Women’s Social and Political Union was formed in 1903. The names you might recognize here are Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela. The group appealed to working-class women, not just respectable ones, and they were called suffragettes by a hostile press. The name was meant as an insult but the group adopted it. Why not? The words Tory and Whig had originally been insults, and both groups ended by embracing them.

In 1905, Christabel and Annie Kenney got themselves arrested when they interrupted a political speech and unfurled a Votes for Women banner. And when I say “got themselves arrested,” I mean that Christabel had to work at it. The police threw them out of the hall and were going to let it go at that until Christabel spat in a police superintendent’s face and hit an inspector in the mouth. 

That did the trick: They both got arrested, they refused to pay a fine, and they were jailed, one for three days and one for seven. 

When they came out, they were met by a thousand supporters and the press, which got them national publicity. 

By 1909 the WSPU was a national organization, selling 20,000 copies of its paper every week, and it had a genius for attention-grabbing actions. Members disrupted political speeches and by-elections. They tried to rush the House of Commons. They broke windows, blew up pillar boxes (which in other versions of the English language would be called mailboxes), attacked paintings in galleries, and bought gun licenses not so they could use guns but to scare the authorities into thinking they might.

They also chained themselves to railings, getting the grill that sectioned off the House of Commons Ladies Gallery removed by chaining themselves to it.

They took advantage of a Post Office service that allowed postmasters to “arrange for the conduct of a person to an address by an Express Messenger,” posting two women to the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, so they could talk with him.

The delivery was refused. 

The sad part was that social media hadn’t been invented. 

It was the eye-catching actions that gave them their reputation, but most of what they did was legal and even peaceful. They drove (at the time that involved horses) around town with placards on carriages. They carried placards themselves, on foot. At a time when women were supposed to be quiet, passive, deferential, and to the best of their ability and training to imitate doormats, this was shocking enough, but they also addressed crowds in theaters and restaurants–crowds who hadn’t come to hear them and were often hostile. They threw leaflets from theater balconies. Many of them were roughed up by crowds of men or by the police. 

In 1913, Emily Davison tried to stop a horse race and was hit by the king’s horse. She died of her injuries a few days later.

In a lot of these actions, women were arrested, and when they were released they were greeted by supporters, who sometimes pulled them through the streets in open carriages, increasing the visibility of their actions. And in prison, many of them went on hunger strikes and were force fed–a brutal and very painful process. 

In The English Rebel, David Horspool asks whether their militancy delivered or delayed votes for women and answers that it probably did both. If you have trouble working that out, go argue with him. I’m not sure both are possible at the same time, but I can see his point anyway. The same argument goes on, although the parallels aren’t exact, when Black Lives Matter demonstrations spill over into rioting or looting. Does it help or does it hurt? It depends on where you do your counting and how. In the case of the suffragettes, even a century later historians can still argue over it.

Whatever the answer turns out to be, it won’t be a simple one.

In 1910, a bill that would have given unmarried women the vote failed. The Liberals thought it might harm their interests. The Conservatives weren’t strongly enough in favor. Militancy had been winding down, but the bill’s defeat wound it up a notch. Asquith’s car was attacked. 

Somewhere in here, the Suffragists’ leadership–and the Pankhurst family–split over tactics. Should they work with men? How violent should their actions be? Should any bill introduced expand the vote for both men and women or should it only be for women?

I’ve been around political activism long enough for this all to sound familiar. If you get deep enough into politics, it can get very crazy very easily, but the alternative is–or at least seems to be–what someone I once knew called crackpot realism, where you dial your goals down to fit what looks possible, accomplishing somewhere between less than you wanted and nothing at all. 

And there things stood when everything was interrupted by World War I. Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the European powers all dug trenches and shot at each other, and 20 million soldiers and civilians died. Another 21 million were wounded. 

That was the war to end all wars. 

Yeah, they really did say it would.

The more radical branch of the Suffragettes (that was Emmeline and Christabel’s) suspended their activities, partly, according to Horspool, because Emmeline and Christabel were exhausted but also because they were realistic about how much political oomph women’s suffrage could have in the circumstances. And they did something I find more interesting: They moved to the political right. They suspended the campaign for the vote, backed the war, changed their paper’s name from The Suffragette to Britannia, and diverted the organization’s funds to the war effort, but many suffragettes were pacifists and the organization broke up for good. 

Their support for the war, according to Horspool, consisted of making speeches and editorializing in the direction of industrial workers, who were probably looking for their news and editorials elsewhere.

 Sylvia’s branch of the Suffragettes had become the East London Federation. Its membership was working class and it aligned itself with the Labour Party, campaigning for both workers’ and women’s rights. And–since changing newspaper names was in style–it changed the Woman’s Dreadnought to the Workers’ Dreadnought.

In 1916, the government faced the prospect of an election in which most servicemen wouldn’t be able to vote because of a residency requirement. 

Crisis. Conference. 

The moderates (remember the suffragists, working politely away in the background?) made a pitch for women’s suffrage. The former radicals (remember half the Pankhursts?) withdrew their support for women’s suffrage in case if ended up disenfranchising servicemen.

Aren’t humans strange?

A compromise bill passed in 1918. It gave the vote to women over 30 who were qualified to vote in local elections or whose husbands were qualified. That was about 8 million women. And there it sat for the next ten years, when the voting age was dropped to 21 and all other restrictions were lifted–in other words, women voted on the same terms as men.

Christabel ran for Parliament as a Women’s Party candidate and lost. Later she became a born-again Christian and lectured in California. Emmeline moved to Canada for a while and lectured on social hygiene until the winters drove her out.

I know just how she felt–minus the social hygiene part.

What is social hygiene? “The practice of measures designed to protect and improve the family as a social institution; specifically: the practice of measures aiming at the elimination of venereal disease and prostitution.” 

Bet you didn’t see that coming.