Sir George Arthur as Lieutenant-Governor

The fragile order of VDL concerned the British government especially as it planned to increase transportation to the Australian colonies.[1] After Bigge found that transportation was an ineffective deterrent, the British government removed the popular Sorell[2] and in 1824 appointed the strict disciplinarian Colonel George Arthur as lieutenant-governor, beginning the most important period of the penal colony’s history. Seeking to make transportation feared by British criminals, Arthur raised convict discipline to new levels and ensured that punishment was uniform and assured. The British government responded by increasing the annual average of convicts sent to VDL from about 800 between 1817 and 1827 to about 1,800 between 1828 and 1835; between 1830 and 1836 convicts formed on average 44 per cent of the population.[3] The increase in convicts and free settlers swelled the total population from 5,468 in 1820 to 24,279 by 1830. Using methods similar to Sorell’s, Arthur deployed the increasing number of convicts on a large programme of public works and assigned convicts to farmers throughout the island. By forcing convicts to work for long periods, Arthur hoped to break the habit of idleness associated with criminality and provide convicts with skills to earn a living on the end of their sentences. The combination of cheap labour, a sizable injection of British capital and a growing free settler population greatly stimulated the economy and further strengthened the power and wealth of the gentry and merchants.

Arthur imposed severe punishments and floggings on convicts who disobeyed his regulations and many were hung for committing serious crimes, but order was also encouraged by his offer of inducements, such as a ticket of leave and a pardon, to those who behaved correctly and showed signs of reformation.[4] A ticket of leave was a license given to convicts if well behaved for four, six, or eight years depending on the length of their sentence. It allowed them to earn wages and live independently while serving the remainder of their sentences. The convicts remained under surveillance and the ticket could be rescinded for bad behaviour. A pardon remitted part or a convict’s entire sentence. A conditional pardon required a convict to remain in the colony, while an absolute pardon made no such requirement. Appealing to the self-interest of convicts was a central principle of Arthur’s policy of transportation

Colonists praised Arthur for restoring order by suppressing bush-ranging and the Aborigines and by enforcing a rigid system of convict discipline. But the relationship between some colonists and Arthur was strained. Arthur wanted to dominate colonists, not bow to their demands, to centralise power, not disperse it, and to restrict liberty, not extend it. The institutions of government reflected his desires. In 1825, VDL secured administrative independence from NSW and was granted an Executive Council, a form of cabinet comprised of senior public servants and a Legislative Council, whose members included the executive councillors and some free settlers chosen by Arthur. Arthur, who initiated all legislation, expected the two Councils to approve his measures and they invariably did. Arthur also expected the Supreme Court, formed in 1824 with the arrival of John Pedder as chief justice, to uphold his autocratic rule, even where his powers might ‘trench upon the privileges or conveniences of the free.’[5] By holding a seat on the Executive Council until 1836 and on the Legislative Council, Pedder subordinated the judicial arm of government to the executive and destroyed confidence in his impartiality.[6]

Arthur used his power to initiate new legislation ‘sparingly’ when it became the only way of ‘varying the community instincts and activities’ that frustrated his policies.[7] In ten years under Arthur (1826 to 1836), eighty-eight statutes were passed compared with one hundred and thirty-six in six years under his successor Sir John Franklin.[8] Arthur’s statute law vested ‘executive powers in himself and those responsible to him; providing administrative directions to enable his policies to be implemented without too much statutory regulation.’ He argued against the notion that no colonial laws should be implemented unless they were ‘adapted to the spirit of the British Constitution.’[9] Those who ‘knowingly’ emigrated to a convict colony, which was in effect ‘an immense Gaol or Penitentiary,’ should not expect ‘to retain every immunity and privilege’ they enjoyed in England and should ‘abide cheerfully by the rules and customs of the Prison.’ There could be

...no happiness nor prosperity without personal security,’ and this could only be secured by ‘severe discipline’.[10]

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[1] Boyce, James, Van Diemen’s Land, (Black Inc.), 2008, pp. 145-212 provides the most recent discussion of Arthur’s rule.

[2] Sorell’s removal had more to do with his relationship with Mrs Kent, whom he lived with in Government House than his governance of VDL. He was negligent in his family obligations and his failure to recognise the social conventions was a deliberate choice. For this he was apparently prepared to pay. He damaged the official career to which he was certainly dedicated, but the majority of the influential free Tasmanian colonists seemed to have overlooked unconventional conduct or impropriety and saw Sorell as a fair and effective governor.

[3] Ibid, Shaw A.G.L., Convicts and Colonies, pp. 365-67; ibid, Forsyth, W.D., Governor Arthur’s Convict System, p. 150; ibid, Hartwell, R.M., The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land, 1820-1850, p. 68.

[4] Arthur, George, Defence of Transportation, in Reply to the Remarks of the Archbishop of Dublin in His Second Letter to Earl Grey, (Gowie), 1835, pp. 48, 96-100; ibid, Shaw A.G.L., Convicts and Colonies, pp. 217-48; Davis, R.P., The Tasmanian Gallows: A Study of Capital Punishment, (Cat and Fiddle Press), 1974, pp. 13-33.

[5] Colonial Office (CO) 280, Arthur to Hanley, 4 April 1834.

[6] For a sympathetic view of Pedder, see Bennett, J.M., Sir John Pedder: First Chief Justice, (University of Tasmania), 1977. See also, Howell, P.A., ‘Pedder, Sir John Lewes (1793-1859)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 319-320.

[7] Ibid, Castles, A.C., ‘The Vandiemonian Spirit and the Law’, pp. 114, 116 n. 53

[8] The Public General Acts of Tasmania 1826-1936, Vol. 7, (Butterworth), 1936-1939, pp. 221-228.

[9] CO 280, Arthur to Hanley, 4 April 1834.

[10] CO 280, Arthur to Hanley, 4 April 1834, emphasis in original.

Emily Wilding Davison and the 1913 Derby

The protest at the Derby on 4 June 1913 and subsequent events were discussed in my Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918 and I have taken the opportunity in its centennial year to extend that discussion. 

On 4 June 1913, Emily Davison rushed on to the Epsom racecourse while the Derby was in progress, received fatal injuries to her head and died in hospital four days later. [1] She was one of a group of ‘freelancers’ or irregulars within the WSPU who inaugurated some of the best-known militant tactics such as hunger-strikes and window-breaking. Fiercely loyal to the WSPU leadership, they also retained their right to independent action even if supported by district WSPU and national organisers. One of the arsonists was Lilian Lenton, the daughter of a joiner from Leicester who  celebrated her twenty-first birthday by volunteering at her local WSPU office for window-breaking raids. After her first spell in prison, she graduated to arson, vowing to burn two empty buildings a week. She was arrested for setting fire to the orchid house and pavilion at Kew, went on hunger strike in prison, and was force-fed. Leonora Cohen, by contrast, was nearly forty when she hurled an iron bar at a display case in the jewel Room at the Tower of London. Unlike Lenton, Mrs Cohen was a respectable married woman, the wife of a staunchly Liberal watchmaker in Leeds. Until she became a branch secretary in 1911, she had contented herself with bringing up her son, and selling newspapers and making marmalade for the WSPU. When Asquith suddenly announced a man-only suffrage bill in November of that year, reneging again on a commitment to women, she turned to direct action. Her subsequent hunger strikes, and refusal to accept fluids, in Armley Gaol in Leeds nearly killed her. [2]

These ‘freelancers’ posed a problem of control over the movement for Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. The autocratic nature of their organisation meant that it was relatively easy to dismiss any staff who deviated from the agreed strategies even at local level. This was not the case with suffragettes who, from 1909 onwards, on their own initiative took militant action. The use of hunger-strikes was begun by Marion Wallace-Dunlop in July 1909 on her own initiative and subsequently accepted by the leadership. The Pankhursts initially disapproved of boycotting the 1911 Census but, when faced with large numbers of members who wanted to take part, somewhat reluctantly approved their actions. By 1913, militant suffragettes and the government, especially Reginald McKenna at the Home Office, were embraced in a struggle for public opinion. The authorities wanted to suppress the campaign but without risking the death of a suffragette explaining the introduction of the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act. Militants sought to discredit McKenna’s policy by taking action that included the serious risk of injury to highlight their cause. For the Pankhursts, their inability to restrain independent, uncoordinated militant initiatives threatened their control over the organisation.

Since 1909, Emily Davison had been involved in militant activities resulting in imprisonment, hunger-strikes and forced-feeding; stone-throwing in 1909, setting fire to pillar boxes in late 1911 and two bombings in 1912. Virtually everything about her death is contentious. Whether or not Emily intended to die is a much debated question. [3] Eyewitnesses were unclear about what happened: some believed she was crossing the course to get to the other side thinking the horses had passed, others thought she was trying to grab the reins of Anmer, the King’s horse as a deliberate act, something Stanley and Morley suggest is shown in film footage of the incident. [4] Gertrude Colmore’s biography was produced at high speed to make political capital from Emily’s death and constructed it as the martyrdom for ‘the Cause’ that many people had been waiting for.[5] She suggested that Davison had considered suicidal action on several previous occasions. Rebecca West also said that she had committed suicide, though the inquest recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, and that her decision was both rational and premeditated.[6] While in Holloway serving a six month sentence in 1912, Davison was again force-fed and in protest threw herself twice over the railings but wire netting broke her fall. She then jumped from the netting onto an iron staircase injuring her hand and cracking two vertebrae. Whether, as Davison told the Pall Mall Gazette on her release he had deliberately tried ‘to commit suicide’ to highlight the ‘horrible torture our women face’, it later used by suffragettes and their critics to explain her action at the Derby as ‘suicide’ and that she was an unbalanced, suicidal fanatic.

In reality, Davison deliberately undertook her final militant act alone, knowing it might prove fatal. But little attention has been given to her religious convictions. As a devout Anglican, suicide would have been unthinkable as it have meant that she could not be buried in consecrated ground. That Emily had purchased a return rail ticket is generally taken as indicating that she did not intend suicide but normal services to Epsom were suspended on Derby Day and replaced by excursion services for which people bought a return ticket, so this is not conclusive. However, she also an invitation to a suffragette dance later that day and had planned a holiday with her sister which suggest that martyrdom was not her intention. She was carrying a suffragette scarf and may have wished to attach it to the King’s horse or simply unfurl it after the horses had passed. If this was the case, then it was a protest that went tragically wrong. Analysis of the three newsreels of the incident show that Emily was closer to the start of Tattenham Corner than previously thought and that this would have given her a clear view of the oncoming race. They show that in the four seconds that passed after she got on to the course, she was able to identify the King’s horse and sought to attach the scarf to it as it passed her but it collided with her and it had always been assumed that this was her intention. Although the jockeys were wearing their owners’ colours, it is unlikely that she would have been able to identify Anmer as he galloped towards her and that she was simply lucky to pick the royal horse. This was an act of political protest not one of political suicide though she was probably aware of the risk this entailed. Stanley and Morley concluded that no proof of her motives is possible since she left no written statement about her intentions.[7] In some respects, it does not matter what her purpose was because the political implications were the same. [8]

The leadership of the WSPU in London found itself having to improvise in the aftermath of Davison’s actions. Christabel was in exile in Paris and Emmeline was in and out of prison and was rearrested en route to the funeral. Her funeral in London, organised by Grace Roe on 14 June, proved to be the last great suffragette showpiece attended by a vast crowd and five thousand women dressed in white as a suffragette guard of honour and much of the press coverage was respectful, awed by her devotion to ‘the Cause’. Although the funeral procession was not subjected to hackling from people who normally turned up the suffragette events, popular reaction to the procession was ambiguous. Anmer had been put down following the incident and, though it was unlikely that he would have won the race, many people had placed bets on him and may have blamed the suffragettes for losing their money. Others saw the attack on Anmer as an insult to the king. Emily’s body was taken north by train and was buried in St. Mary’s churchyard, Morpeth, Northumberland. The movement now had its martyr.

The mixed reactions to her funeral were a reflection of growing popular hostility to the suffragettes after 1912. Labour Party leaders and non-militant suffragettes denounced suffragette martrydom as a contrived and dishonest policy that did little to further the suffrage cause. The press insisted that society could not submit to what the Daily Sketch labelled as a form of terrorism. Emily’s death had no impact of government policy to suppress the WSPU: in continued to raid its headquarters, tap its telephones and intercept its mail. If anything, the campaign by the authorities was intensified strengthened by the increased alienation of public opinion by its militant actions. This was reflected in private correspondence along suffragettes and, although the Pankhursts tried to capitalise on Emilys’ death, it helped to strengthen their determination to change course after the outbreak of war in 1914.

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[1] Tanner, Michael, The Suffragette Derby (Robson Press), 2013, is good on the tensions of the Derby though less convincing on Davison’s actions.

[2] Ibid, Liddington, Jill, Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote, pp. 231-245.

[3] Morley, Ann with Stanley, Liz, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, (Women’s Press), 1988, is an important revisionist study of this rather enigmatic figure. See also, Purvis, June, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872-1913), Women’s History Review, Vol. 22, (3), (2013), pp. 353-362, and Fisher, Lucy, Emily Wilding Divison: The Suffragette Who Died For Women’s Rights, (Blacktoad Publications), 2013. Collette, Carolyn P., (ed.), In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette, (University of Michigan Press), 2013, prints her published and unpublished writings, some of which are at http://emilydavison.org/browse-letters/

[4] Morning Post, 9 June 1913. Ibid, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, pp. 164-165.

[5] Colmore, Gertrude, The Life of Emily Davison: An Outline, (The Woman’s Press), 1913. Her biography, hagiography as it undoubtedly is, remains an important reference point as it contains the basic source material for all later writers in Emily Davison. However, it excludes much that is important in understanding Emily’s life and thus her death.

[6] West, Rebecca, ‘The Life of Emily Davison’, The Clarion, 20 June 1913.

[7] Ibid, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, pp. 165-166.

[8] There was a copycat incident at Ascot a fortnight later, when James Hewitt, great-grandson of the second Viscount Lifford and generally regarded as an ‘eccentric’, ran out in front of the Gold Cup field with a suffragette flag in one hand and a loaded revolver in the other. He brought down Tracery, the leader and was seriously injured.

4000,000 and counting

PASSING 400,000

I started my Looking at History blog on Blogger on 30 July 2007 and it’s taken until 7 June 2013 to reach 400,000 ‘hits’: an average of around 66,000 per year.  I’ve published 823 blogs in that time, around 137 blogs a year.  Inevitably, take-up of the blogs was initially slow but once they began to appear in Google Search the number of hits began to rise significantly and in the past two years the blog has consistently been getting 20,000 hits a month.

Analysis of which blogs have been particularly popular shows that ‘Disease in the Victorian city: extended version’ has over 9,000 hits followed closely by ‘Suffrage since 1903: Arguments against  women’s suffrage’ with 8,300.  Generally the blogs on nineteenth century British society, women’s history and Canada have performed the best.  Given the nature of the blogs, their audiences is not surprising with the United Kingdom (150,000) and United States (121,000) being the most important.  There has also been a good take-up from Canada (23,000), Australia (13,000), France (11,000) and Germany (10,000) with a gap before Russia (2,000) and India (2,000). 

The bulk of the hits are accessed through Internet Explorer (41%), Firefox (21%) and Chrome(20%) using Windows (77%), Macintosh(10%) and Linux (5%).  Access using tablets or phones is currently more limited with iPad (2%), iPhone(2%) and Android (1%) but this represents a significant increase since the end of 2011 when these did not register at all. 

Comments on the site have been overwhelmingly positive and in several cases helpful in enabling me to correct errors and I have been both gratified by this as well as pleased that readers take the time to make comments (whether critical or not). 

The Anti-Suffragist movement

The anti-suffragist movement aimed to resist any proposal to admit women to the parliamentary franchise and to Parliament but to maintain the principle of the representation of women on municipal and other bodies concerned with the domestic and social affairs of the community. The more active anti-suffragists were prepared to argue about their role in society, speak on public platforms, write articles and campaign for the causes which they believed allowed them to realise their potential for service and self-expression. As Violet Markham said in 1912:

We believe that men and women are different – not similar – beings, with talents that are complementary, not identical, and that they therefore ought to have different shares in the management of the State, that they severally compose. We do not depreciate by one jot or tittle women’s work and mission. We are concerned to find proper channels of expression for that work. We seek a fruitful diversity of political function, not a stultifying uniformity. [1]

The first meeting of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League took place on 21 July with Lady Jersey in the chair. [2] In addition to Mary Ward, its executive committee included Gertrude Bell, the writer and traveller, Ethel Bertha Harrison, a writer and reformer and Joseph Chamberlain’s daughter Beatrice, an active social worker. A small number of men were already actively involved in the League including John Massie and Heber Hart on its executive committee. The first issue of The Anti-Suffrage Review appeared in December 1908 that, especially when Mary Ward wrote for it, gave some intellectual respectability to the anti-suffragist cause. The organisation also included ultra-conservatives such as Lady Havesham and Frances Low who did not believe in Ward’s progressive social feminist view of ‘civic housekeeping’ but in maintaining the separate sphere ideology and resisted her desire for a ‘Forward Policy’. This linked anti-suffragism to calls for social reform, women’s participation in local government and to womanly self-development through the performance of womanly duties to God, family, nation and empire. It emphasised women’s service not women’s rights. [3] Difference between reformers and conservatives did not prevent them collaborating in a membership drive and publicity campaign that resulted in over eighty branches by July 1909.

Anti-Suffrage postcard, 1908

The rhetoric that informed both ‘anti’ and suffragist political argument was remarkably similar. Ward’s view of differentiated citizenship celebrated the distinctive roles of men and women in society while suffragists emphasised what men and women had in common. [4] Her reforming imagination, commitment to women’s service, and sympathetic literary depictions of friendships between women, the hallmarks of much of her fiction, lend weight to the argument that there is more common ground between suffragists and ‘antis’ than is sometimes supposed. [5] Suffragists and anti-suffragists shared beliefs in sexual difference but disagreed about the extent to which women should carry their particular gifts to the national arena. Suffragists believed that women should reshape national government through the vote, ends with which anti-suffragists disagreed. Millicent Fawcett always considered that Mary Ward was a social reformer whose forte was philanthropic work and that she had somehow wandered into the wrong camp on women’s suffrage.

The earliest achievements of the anti-suffragists were impressive. The Women’s Anti-Suffrage League expanded rapidly and developed a considerable number of branches throughout Britain. In December 1908, it had 2,000 members and by October 1909, around 10,000 members. By April 1910, there were 104 branches; and by April 1912, 235 branches. Analysis of the branch distribution shows that London and the southeast accounted for most of the anti-suffragist effort, 42 per cent of the total membership between 1908 and 1914. The League’s regional pattern of support paralleled Edwardian rural and suburban Conservatism and Brian Harrison argues that, despite its elitist leadership, it appealed widely to the conservative working-class. [6] The movement was weaker in the industrial north and in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. [7] By 1910, Scottish anti-suffragists had established their own affiliated anti-suffrage organisation, the Scottish National Anti-Suffrage League, presided over by the duchess of Montrose and in 1913 affiliated to the League as the Scottish League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. The annual council of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was told in 1914 that membership stood at ‘42,000 subscribing members and 15,000 adherents at the end of six years' work…a very good record which compares very favourably with the records of the associations organised by our opponents’. [8] This total included the members of the affiliated Scottish League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. Other records reveal that about five out of every six members of the League were female, and that branch leadership remained largely in the hands of women.

Charles Lane Vicary, Ye Anti Suffrage League, (Printed and Published by the Artists Suffrage League), 1908

In December 1908, male anti-suffragists launched a parallel and much less active Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage. Although it was skilled at fundraising, it failed to gain popular support. Dominated by the imperialist leadership of Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, it was a collection of major public figures rather than a nationwide movement. Its supporters also included Rudyard Kipling, and A. V. Dicey but also newspaper editors such as Charles Moberly Bell, editor of The Times and John St Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator. In a still largely deferential society, a great strength of the anti-suffragists was the list of great men who gave it support. Both groups were set up to be non-party organisations and had members from all parties even though Harrison maintains the Conservatives were the natural home of the anti-suffragists.

Within two years it was clear that both Leagues faced serious practical problems. The Women’s League had little parliamentary influence or sufficient campaign funds, while the Men’s League lacked active campaigners and female support. It was its success in raising a £20,000 anti-suffrage fighting fund that made the prospect of a merger enticing to the anti-suffrage women. They were eager to put their faith in complementary gender roles into practice though not at the cost of abandoning important priorities of the Women's League. In addition, both Leagues feared that a majority of MPs were now in favour of giving votes to women householders. Amalgamation was achieved after months of tortuous negotiation over the name of the new organisation, its constitutional gender balance and the continued endorsement by the Women's League of women's local government work within the objectives of the new, mixed-sex league. [9] In December 1910 the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was formally launched, with Lord Cromer as president, Lady Jersey as vice-president and an executive of seven men and seven women. [10]

Between 1911 and 1914, the League’s performance was disappointing, though its achievements were far from negligible.[11] Lord Cromer wanted to focus the campaign on Parliament but anti-suffrage interventions during by-elections proved ineffective and the League was notably unsuccessful in influencing the views of Parliament itself. A parliamentary committee of the League led by Mary Ward’s son Arnold, MP for Watford between 1910 and 1918, failed to rally a united opposition, even though growing militancy checked the advancing tide of parliamentary suffrage support. [12] In addition, the League’s leadership suffered from divisions exacerbated by Cromer’s difficulty in collaborating with independently-minded women. Supporters of the ‘forward policy’ attempted to press ahead with a positive agenda of local government work and womanly social action, initially organised under the auspices of a separate women’s Local Government Advancement Committee and publicised through the Anti-Suffrage Review. Despite opposition from the League’s male leaders, Mary Ward firmly believed in increasing the role of women in municipal affairs and that the League should do more than occupy itself with ‘opposition and denial’. Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon were hostile to such diversionary activity, a position reinforced by their growing awareness that the anti-suffrage women themselves were far from united behind such a programme. Their hostility was further aggravated by local government campaigning that cut across party politics and appeared to set women’s perceived social needs above those of the anti-suffrage movement.

Although local government work was gradually relegated from the League’s programme during 1911 and 1912, Ward’s backing of Dr Elizabeth Jevons as a candidate for a seat on the London County Council contributed directly to Cromer’s resignation in early 1912. He may have been right in his belief that any attempt to promote wider women’s issues would be politically divisive but his resignation was testimony to the problems he encountered in holding this particular line. He commented to Curzon that he did not have the ‘health, strength, youth and I may add, the temper to go on dealing with these infernal women’. [13] Efforts by the League’s leaders to impose masculine authority within their own headquarters proved equally counter-productive. Lucy Terry Lewis, the leading Women’s League administrator, refused to be upstaged by inferior male colleagues and drew support from fellow supporters of the ‘forward policy’. [14] Though she was driven from office shortly before Cromer’s resignation, male replacements proved ineffective and antagonised the leading women. Peace was only restored when Lord Curzon, Cromer’s successor as president, acknowledged the formidable skills of Gladys Pott, another woman administrator during 1913. [15]

The League could justifiably claim some success in holding a number of large-scale public meetings that demonstrated the harmonious collaboration of male and female opponents of the vote. The most famous, at the Albert Hall on 28 February 1912, attracted 20,000 ticket applications and an audience of over 9,000.[16] Violet Markham, a Liberal Unionist, imperialist and womanly social reformer, made an imposing defence of progressive anti-suffragism, alongside male speakers from both major parties. The marchioness of Tullibardine had almost equal success at a 6,000-strong meeting in Glasgow a few months later, though on that occasion the most striking speech was undoubtedly Lord Curzon’s resounding defence of the British Empire against the suffragist threat. [17] Despite these successes, the anti-suffragists proved less efficient than the suffragists. There is little evidence of working-class women taking part in the anti-suffrage movement though there is some evidence for tacit male working-class support. They also found it difficult to recruit younger middle-class women. Anti-Suffrage League meetings were drab and its press office less effective than either the WSPU and NUWSS. Nonetheless, the League did have most of the press on its side ensuring it communicated its message effectively.

With the outbreak of war, the League swiftly suspended all campaigning, devoting its resources to the war effort. [18] This proved difficult to maintain when patriotic suffragists grasped every opportunity to strengthen their cause through well-advertised war service. Though weakened by the departure of male supporters, the League continued to publish its journal and maintained a low level of anti-suffrage propaganda throughout the war. By 1916, some London branches were demanding a more active stance. During the following year the suffrage issue was again before parliament and women leaders were once again to the fore at the highest levels of the League. By this stage, many long-term supporters including Lord Curzon were prepared to bow to the inevitable. By contrast, Mary Ward, confident in the latent anti-suffragism of the silent majority of British women, was acting chairman as the Representation of the People Bill passed through parliament but her frantic last-minute attempts to check its progress failed. At a determinedly positive final meeting of the League in April 1918, Lady Jersey, Mary Ward, Gladys Pott and Beatrice Chamberlain emphasised the justice of their cause to a post-war future in which women would need to be educated to use their votes wisely. For them, the gendered values of British womanhood remained worthy of defence.

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[1] Markham, Violet, Miss Violet Markham’s Great Speech at the Albert Hall, (National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage), 1912.

[2] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 163-192.

[3] Bush, Julia, ‘British Women’s Anti-suffragism and the Forward Policy, 1908-14’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 11, (3), (2002), pp. 431-454.

[4] This position was evident in the 1889 Appeal and especially in Harrison Ethel B., The Freedom of Women: an argument against the proposed extension of the suffrage to women, (Watts & Co.), 1908.

[5] For the contradictions in Ward’s work see, Saunders, Valerie, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists, (Palgrave), 1997, and Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth, ‘Shot out of the Canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminisms’, in Thompson, Nicola Diane, (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, (Cambridge University Press), 1999, pp. 204-222.

[6] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 140-141.

[7] For the regional impact of anti-suffragism see, ibid, Wallace, Ryland, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1868-1928, pp. 184-218, and ibid, Leheman, Leah, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, pp. 70, 106, 192, 215.

[8] Anti-Suffrage Review, Vol. 69, (July 1914), p. 110.

[9] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp.128-130.

[10] Owen, Roger, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul, (Oxford University Press), 2004, pp. 374-378, examines his anti-suffragist activities.

[11] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, pp. 310-337, considers Mary Ward’s role between 1910 and the outbreak of war.

[12] Arnold Ward was dropped by the Conservative Party as their candidate in Watford for the 1918 General Election. His anti-suffragist credentials would have been a liability in the first election when women could vote.

[13] Cromer to Curzon, 8 February 1912, cit, ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 134.

[14] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp.131-132.

[15] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 184.

[16] Ibid, p. 149.

[17] Ibid, pp. 43, 75.

[18] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 257-287, examines the anti-suffragists during the War.

Opposition to women’s suffrage

Organised opposition to women’s suffrage has almost as long a history as women’s suffrage. [1] A Parliamentary Committee for Maintaining the Integrity of the Franchise was formed in 1875 after the 1875 suffrage bill failed to pass its second reading and was in action when the bill was against debated in 1876 and 1878. The backbone of the Committee was a group of Conservative MPs led by E. P. Bouverie and including Lord Randolph Churchill. Some Liberal MPs became members and some peers. Little more is heard of the Committee after the 1878 bill was defeated and it is probable that it did not survive the election of a new parliament in March 1880. [2]

The first collective protest against suffragism occurred in 1889. [3] Encouraged by Frederic Harrison and James Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century, Mary Augusta Ward, the writer Mrs Humphry Ward published an article against demands for the extension of the suffrage to women, signed by 104 prominent women, prominent largely because their husbands were prominent. [4] More than 2,000 women from many parts of Britain signed an accompanying ‘female protest’, though they declined to form a continuous anti-suffrage campaign group. [5] Harrison suggests that this appeal had a considerable effect on decision makers and may have finally persuaded William Gladstone to reveal his opposition to women’s suffrage in 1892. The appeal did not result in the creation of an organisation to fight the growing popularity of the suffragist movement and the case against the vote was advanced largely through the journalistic and literary debate over gender roles during the 1890s, a reaction to the prominence of the ‘New Woman’ in fiction and growing concerns over Britain’s imperial future caused by fears of social and racial degeneracy.

Organised anti-suffragism revived after 1900 especially after the House of Commons passed a suffragist resolution by a large majority in 1904. [6] Some parliamentary anti-suffragists were active and vocal supporters of organised anti-suffragism while others were more reluctant to fuel party divisions and confined their opposition to parliamentary debates and to the voting lobby. Within the Liberal Party, some members such as James Bryce, who had believed in organised opposition for twenty years, provided support for the ‘antis’ even when he was ambassador to Washington between 1907 and 1913. [7] Several MPs played an active role in the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage including John Massie, Rudolph Lehmann and Alexander MacCallum Scott. Asquith, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister, could not become a member of the National League but he was undoubtedly supportive of its aims telling a deputation of anti-suffragists in Downing Street in 1910 that they were ‘preaching to the converted’. More Conservatives and Unionists supported anti-suffragism especially after 1906 when not in government and could be more forthright in their views. In addition to Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, successive presidents of the National League who feared that women’s suffrage threatened the Empire, other front-bench politicians supported the League including Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, F. E. Smith and Walter Long in the Commons and Lord Lansdowne, Lords George Hamilton and Lord Northcote in the Lords.

Anti-suffragist cartoon, c1910

Women were also mobilising opposition with a number of women writing in The Times and The Spectator in 1905 and 1906 expressing their concern about the growing activity of the suffragists and suffragettes, arguing that it was time for the ‘antis’ to become active. They argued that there was a ‘silent majority’ that supported their views and later during 1908 produced an anti-suffrage petition containing 337,018 signatures. [8] The launch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League in July 1908 largely through the efforts of Mary Ward who remained as intransigent in her opposition to women’s suffrage as she had been two decades earlier. [9] Her obstinacy cost her dear and is one of the reasons why Edwardians such as Lytton Strachey and H. G. Wells were so keen to abuse and posterity to forget her as a traitor to her sex. Although progressive in her thinking about women’s education and their potential in social reform and local government, Mary Ward was unwavering in her opposition to women’s suffrage. [10] She thought that for women to want to vote was somehow unseemly and instinctively associated the militancy of the WSPU with the Irish outrages that had terrified her in the 1880s. She could tolerate constitutionalist suffragists even if she disagreed with them, but as Sutherland commented, ‘suffragettes were hardly better than Fenians’. [11]

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[1] Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, (Croom Helm), 1978, should be complemented by ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain. See also, Faraut, Martine, ‘Women Resisting the Vote: a case of anti-feminism?’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 12, (2003), pp. 605-622.

[2] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 115-116.

[3] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 141-162, examines anti-suffragism after 1889.

[4] Ward, Mary A., ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, The Nineteenth Century, June 1889, pp. 781-788, and see also, Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, ‘The Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage: a Reply’, Nineteenth Century, July 1889, pp. 86-96.

[5] Joannou, Maroula, ‘Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry) and the Opposition to Women’s Suffrage’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 14, (2005), pp. 561-580. See also, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, (Oxford University Press), 1990, pp. 197-200, and ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 252-253.

[6] Bush, Julia, ‘National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (act. 1910-1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/92492, accessed, 25 April 2012]

[7] Like his friend Frederic Harrison, Bryce was a radical by temperament but this did not prevent him strongly opposing women’s suffrage; see Bryce, James, The Hindrances to Good Citizenship, (Yale University Press), 1909, pp. 85, 90, 98, 175, 181, and Seaman Jr., John T., A Citizen of the World: The Life of James Bryce, (I. B. Tauris), 2006, pp. 96-97, 198-199.

[8] This was the largest petition on women’s suffrage since 1874 and the following year suffragists could only manage 288,736 signatures.

[9] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, pp. 299-309, considers her role in 1908 and 1909.

[10] See, for instance, Ward, Humphry, Mrs, ‘Why I Do Not Believe In Woman Suffrage’, Ladies’ Home Journal, Vol. 27, (November 1908), pp. 21-22, ‘Women in Politics and the Vote’, The Times, 20 June 1910, and ‘Mrs Humphry Ward and the Suffrage’, The Times, 19 December 1911.

[11] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, p. 200.

Why not give women the vote?

Not all women wanted the vote. Queen Victoria who felt quite capable of ruling an empire and yet opposed women’s suffrage referring to it as ‘this mad, wicked folly’. [1] Many women campaigners, such as Octavia Hill, were convinced that reforms in civil and social rights were of greater moment than political enfranchisement. Most national and regional newspapers, especially The Times were hostile to the women’s suffrage campaign especially after militant action began although this did encourage newspapers to print stories about the suffragettes, providing them with the ‘oxygen’ of publicity. There was a deep-seated fear of change particularly sharing power with women who had never been seen as men’s equals. Opposition to women’s suffrage was frequently instinctively hostile and blatantly prejudiced but much of it was also carefully considered and cogently argued. Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period, it was deep-rooted and influential, organised and vocal and the ‘antis’ came from across the social and political spectrum and involved women as well as men.

For those who accepted the notion of ‘separate spheres’, and many still did in the 1880s, the role played by men was different (and should be different) from that played by women. [2] While the masculine public sphere was for men, the feminine domestic sphere was for women. [3] Bax went so far as to deny that any oppression of women had occurred at all:

The whole modern women’s movement is based, in a measure, at least, on an assumption which is absolutely unfounded -- to wit, that man has systematically oppressed woman in the past, that the natural tendency of evil-minded man is always to oppress women, or, to put in another way, that woman is the victim of man’s egotism.....[4]

Before the 1872 Ballot Act, voting was ‘open’, a public statement on the hustings and violence and harassment was common. [5] Many men believed that women as ‘the weaker sex’ would not be able to cope with the ‘hurly-burly’ of elections and should be kept out of the political arena. Their strength lay within the family providing support, inspiration and raising children. If the vote was given to women, it might cause political disagreements with their husbands and consequently accelerate the break-up of the family. In short, women were a civilising element in society. Forcing women into a public, political role would detract from their femininity or, as William Gladstone put it in 1892, ‘trespass upon their delicacy, their purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature’. [6] Goldwin Smith, in a letter published in The Times, wrote that women’s real object was ‘nothing less than a sexual revolution…deposing the head of the family, forcing women into male employments, and breaking down…every barrier which Nature or custom has established.’ [7]

The ‘different biology and psychology’ argument was a widely held that women tended to be temperamental and prone to outbursts of emotion so how could such beings be trusted with the franchise? The militant tactics of the WSPU after 1905 reinforced this viewpoint. Anti-suffragists held a number of assumptions about female psychology and physiology. It was argued that women were physically and mentally weaker than men. They were more emotional, unable to grasp abstract questions and slow to make up their minds and that it would be a highly undesirable product of women’s suffrage if women came to shape policy. This was frequently reinforced by their lack of education and it was difficult for many people to believe that women were as capable as men of making intelligent choices as voters. For those who had to conserve their limited energies for the vital and debilitating business of childbearing, politics would simply be too great a strain. The medical profession in general supported these views with scientific authority despite being largely ignorant about female physiology in this period. Sir Almroth Wright, an eminent if eccentric medical practitioner, expressed this view, most notoriously, in the letter published in The Times in 1912 at the height of the suffragette violence that was reprinted the following year. [8] He attacked the suffragettes as frustrated spinsters venting their bitterness on men but he also claimed that women in general were prone to hysteria that made them inadequate to receive the vote. His attack on ‘militants’ as a justification for denying the vote to women was echoed by others. For instance, Harold Owen, wrote:

The fact, then, that Suffragism has been supported by the vehemence and disorderliness of a few woman is no commendation whatever of the vote being granted as an act of grace. Their earnestness is counter-balanced by the orderly earnestness of women who do not want woman to be enfranchised....[9]

This delicacy of nature and also of physique unfitted women formed the key, traditional military role of the citizen. It was claimed, ‘The voter, in giving a vote pledges himself to uphold the consequences of his vote at all costs ... women are physically incapable of this pledge.’ [10] Male suffrage was justified by the fact that men could be called upon to risk their lives for their country, a sacrifice that women would not be asked to make and as a result, did not deserve full citizenship. Some opponents of women’s suffrage pointed out that the maintenance of the British Empire required a large army and because women did not contribute to the defence of Empire, they should not have the vote. Lord Curzon, an ardent anti-suffragist and former Viceroy of India told Glasgow audiences in 1912 that, if women received the vote, the sub-continent would be lost to the Empire.

The logic of their case was that women could properly be entrusted with municipal affairs, while imperial matters were outside their ‘sphere’; but the two doctrines did not combine very happily together. They [the anti-suffragists] had some trouble with their own members, particularly with the imposing array of Peers who were their vice-presidents, since these gentlemen objected just as strongly to the presence of women on borough councils as anywhere else (outside the home); and the spectacle of their troubles was a constantly recurring delight to their opponents... [11]

A further variant was the idea that, since women could not physically enforce the laws they made, men might simply refuse to accept them leading to a breakdown in law and order.

There were also fears about the practical results of enfranchising women. If adult suffrage were granted, there would be about 1.5 million more women voters than men. Government would reflect female views and as women were ‘less virile’ than men were it would result in Britain and the Empire being weakened. To concede even a limited vote would lead eventually to complete suffrage and a female majority that might well push anti-male policies. The eminent jurist A. V. Dicey warned that since women constituted the majority of voters they would be in a position to force Parliament into adopting policies opposed by the male minority.[12] There were also concerns that women would use their new political power to improve their position in the labour force or that they would neglect their domestic duties.

Some opponents of women’s suffrage suggested that the majority of women did not want the vote or at least, did not care whether they had it. This claim was plausible despite the suffragists’ best efforts to disprove it. The Anti-Suffrage League argued that the vote was overvalued. Even though some men had the vote, there was still plenty of poverty, unemployment and low wages. They maintained that it must not be assumed that female suffrage would solve all the problems of women. This view was reinforced by the argument that women themselves did not really want the vote. Suffragists, they claimed, were an unrepresentative and small, if vocal minority and their campaign for ‘their own emancipation’ was watched by most women with what in 1892 Asquith, who had long opposed women’s suffrage, called ‘languid and imperturbable indifference’. [13] Two further and somewhat contradictory arguments were put forward. There was the argument that women were already represented in Parliament by the men in their family. In addition, women already exercised some control over political decision making since leading politicians listened to the views of their wives, mothers and other female acquaintances. Also, since women were incapable of making decisions and would do what the men in the family told them to do, if they had the vote it would lead to some men, in effect, having several votes more than others.

Above all, the anti-suffragists drew strength from the fact that their membership was not exclusively male. Anti-democratic and hostile to the labour and feminist movements of their day which they saw as a threat to marriage and motherhood, they were ridiculed as absurd by supporters of the parliamentary vote for women. Many women, including some who enjoyed a prominent public role such as Octavia Hill, Florence Nightingale and at one time Beatrice Webb, refused to support women’s suffrage although they were often enthusiastic about local government and the need for social action by women to improve the conditions of the poor. For them, involvement in local government was a ‘proper channel’ for ‘womanly’ influence and involved action in areas such as education and the Poor Law, areas of ‘home concerns’ or the upkeep of towns or ‘civic housekeeping’. Mary Ward called women’s civic duties the ‘enlarged housekeeping of the nation’ arguing that their domestic skills were need not just in the private sphere but in the public sphere as well. Bush suggests that the anti-suffrage women leaders were divided into three loose and overlapping groupings, the maternal reformers, the women writers and the imperialist ladies.[14] Although there was a diversity of view, most of the leading women drew their enthusiasm from deeply rooted convictions about womanhood, the nation and empire. It was almost universally assumed that differences between the sexes were natural, and that any major departure from women’s role as wives and mothers would bring social chaos to Britain and the Empire. [15] Their anti-suffragism was social rather than political and reflected the continuing development of their role as women in improving nation and empire. Theirs was a view of citizenship that saw women’s mission as essential to the proper development of the country and in that benign moral vision, the parliamentary vote had no place.

Many of the anti-suffragist arguments represented self-serving pleas by the traditional male elite anxious to preserve its position and authority. On the other hand, there is a danger in dismissing the entire anti-suffragist case simply because today we take it for granted that women should have the vote. From the view of the main women’s middle- and upper-class non-political organisations the anti-suffragist claims were far from absurd and reflected mainstream female opinion on desirable gender roles and on women’s positive role in national life. [16] Large women’s organisations such as the Mothers’ Union were not suffrage organisations and even the Women’s Co-operative Guild with 30,000 members did not adopt women’s suffrage until 1900. Anti-suffragist ballots to test public opinion on women’s suffrage suggested that those opposed to votes for women outnumbered suffragists by two to one. [17] Historians need to explain when and why certain parts of the anti-suffragist case lost their force. In the 1870s and 1880s, it is not obvious that most women were enthusiastic about the vote. Suffrage societies were small pressure groups until well into the first decade of the twentieth century and shared similar beliefs with anti-suffragists about their social mission to strengthen the family both at home and in the empire through their participation in social activism.

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[1] Queen Victoria to Sir Theodore Martin, 29 May 1870, cit, ibid, Rover. Constance, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics, 1866-1914, p. 34.

[2] Hart, Heber L., Women’s Suffrage and National Danger: A Plea for the Ascendency of Man, (Alexander and Shepheard), 1889, pp. 89-188..

[3] Delap, Lucy, and Heilmann, Ann, (eds.), Anti-feminism in Edwardian literature, 6 Vols. (Thoemmes Continuum), 2006, Heilmann, Ann, and Sanders, Valerie, ‘The rebel, the lady and the ‘anti’: Femininity, anti-feminism, and the Victorian woman writer’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 29, (2006), pp. 289-300.

[4] Bax, E. Belfont, The Fraud of Feminism, , (Grant Richards Ltd.), 1913, pp. 173-174.

[5] Kinzer, Bruce, The Ballot Question in Nineteenth-Century English Politics, (Garland), 1982.

[6] Gladstone to Samuel Smith MP, 11 April 1892, Matthew, H. C. G., (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. 13, 1892-1896, (Oxford University Press), 1994, p. 19.

[7] The Times, 26 May 1896.

[8] Wright, A. E., ‘Militant Hysteria’, The Times, 28 March 1912, reprinted in Wright, Sir Almroth E, The Unexpurgated Case against Woman Suffrage, (Constable and Company Ltd.), 1913, pp. 77-86

[9] Owen, Harold, Woman Adrift. The Menace of Suffragism, (Stanley Paul), 1912, pp. 138-139.

[10] NUWSS, Anti-Suffrage Arguments, (Templar Printing Works), 1913, a poster.

[11] Ibid, Strachey, Ray, The Cause, 1928, pp. 319-320.

[12] Dicey, A. V., Letters to a Friend on Votes for Women, (John Murray), 1909, pp. 69-70.

[13] Hansard, House of Commons, Debates, 27 April 1892, Vol. 3, c1510.

[14] Bush, Julia, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power, (Leicester University Press), 2000, pp. 170-192.

[15] Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2007, pp. 23-139.

[16] Ibid, p. 4.

[17] Ibid, p. 5, results were summarised in The Anti-Suffrage Handbook, (National Press Agency), 1912.

Nineteenth century social history

Those of you who follow my blogs on nineteenth century British social history might like to know that modified and more recent versions of the blogs are available as a series of Kindle books.  They have been published in two formats . As five single volumes:

• Economy, Population and Transport
• Work, Health and Poverty
• Education, Crime and Leisure
• Class
• Religion and Government

Or as a single volume: Society under Pressure: Britain 1830-1914.  In addition, a supplementary volume Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918 has also been published in both print and Kindle versions.

All of these volumes are available at the click of a mouse from Amazon sites in the UK, Europe and North America and are now also available in India. 

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918

JUST PUBLISHED

 

In 1830, women of all classes were repressed in a male-dominated society. By 1918, largely through their own struggles, they had seized control over most areas of their lives. Some of these sought access to the public sphere in education, the professions and central and local government. Others aimed to improve women’s legal and economic status within marriage. Married women’s property rights, divorce, custody of children, domestic violence as well as prostitution were all significant areas in which feminists campaigned for changes in the male-oriented status of the law and the differing moral standards to which wives and husbands were expected to conform. The long campaign for women's suffrage by suffragists and after 1903 suffragettes and the effects of World War 1 culminated in some women getting the vote in 1918 and a decade later women achieved the vote on the same terms as men. Yet, despite these advances for many largely working-class women, the tyranny of multiple pregnancies, poorly paid work and limited access to the means of personal improvement remained. This book explores the ways in which women's status in society developed and changed during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century by looking at the nature of and challenges to women's place in a masculine world, the character of work and how women achieved political and legal rights.

This innovative study is available from: http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Work-Politics-Britain-1830-1918/dp/146644908X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336837483&sr=1-2

What if?

The history of the women’s movement from John Stuart Mill onwards is a fine blend of heroism and farce that came to an abrupt halt in 1914 by which time the movement lacked any obvious strategy for success. The failure of the suffrage movement to achieve its objectives by 1914 is frequently blamed on suffragette militancy and violence, coupled with the personal style of management adopted by the Pankhursts and its effects on both public opinion and the three major political parties. That there was widespread disgust at the activities of the WSPU, something fanned by an antagonistic national and provincial press, is undoubtedly true but this neglects the quieter constitutionalist campaigns whose non-militancy proved equally unsuccessful. Neither suffragettes nor suffragists succeeded in concluding a firm alliance with either of the Conservative or Liberal parties, the WSPU squandered its potentially useful link with the ILP while by 1914, the EFF had yet to deliver real success to the Labour Party. They were unfortunate that Asquith was so personally opposed to women's suffrage and that their campaign coincided with other, more pressing political issues. In many respects, the suffrage campaign was not in a much better position in 1914 than it had been in 1897. True, it was better organised, had developed new methods for getting its message across and had increased support across society but it now faced a well-organised and resourced anti-suffrage movement.

If war had not broken out in 1914, there would been a general election in 1915. If the Liberals under Asquith had won there is no reason to suggest that he would have changed his views of women’s suffrage while a Conservative victory was unlikely to have led to women getting the vote since parliamentary debates could have opened up the question of adult suffrage, an issue the party wished to avoid. Under the existing franchise, it is highly unlikely that the Labour Party would have made an electoral breakthrough and, without their continued pact with the Liberals, could have actually lost seats. In addition, there is the question of what would have happened to the WSPU. By August 1914, it had largely exhausted the scope of its militancy, had alienated many of its supporters and appeared to be in terminal decline. The NUWSS and WFL might have benefitted from this in terms of membership but their constitutionalist methods had failed to deliver change before 1914 and, without an alteration in attitude by the leaders of the political parties, there is no reason to believe that their methods would have been any more successful before or after a general election in 1915. So when would women have got the vote? Assuming a Liberal win in 1915 and assuming that Asquith was not replaced by Lloyd George who was increasingly suffragist in opinion or a Conservative victory, it is quite possible that the 1920 general election would have been fought under the existing franchise. It is unlikely that women’s suffrage could have been delayed beyond 1920 since international trends favoured enfranchisement. The result was that adult suffrage would have been introduced and the election in 1924 or 1925 fought with a broadened electorate that might have included all women, three years before they were actually fully enfranchised.

Why did women want the vote?

This is an extract from my forthcoming book: Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918

The prolonged demise of Chartism during the 1850s sapped working-class calls for the franchise and the fragmented nature of party politics in the 1850s meant that the issue of parliamentary reform and calls for women’s suffrage, never a vocal force, died away. [1] A concerted campaign for women’s suffrage did not emerge until the mid-1860s. Although votes for women was an obvious area of feminist concern, it was by no means an overriding consideration and before 1914 proved one of the areas of least success for the movement. The constant denial of the parliamentary franchise to women when feminist campaigns were enjoying success in many other areas sets it apart not as their dominant concern but as the demand that successive governments were not willing to concede.

The emergence of the suffrage movement coincided with important changes in the relationship between the state and society. In 1860, a division between the public tasks of government and the private worlds of work, family, religion and property was still largely accepted. By the late 1890s. the expansion of social policies and social responsibilities had transformed and extended the local and national role of the state and the boundaries between what was public and what was private had been significantly blurred as the state increasingly interfered in areas of life previously regarded as private. Enthusiastic and radical local elites established a dominant niche in the enhanced and in some cases elective administration of education, poor relief, public health and in improving the urban environment within the policies and monitoring of the central state. Socially and ideologically, Britain was, or at least gave the impression of being, a more collectively organised country in 1900 than it had been in 1860. [2]

Women approached their demand for parliamentary suffrage from different directions. Their specifically political arguments centred on the issues of equality and representation while ethical arguments ranged from a simple declaration of justice to a belief in woman’s moral superiority and fitness. Suffragists recognised the force of contemporary opinion that potential voters should be demonstrably fit to exercise the franchise freely and intelligently, particularly when presenting the case to Parliament. [3] The transformation of the local and national state called into question the traditional view of citizenship. In 1860, it was assumed that the vote was not a natural right but a historic privilege grounded in an ancient, possible Anglo-Saxon constitution. [4] It was based on the independent man as head of the household and was used to justify the exclusion of women from the franchise. [5]

When Georgian men claimed to be ‘independent, they were drawing upon a political culture that privileged freedom from obligation, self-ownership, patriotism, straightforward manliness and constitutional balance. [6]

When the reforming Whigs legislatively defined the citizen as being an ‘independent man’ in 1832, it opened the door to generations of radical working men who, as breadwinners in their households, claimed that they too met this standard. Although property qualification retained their importance in the debates about electoral reform in the 1860s, Liberals and Radicals began to broaden their definition of property qualification to include the recognition of men’s property in their skills and sought to enfranchise skilled, respectable workers on this basis. The question was whether women were entitled to the vote on the same terms as men, an argument that gained credence as single women were given the municipal vote. Married women, who could not own property of their own before 1882, could not qualify. [7] Equality could simply mean the vote for single women and widows, who might own or rent property and pay their own taxes. Frances Cobbe Power argued that enfranchising a limited group of women might restore:

…the just balance in favour of an educated constituency against the weight of the illiterate male voters now entrusted with the franchise. [8]

After the Reform Act of 1867, which was gradually to extend the franchise to approximately 60 per cent of adult men, including virtually all urban householders, this could include all women who paid rates. After John Stuart Mill unsuccessfully attempted to amend the Reform Bill in 1867 to include women, Lydia Becker led a vigorous campaign for women who paid rates to be placed on the parliamentary register giving them the right to vote in the election of 1868. She suggested that in medieval and early-modern England, property had given women as heads of household the right to exercise the vote or to send deputies to vote on their behalf. She also argued on a legal technicality that the 1867 Act by using the term ‘man’ rather than ‘male person’ had generically included ‘women’. The basis of her campaign was ‘no taxation without representation’ and Becker organised a large number of potential voters in the Manchester area and elsewhere to register as voters. However, presiding barristers were unconvinced by either the historical or linguistic arguments and although a few claims to registration succeeded, they were rejected in a higher court and many feminists were unhappy at the conservative implications of limiting enfranchisement only to single women.

For many women, this approach led them to a surprisingly uncritical acceptance of the property terms of the Victorian male franchise arguing that acceptance of a restricted franchise was a matter of expediency rather than of principle. [9] For instance, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, later leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) recognised existing social and political conditions and maintained that voting was a right granted only to those whose proof of good citizenship or ‘fitness to vote’ could be weighed by the contents of their purse or the amount of their property. This was no more than equality with men, within the existing arrangements. Fawcett was not concerned with the merits or otherwise of the system, but more with its lack of logic: if propertied men could vote, why not propertied women? Feminists who accepted this position were asserting their rights as a female propertied class as distinct from their gender rights. Conservative women, in particular, focused on the contrast between the exclusion of middle-class women and the gradual extension of voting rights to working-class men. Feminists of all political views were unhappy with the performance of successive governments, not merely about women’s questions but in their attitude to a host of social and economic problems. Their analysis of those inadequacies rested on the unbalanced nature of representation that denied the vote to outsiders, women and the propertyless poor. The argument that women’s representation would force Parliament to consider matters previously neglected was as common a rationale as the broader moral reasoning based on a simple notion of equal justice. Not only was an unrepresentative government ‘despotic’ but it would also inevitably ignore the problems of the unrepresented.

The second case for enfranchising all women and men was based on grounds of their equal humanity and natural rights. Many feminists shared the views of the liberal John Stuart Mill, who in his works On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) had written of citizenship as a means of self-development, offering the freedom to develop the individual’s fullest potential whether male or female. [10] Mill stressed the role of the intelligent, rational and educated citizen, man or woman, in a developed western civilisation. He feared, however, the destructive effects of democracy, a ‘collective mediocrity’ as he called it, arguing for educational qualifications and for forms of representation that safeguarded the power of the educated. Some middle-class suffragists, whether married or single, from the liberal elite, found Mill's ideal of citizenship one which offered them ways of expressing their own need for fulfilment in an active and committed life. For Barbara Leigh Bodichon, the most important effect of women’s suffrage was in increasing patriotism and establishing an ‘unselfish’ public spirit in which feminists could cast themselves as guardians of the national character. This was a less restricted view of citizenship since it did not necessarily exclude married women and was not incompatible with the sexual division of labour. These arguments could rest, explicitly or implicitly, upon the exclusion of others, whether the uneducated poor, or those still termed ‘uncivilised’, beyond the western world. White British women claiming suffrage could use the language of contrast, comparing their own progress and moral character to the drudgery and oppression of women in the rest of the world, a progress that could be carried even further if they were allowed their rightful place.

Others drew on the language of ‘separate spheres’, maintaining that the different qualities that women possessed, and the concerns which arose out of domestic and philanthropic responsibilities, for children, for public health, and for the poor, were needed in public life, locally and nationally. This was a language frequently heard, as women were gradually admitted into some areas of local government, though it also rested on the existence, and the implicit exclusion, of those such as the poor and married working-class women, on whose behalf such responsibilities were claimed. Independence and self-development also featured in their arguments. Political participation would release women’s potential to the full. The grounds on which women from different feminist organisations demanded the vote did not differ radically. Their arguments tended to cluster round these considerations; their clashes occurred far more commonly over tactics, over means rather than ends. All the suffrage bodies founded during the period before the Suffragettes used similar methods of persuasion but differed in how extensive a franchise they were prepared to ask for in the first instance.

Feminist societies largely maintained some distance from direct support for mainstream politics, whether Liberal or Conservative, and criticised both for their entrenched attitudes to women. A growing number of Conservatives began to support women’s suffrage, usually because they believed they would benefit from votes for propertied women. The Conservative argument placed less emphasis on rights and more on the duties of the citizen to the state. Nor was this emphasis confined to the right wing. It was increasingly a feature of both Liberal and Labour suffragism and of feminist propaganda. Many feminists professed political beliefs that coloured their feminist inclinations, but for the most part women of differing political opinions worked together. The various grounds on which women claimed their right to the parliamentary vote represented the entire spectrum of political opinion and reflected contradictions between the reality of women’s powerlessness and prevailing political ideologies.

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[1] Saunders, Robert, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act, (Ashgate), 2011, pp. 1-26.

[2] The extension of the role of the state can be approached through Corrigan, P., and Sayer, D., The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, (Basil Blackwell), 1985, Harling, Philip, ‘The powers of the Victorian state’, in Mandler, Peter, (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2006, pp. 25-50, and Harling Philip, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction, (Polity), 2001.

[3] Bolt, Christine, ‘The ideas of British suffragism’ in ibid, Purvis, June, and Holton, Sandra Stanley, (eds.), Votes for Women, pp. 34-57, and Rendall, Jane, ‘Citizenship, culture and civilisation: The languages of British suffragists, 1866-1874’, in Daley, Caroline, and Noland, Melanie, (eds.), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, (New York University Press), 1994, pp. 127-150.

[4] Hill, Christopher ‘The Norman Yoke’, in his Puritanism and Revolution, (Secker & Warburg), 1958, pp. 50-112, considers this issue. Le joug normand: La conquête normande et son interprétation dans l’historiographie et la pensée politique anglaises, (Université de Caen), 2004, pp. 15-55, provides a more recent perspective.

[5] On the development of the notion of the ‘independent man’ see, McCormack, Matthew, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England, (Manchester University Press), 2011, especially pp. 187-200.

[6] Ibid, p. 201.

[7] On the reform of married women’s property law, see pp. 164-166.

[8] Power, Frances Cobbe, Why Women Desire the Franchise, (National Society for Women’s Suffrage), nd, p. 1.

[9] A similar view was expressed in the 1830s and 1840s by some radicals who saw the development of male household suffrage as a first step towards universal manhood suffrage. It too led to considerable disagreement within radicalism.

[10] Annas, Julia, ‘Mill and the Subjection of Women’, Philosophy, Vol. 52, (1977), pp. 179-194, and Smith, Elizabeth S., ‘John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women: A Re-examination’, Polity, Vol. 34, (2001), pp. 181-203. See also, Rendall, Jane, ‘The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867’, in Hall, Catherine, McClelland, Keith, and Rendall, Jane, (eds.), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, (Cambridge University Press), 2000, pp. 119-178.