Fabian Women: some sources

Source 1

Beatrice Webb Fabian Tract No. 67: Women and the Factory Acts [February 1896], printed in Sally Alexander (ed.) Women's Fabian Tracts, Routledge, 1989, pp.17-32

The ladies who resist further legal regulation of women's labour usually declare that their objection is to special legislation applying only to women. They regard it as unfair, they say, that women's power to compete in the labour market should be 'hampered' by any regulation from which men are free. Any such restriction, they assert, results in the lowering of women's wages, and in diminishing the aggregate demand for women's work......Mrs Henry Fawcett and Miss Ada Heather-Bigg, for instance, usually speak of legal regulation as something which, whether for men or for women, decreases personal freedom, diminished productive capacity and handicaps the worker in the struggle for existence......It is frequently asserted as self-evident that any special limitation of women's labour must militate against their employment. If employers are not allowed to make their women work overtime, or during the night, they will, it is said, inevitably prefer to have men. Thus it is urged, any extension of Factory legislation to trades at presented unregulated must diminish the demand for women's labour. But this conclusion, which seems so obvious, really rests on a series of assumptions which are not borne out by the facts....The evolution of industry leads inevitably to an increased demand for women's labour. Immediately we substitute the factory with its use of steam power and production on a large scale for the sweater's den or the domestic workshop, we get that division of labour and application of machinery that is directly favourable to the employment of women.....We can now sum up the whole argument. The case for Factory legislation does not rest on harrowing tales of exceptional tyranny, though plenty of these can be furnished in support of it. It is based on the broad facts of the capitalist system and the inevitable results of the Industrial Revolution. A whole century of experience proves that where the conditions of the wage earner's life are left to be settled by 'free competition' and individual bargaining between master and man, the worker's 'freedom' is delusive. Where he bargains, he bargains at a serious disadvantage, and on many of the points most vital to himself and to the community he cannot bargain at all. The common middle-class objection of Factory legislation -- that it interferes with the individual liberty of the operative -- springs from ignorance of the economic position of the wage-earner. Far from diminishing personal freedom, Factory legislation positively increases the individual liberty and economic independence of the workers subject to it....the fear of women's exclusion from industrial employment is wholly unfounded. The uniform effect of Factory legislation in the past has been, by encouraging machinery, division of labour and production on a large scale, to increase the employment of women and largely to raise their status in the labour market. At this moment the neglect to apply the Factory Acts effectively to the domestic workshop is positively restricting the demand for women workers in the clothing trade....The real enemy of the woman worker is not the skilled male operative but the unskilled and half-hearted female 'amateur' who simultaneously blacklegs both the workshop and the home. The legal regulation of women's labour is required to protect the independent professional woman worker against these enemies of her own sex. Without this regulation it is futile to talk to her of the equality of men and women. With this regulation, experience teaches us that women can work their way in certain occupations to a man's skill, a man's wages and a man's sense of personal dignity and independence.

Source 2

B. L. Hutchins Fabian Tract No.157: The Working Life of Women, [June 1911] printed in Sally Alexander (ed.) Women's Fabian Tracts, Routledge, 1989, pp. 164-178

It is still the custom in some quarters to assert that 'the proper sphere for women is the home' and to assume that a decree of Providence or a natural law has marked off and separated the duties of men and women. Man, it is said, is the economic support and protector of the family, woman is its watchful guardian and nurse: whence it follows that the wife must be maintained by her husband in order to give her whole time to home and children....It is not very easy to summarise briefly the facts of woman's life and employment....But there are several points which seem to be of special importance. First, there is the curious fact that women, though physically weaker than men, seem to have a greater stability of nerves, a greater power of resistance to disease and a stronger hold of life altogether....On the other hand there are more female paupers and more female old-age pensioners than male and these facts seem to indicate that women on the whole are handicapped rather by their economic position than by physical disability....Normally working women seem to pass from one plane of social development to another, not once only but in many cases twice or thrice in their lives. We might distinguish these places as status and contract, or value-in-use or value-in-exchange. All children are born into a world of value-in-use; they are not, for some years at all events, valued at what their services will fetch in the market. At an age varying somewhere between eight and eighteen or twenty the working girl, like the boy, starts on an excursion into the world of competition and exchange; she sells her work for what it will fetch. This stage, the stage of the cash nexus, lasts for the majority of girls a few years only. If she marries and leaves work, she returns at once to the world of value-in-use: the work she does for husband, home and children is not paid at so much per unit, but is done for its own sake....Socialists will not fail to realise that the case of the mother of small children forced under a competitive system to do unskilful and ill-remunerated work and neglects the work that is all important for the State, viz., the care and nurture of its future citizens, is only the extreme instance of the anomaly of the whole position of women in an individualist industrial community.....

Source 3

M.A. Fabian Tract No. 175: The Economic Foundations of the Women's Movement [June 1914], printed in Sally Alexander (ed.) Women's Fabian Tracts, Routledge, 1989, pp. 256-282

Purely economic causes are never sufficient to account entirely for any great revolt of the human spirit. Behind every revolution there lies a spiritual striving, a grasping after an ideal felt rather than seen.....It was not until the nineteenth century that the demand of women for political, economic and educational freedom was heard among any considerable mass of the people. This extension of the demand for emancipation was due to economic changes, to those alterations in human control over environment which are associated with the substitution of mechanical power for human energy in the making of commodities.....different classes of women were affected very differently [by the Industrial Revolution]. Among the wealthier people attempts were made to preserve the subordination of women to the family unit, although the economic justification for that dependence had ceased. Among the poor the necessity for the women's contribution to the family income was so strong that they were drafted into the new forms of industrial life without any consideration of their powers or capacities....parasitism became the fate of the middle class women, ruthless exploitation that of the working class women....at the present time there are two main sections in the modern women's movement -- the movement of middle class women who are revolting against their exclusion from human activity and insisting, firstly, on their right to education...secondly, on their right to earn a livelihood for themselves, which is rapidly being won, and thirdly, to their right to share in the control of Government, the point round which the fight is now most fiercely raging. These women are primarily rebelling against the sex-exclusiveness of men, and regard independence and the right to work as the most valuable privilege to be striven for. On the other hand, there are the women of the working classes, who have been faced with a totally different problem, and who naturally react in a different way. Parasitism has never been forced on them...What the woman of the proletariat feels as her grievance is that her work is too long and too monotonous, the burden laid upon her too heavy...The working woman feels her solidarity with the men of her class rather than their antagonism to her. The reforms that she demands are not independence and the right to work, but rather protection against the unending burden of toil which she has laid upon her....these changes in the status of women cannot come about in our present individualistic society...It is only Socialism which can make possible throughout the whole fabric of society for the normal woman to attain her twin demands, independent work and motherhood.

Source 4

Barbara Caine 'Beatrice Webb and the Women's Question', History Workshop Journal, volume xiv, 1982, pp. 23-43

It seems to me that she [Beatrice Webb] is important for the history of feminism precisely because of her unease and hesitancy about the women's movement....[It] did not appear to address either her own deep conflicts as a woman, or the wider social questions with which she was concerned -- first as a social investigator and later as a Fabian socialist. Her diaries and published works show with extraordinary clarity the centrality of the 'woman question' to late nineteenth century thought, while at the same time revealing the narrow but important boundaries which separated feminists from non-feminists in terms of personal attitudes and political choices....She rarely commented on the movement, despite the fact that she was surrounded by both its supporters and its opponents...But it was not until her signing of the 'Appeal Against Female Suffrage', which appeared in The Nineteenth Century in June 1889, that she commented directly on the women's movement in her diaries. This disinterest is not wholly surprising. The entire thrust of the late Victorian women's movement was such as to make it appear irrelevant to someone like Beatrice Webb...enfranchisement was seen as the key to women's emancipation. For Beatrice, now deeply preoccupied with the problems of economic inequality and the need for labour organisation, this perspective seemed very narrow -- especially since it was only single propertied women for whom the vote was demanded. It was one thing, however, to feel critical of the political direction of the women's movement, but quite another to oppose it publicly, as Beatrice did in the anti-suffrage 'Appeal'. The explanation of this episode in My Apprenticeship is scarcely adequate. She referred to her signing the statement as a 'false step' taken in reaction against her father's over-valuing of women, her irritation at the continual discussion of women's rights by suffragists and the fact that she had not personally suffered from her lack of political rights....In 1906 she sent Millicent Fawcett a letter intended for publication in which she explained her reasons for her earlier opposition to the suffrage and for her change of mind. She had no belief in the abstract 'rights' of humanity, she told Fawcett; rather she viewed life as a 'series of obligations'. The exercise of these obligations on women's part might once have been seen as distinct from the exercise of political power, but now the extension of state involvement and legislation into all areas of social life rendered such a distinction invalid. The demand for women's suffrage would now be seen not as a "claim to rights or an abandonment of women's particular obligations, but a desire more effectively to fulfil their functions by sharing the control of state action in these directions"......Beatrice Webb's Fabianism provided a framework whereby her earlier ideas about the role of women and their need to serve and nurture others could be extended and socialised. Through serving their families and through work, women could contribute to the Common Weal. Whether or not such a contribution satisfied them personally was not the question to be asked....

Source 5

Carole Seymour-Jones Beatrice Webb. Woman of Conflict, Pandora, 1992, pp. 268

As the militant suffragette movement attracted criticism in the press after Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney demanded "Votes for Women" and were arrested for spitting, a technical assault, at a political meeting in Manchester, Beatrice contacted Millicent Fawcett to say she had recanted: "As the women suffragists were being battered about rather badly, and coarse-grained men were saying coarse-grained things, I thought I might as well give a friendly pull to get things out of the mud, even at the risk of getting a little spattered myself." Her letter, which was printed in The Times, together with Louisa Creighton's change of heart, spoke of the "personal suffering and masculine ridicule" of women forced to commit a breach of the peace

The Fabians and the Women's Question

Beatrice Webb made little mention of the women’s movement in her diaries before 1900. This is surprising because women formed between a third and a half of the total membership, sat on the Executive and played a full part in the political life of the Society. However, the Fabianism of Beatrice Webb was dry and passionless, the product of reason. The Woman Question aroused passions not always amenable to reason because it opened up the vexed questions of marriage, the family and ‘sex-relations’. The early Fabians refused to think politically about sexual difference, which is why some women found it necessary to form the Fabian Women’s Group.

The Fabian Women’s Group first met in the drawing room of Maud Pember Reeves, wife of a New Zealand diplomat in early 1908 after a winter of suffrage activity of increasing violence. Women had not made themselves, or their cause felt sufficiently within the Society, they believed. At their first meeting they resolved first to further the principles of equal citizenship within and without the Society, and second, to ‘study women’s economic independence in relation to socialism’. They wanted to forge links between the two most vital movements of their time: socialism and women’s emancipation. They saw the Women’s Question as a problem of ‘economic liberty’ and this represents an important development in thinking through the connections past and present between this problem and socialism[1].

It was, however, the ‘sex-relation’ that was more difficult to reconcile with socialism in thought or practice. The early Fabians were silent on the issue. It was the growing momentum of the women’s movement and its militancy in the early twentieth century that meant that the issue could no longer be ignored. Women joined trade unions in large numbers and their independent voice was being heard through the National Federation of Women Workers (1906-21) while the Women’s Co-operative Guild (formed in 1883) spoke for the working class housewife and mother. Fabian women belonged to these organisations and were often among their leadership. Fabian women recognised class difference among women and made it central to their analysis of women’s economic condition. They argued that economic changes in the nineteenth century had reduced wealthy women to economic ‘parasites’ within the family and confined working class women to sweated industries and starvation wages. Differences between women might vary but their ultimate interests were the same. Fabian women identified the following:

1. The parasitic status of women of property obliged them to expose and reform the poverty in which the majority of women lived and died.
2. What united women (apart from not having the vote) was their economic dependence and their ‘sex-function’.
3. What Fabian women wanted to do was to separate them. A woman’s economic liberty depended on her either receiving the rate for the job in industry -- irrespective of sex-- or a state pension if she were a mother.

Fabian analysis went on to argue that the artificial exaggeration of sex differences was historical, patriarchal and that its effects spread adversely through domestic and industrial production. Women’s economic dependence, Fabian women argued, was twofold: within the family they were subordinate to father, husband and sons; while in wages work they were seen as unskilled and cheap labour. Both positions were historical and had a single cause: the custom of marriage by capture or purchase and the exclusive focus on a woman’s sex which a man’s wish for legitimate heirs imposed on his wife. Men defined women through their sex rather than their common humanity. Motherhood united women but motherhood was a ‘stigma’ when it should have been recognised as ‘a valuable act of citizenship’ and rewarded with state pensions and co-operative households.

The Fabian women found the sexual division of labour wherever they looked. Women were domestic servants, unskilled and sweated workers. Unskilled women were, according to Beatrice Webb in her Women and the Factory Acts (1897), their own worst enemies. She pointed to their partial subsistence from within the family, their lack of training and skills and their low standard of living. Women made poor trade unionists, a failing that perpetuated their economic role and from which they could raise themselves up if only they organised and refused to accept wages below subsistence level. Fabian women’s analysis of women’s economic plight was as thorough in its details as it was circumspect in its demands.

Many contemporaries considered Fabian women to be ‘serious-minded ladies’. Certainly Beatrice Webb (Potter as she was then) thought, in the late 1880s, that intellectual work was an antidote to sexual desire: “I have not despised the simple happiness of a woman’s life; it has despised me and I have been humbled as far down as women can be humbled”. The first generation of Fabian women supported each other, helped each other to learn and spurred each other on with reminders of women’s underdeveloped civic sense, lack of mental discipline or the habits of trade unions. Education was the path to collective as well as individual self-improvement as it was for so many working class men. Beatrice Webb commented towards the end of her life on the middle class respectability of the first Fabians despite the open sexuality of many Fabian men and some Fabian women. Yet, this remained the most volatile element of the delicate relationship between the movements for women’s emancipation and socialism. There was to be no resolution of this tension in the short term.

In essence, Fabian women saw the Woman’s Question in economic not political terms. A woman could achieve economic liberty as long as the laws of the market were tempered in waged work by judicious legislation and responsible trade unionism and in the home by state pensions and co-operative households. But the sex-relation could not be compressed into economic relations. Fabian women ducked the question of what sort of relations should exist between men and women by urging women wage earners to become more like men and the state to take responsibility for maintaining children. The search for an identity independent of men and children and self-fulfillment was hard to reconcile with the collective socialist will.

It is difficult to evaluate the degree to which Fabian women enabled emancipation to occur. Certainly, their critique of women as wage earner raised awareness of the low-skill, low-wage problem and their collectivist ideas led to the question of state support for women and their children. It is, however, difficult to see what direct impact Fabian women had on political emancipation in the years before 1914 and the relationship between them and women’s suffrage movements is far from clear. Fabian women may have been aware of the problem but they did not essentially provide a solution that address the sex-question.

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[1] Clementina Black Married Women’s Work Being the Report of an Enquiry undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council, 1915 is a report on rural work and charwomen. Maud Pember Reeves Round About a Pound a Week, 1913, Virago, 1979 is a survey carried out by Fabian Society’s Women’s Group of families living on an income of 18-26 shillings a week in Lambeth, south London are two examples of the research the Fabians did. In addition, Beatrice Webb examined women’s low pay; Barbara Hutchin uncovered the different economic needs of women at different phases of their lives; Barbara Drake studied women and trade unionism; and Alice Clark examined working class women in the seventeenth century. They still form a vital part of feminist thought.

Women's Suffrage: A Fabian perspective

The 1870s and 1880s saw the founding of several socialist groups. They sought a ‘new life’ based on the regeneration of self and the repudiation of the waste and excess of capitalism. The Fabian Society, which sought a political route, was formed in London in 1884[1]. It grew from the frustration of young idealists with Christian belief and the fading ethos of liberal individualism. The inner life was less important to Fabians than the poverty and squalor in which the mass of the population lived.

Who were the Fabians and what did they believe?

In 1884, Fabian socialism was rudimentary. It meant a belief in collectivism (intervention by the state by passing laws) to deal with the central social problem of poverty. Fabians saw the gap in living standards between rich and poor as the social evil of the late nineteenth century. Both George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb have identified the awakening ‘consciousness of sin’ among the privileged and propertied classes, anxious to hold on to their political and economic power and afraid of the newly enfranchised working classes[2]. People of all classes spoke of their ‘conversion’ and the socialism of the 1880s and 1890s had something of the enthusiasm of a religious revival. Fabian socialism was always intellectual. It took the form of a critical dialogue with others. It never had a popular base and, with the occasional exception, never sought one.

The early Fabians were writers, teachers, journalists and civil servants. Mostly young, in their early twenties, several were impoverished. They came from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. The emergence of Fabian socialism took place against a background of riots of the unemployed and the strikes of the match girls in 1888, dockers and other unskilled workers in London in 1889 and 1890. It was shaped then and during the equally turbulent years of Irish nationalism, women’s suffrage and syndicalism before the First World War (1906-14), years when the mental life of the nation changed. Some Fabians took a direct part in these struggles alongside trade unionism and socialist militants. But this experience of working class militancy filled them with unease.

Fabians had studied Marx but rejected his theory of change through class struggle. According to Fabians, the motors of history were the collectivist spirit and the gradual growth of the state.  Socialism they conceded might be inevitable but it would not come from the working classes. The poor lacked both the education and the leisure to think and to organise. The Fabian ideology was therefore an elitist one.  In many respects, Fabian socialism owed more to the ideas of John Stuart Mill than to the revolutionary creeds of Marx and Engels. Mill’s reservations about the benefits of mass democracy, the fear that the desires of civilised minorities would be swept aside by the uncultivated majority, was at the heart of much Fabian thought. Socialism was as necessary as political democracy was unavoidable. However, the Fabians argued it must be socialism grounded in the study of facts not the encouragement of feelings (except collectivist ones).

Socialist aspirations were unsettling because emotive. They were for the unconverted. The characteristics of Fabian socialism identified by Beatrice Webb were[3] “they translated economics and collectivism into the language of prosaic vestrymen and town councillors. They dealt largely in statistics; they talked about amending factory acts and municipalising (bringing services under the control of local municipal or urban authorities) gas and water supplies. Above all, they were productive in collecting facts and developing ideas and practical projects for reform.... Their summary of Socialism, which was found in the ensuing decade to have a strong appeal, was put in the following terms. It comprised, they said, essentially collectivist ownership wherever practicable; collective regulation everywhere else; collective provision according to need for the impotent and sufferers; and collective taxation in proportion to wealth, especially surplus wealth.”

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[1] On the development of the Fabian Society, see A.M. MacBriar Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884-1918, Cambridge, 1962 and Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie The First Fabians, London, 1979. Carole Seymour-Jones Beatrice Webb. Woman of Conflict, Pandora, 1992 is the most accessible biography. Royden J. Harrison The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb 1858-1905: The Formative Years, Palgrave, 2000 should now be regarded as the definitive study on the key players. On the role of socialist women more generally, see June Hannam and Karen Hunt Socialist Women, Routledge, 2001.

[2] Primary materials on growing Fabian awareness can be found in Sally Alexander (ed.) Women’s Fabian Tracts, London, 1989, introduction reprinted in Sally Alexander On Becoming a Woman and other essays, Virago, 1994, pages 159-170. Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (eds.) The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, Virago, 1986, Norman Mackenzie (ed.) The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, three volumes, Weidenfeld, 1978, Beatrice Webb My Apprenticeship, Longman, 1926 and Our Partnership, Longman, 1948 are essential on the Webbs.

[3] Beatrice Webb Our Partnership, London, 1948, page 107.

Women's History: a perspective

The reign of Queen Victoria is one of the great ironies of the historiography of the nineteenth century. Britain and her Empire were ruled by a woman and yet historians have, until recently, kept the lives of ordinary women 'hidden from history'. Yet the British suffragettes were the exception. The activities of some of the movement's leading figures, particularly the Pankhurst family, were well publicised at the time and have since achieved almost mythic standing. This too is ironic for had not the war intervened in 1914 historians may today be writing of the suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union as an heroic failure. It can be argued that the dominance accorded to the suffragettes, itself a consequence of the interpretative discourse established by Sylvia Pankhurst and George Dangerfield in the 1930s, has received a disproportionate amount of historians' attention and has, as a result, slanted the modern view of the whole women's movement. Politically active women were not typical of the female experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 'publicness' and articulateness of suffragettes made them exceptional beings among their sex. Neither was politics central to the processes of social change affecting women. Politics was remote from the lived experience of most ordinary women.

It is important to begin by asking the question 'Why should we study women's history?' Although there is today recognition that there is a history of women we cannot take the question for granted. Women's history has made significant strides in the last two decades but it is still as relevant today as it was when first posed. History is a public and politicised discourse, a reflection of prevailing social and cultural attitudes. The male view of history -- history about men and men's activities in a public world of diplomacy, war and politics -- was long viewed as history. As historians have been primarily male this is not surprising with the result that the history of men was seen as universal history, the history of all humanity. Even socialist and labour historians who challenged the class bias of history and focused on the experiences and struggles of the working class omitted women from their discussion. Edward Thompson's attempt in his The Making of the English Working Class to rescue the working class from 'the enormous descension of posterity' has been criticised for its maleness. His approach is not unusual. Peter Clarke's Lancashire and the New Liberalism suggests the importance of the women's suffrage issue to the fate of British Liberalism and David Morgan's study Suffragists and Liberals supports this view. But women suffragists make only brief appearances in Morgans's book and are almost invisible in Clarke's. They remain unseen in Ross McKibbin's The Evolution of the Labour Party, a major study on the emergence of the party before 1914.

Part of the reason for this was the nature of the women's movement itself. The first phase, though not exclusively middle class or bourgeois in character, focused on improving the legal, educational and political status of women. It was essentially conservative in character, a search for the same opportunities as middle class men. It did not, in general terms, challenge the consciousness of women as women. It was concerned with women in a man's world addressing inequalities rather than male oppression. Fabian women recognised that fundamental change in the status of women would only come if the male-dominated economic system was challenged. This was a far more difficult process that campaigning for the vote or for admission to higher education. Arguably the first phase of the women's movement hit essential, but nonetheless 'soft', targets, areas that could not stand long against charges of illogicality and unfairness. This first wave of the movement produced some important scholarly works: Alice Clarke's Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century in 1919 and Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution in 1930 for example. These books, and others produced at this time, were not only not followed up by a spate of other studies, but were themselves soon ignored and forgotten. Only in the second phase of the movement did a renewed interest and curiosity about women's history emerge.

The dawning of the second wave of the women's movement, in the late 1960s and 1970s, raised the consciousness that women had been left out of the historical record. For the first time women seriously challenged the status quo and began to look to their past to throw light on their present. The critical questions historians asks were 'Why is it like this now?' and 'Has it always been like this?' There was an increasing recognition that to know the past was to understand the present. Women, it was argued, needed to look backwards to seek the origins and development of the wrongs, oppressions and inequalities which they suffered today^[1]. This process, though necessary in helping modern woman define her individual and social consciousness, can be seen as 'Whiggish' in nature. The Whig interpretation of history, effectively debunked by Herbert Butterfield in the 1930s, suggests that historians need to look to the past to explain the present. There is a strong case for this approach to women's history since it enables challenges to be made to received 'truths'. A good example of this is the notion that 'a woman's place is in the home'. Historians have long led people to believe that this is an age-old axiom, based on a long tradition of men going out to work and women staying at home. Women's history shows how unhistorical this notion is. The domestic ideology was created in the early nineteenth century when middle class women were pushed into the private sphere of the home and men went out into the public world.

The contribution of the women's movement to historiography falls into the following areas.  First, it has pointed to the diversity rather than the sameness of women's experiences in the past. This shattered the notion that women's history is not worth bothering about because the lives of women have somehow always been the same. Part of the reason for this perspective of the history of women has occurred because their role was seen as monotonous and uniform because of its close identification with domestic chores and with childcare. The housewife's fight against dirt and dust, it was suggested, did not change much between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution and when change eventually occurred it was the consequence of benevolent male technology in the form of vacuum cleaners and dishwashers. Childcare was also regarded as remaining basically the same and unaffected by outside factors. This whole view needed drastic reappraisal for a variety of reasons.  Secondly, Women's history is not exclusively domestic any more than men's history is exclusively political.  The private sphere cannot be divorced from the public. The study of the private sphere has implications for the study of the public world. A seemingly small pebble causes ripples across the whole pool.  Finally, women cannot just be tacked on to the mainstream of history. The whole shape of what we mean by history is radically changed by the inclusion of women and the new questions which have to be asked lead to a fundamental review of many of the basic assumptions of men's history. Feminist analysis of changing definitions of femininity over time show that masculinity cannot be assumed to be constant.

Like all forms of history, women's history can fall into polemic and propaganda. In many respects this can be explained by the ways in which women's history developed. Its place was not in mainstream academic institutions but at the margins of scholarship where it often took the form of an alternative history. Sheila Rowbotham's Hidden from History, first published in 1973, was the first book to make women's history available to a wide audience. The formation of the Virago Press was also an important development concentrating as it still does on feminist work including history. Throughout the 1980s women's history and other branches of women's studies enjoyed unparalleled growth. Yet it is important not to regard women's history as having firm footings within academia. Women's history was still not part of the mainstream, according to Deidre Beddoe. Its growth in higher education has depended on women staff, often appointed to teach other subjects but who have developed courses because of their personal enthusiasm. A survey in 1991 showed that women made up only 17 per cent of lecturers in history, 12.7 per cent of senior lecturers, 6.6 per cent of readers and there were only three women professors out of 134.

The emergence of women's history is intertwined with the emergence of the category of 'women' as a political identity and this has been accompanied by an analysis that attributed women's oppression and their lack of historical visibility to male bias. Unequal power relations within the discipline made charges of ideology dangerous to those who sought professional status and disciplinary legitimacy: if women historians wanted to be successful they had to play by the rules of male historians. It led to criticism from male historians that women distorted evidence to support modern feminist ideology^[2]. Women's history was seen by some as subverted the true canon of history and as have political motivations that had little to do with serious historical study.

So where does women's history fit into history? Certainly it is part of the reaction of some historians to the traditional view of history, what may be called Rankean history after the great German historian Leopold von Ranke [1795-1886]^[3]. This traditional view of history can be summed up in seven points:

1. History is essentially concerned with politics or, in the context of women's history, the public sphere. The Victorian professor Sir John Seeley said that "History is past politics: politics is present history". History concerned the state; it was national and international rather than local [that was the domain of antiquarians]. Other areas of history, though not altogether excluded by this traditional paradigm, were marginalised in the sense of being considered peripheral to the interests of 'real' historians.

2. Traditional historians think of history as essentially a narrative of events while the new history is more concerned with the analysis of structures. The feminist writings of the first stage of the women's movement tended to by ignored because they focused on structures not events.

3. Traditional history offers a view from above concentrating on the great deeds of great men [and the occasional woman]. The rest of humanity was accorded a minor role in the drama of the past.

4. History should be based on documents. Ranke's great achievement was to expose the limitations of narrative sources and he stressed the need to base written history on official sources, emanating from governments and preserved in archives. The result of this was that other types of evidence were neglected.

5. History is objective. The historian's task is to give the reader the facts, or as Ranke put it in a much-quoted phrase, to tell "how it actually happened". Lord Acton, the general editor of the first Cambridge Modern History, believed that his readers should be unable to tell where one contributor put down his pen and another took it up. This was unrealistic when Acton wrote. However hard we try to avoid the prejudices associated with race, creed, class or gender, we cannot avoid looking at the past from a particular point of view. We have moved from the ideal of the Voice of History [singular] to that of heteroglossia [varied and opposing voices].

6. Rankean history was the territory of professionals who were almost exclusively male.

Women's history challenged each of these characteristics of the traditional approach to the past and its history. It is part of the expansion of the historian's universe and the increasing dialogue with other disciplines. It is part of the fragmentation of history. This creates problems of synthesis and it has certainly proved difficult to integrate women's history into any attempt at rewriting the universal history of the past. We have moved a long way from G.M.Trevelyan's definition of history as being "about chaps” but we still have a considerable way to go before we are able to produce a history of people.

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[1] The current state of women's history and the ideological issues raised by it are best dealt with in Bryan D. Palmer Descent into Discourse. The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History, University of Toronto, 1990, pp. 145-186 and Joan Scott ‘Women's History’, in Peter Burke (ed.) New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Polity, 1992, pp. 42-66.

[2] As if the meaning of evidence was uncontested and presented no problems about the position, point of view and interpretations of historians.

[3] Ranke was less confined by this than his followers were: just as Marx was not a Marxist so Ranke was not a Rankean!

The Women's Suffrage Movement 1865-1903: The 1890s decline or not? Some sources

Source 1

Brian Harrison ‘Women’s Suffrage at Westminster 1866-1928’, in M. Bentley and John Stevenson (eds.) High and Low Politics in Modern Britain, Oxford, 1983, pages 87, 92-93

The growth-pattern of feminist organisations shows that, after initial success between 1866 and 1871, a long period of decline sets in; this is slow at first, but rapid after the major setback of Gladstone’s Reform Bill [1884]. Revival begins about 1900 and peaks between 1910 and 1913.... Distance from Westminster entailed distance from the political parties, which originated and were directed from there. Contempt for party loyalties was widespread among later Victorian reforming movements, but historical parallels were misleading. In early Victorian conditions, the campaigns against slavery and the Corn Laws might prevail over party, but after the 1860s -- when political parties adapted themselves to cater for an expanded electorate -- this was diminishingly possible. Yet suffragists continued to assume that it was the reforming movement, not the political party, which embodied democratic principles. A non-party outlook was continuously peddled in the Women’ Suffrage Journal of the 1870s and 1880s and remained with Mrs Fawcett to the end.... Their non-party outlook led suffragists naturally on to the private member’s bill as a political device and to the pledging of MPs from all parties to support it. Yet this was less appropriate in a House of Commons whose mounting pressure of business made it necessary to entrust governments with control over its timetable...By the 1880s the shrewder suffragists perceived the drawback of this non-party approach, yet suffragists remained wedded to it.

Source 2

David Rubinstein A Different World for Women. The Life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Harvester, 1991, pages 131, 137

In the mid-1880s, the outlook for women’s suffrage was bleak. It became even dimmer as the years passed, partly because of quarrels within the ranks of suffragists, but chiefly as the nature and extent of male opposition became clearer.... Nevertheless the suffrage movement between 1884 and the first years of the new century was full of incident and deserves a better press than it has received at the hands of those primarily interested in an earlier or later period.... The years between 1884 and 1905 formed a period when suffragists kept their flag flying under difficult conditions. The movement remained active, its supporters (though not its income) buoyant and its structure flexible. Its gradual reunification [in 1897] and the second reading triumph of the Begg bill [also 1897] showed that it remained a force to be reckoned with, though not one to which ambitious politicians devoted much attention. It had, however, reached the limit of what could be achieved by meetings, petitions and private members’ bills. New forms of activity were required and were to be introduced by both the new militant suffragists and the moderates...

Source 3

Christine Bolt The Women’s Movement, Harvester, 1993, pages 184-5.

.... That the suffrage movement enjoyed increased support in the 1890s, as indicated by the good showing of the two suffrage bills; the size of the petition for enfranchisement produced in 1896; and the growing interests of working-class women, notably in the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Moreover, women’s capacity in political affairs, first shown modestly, in family or community activities, but now formally demonstrated by the efforts of the Women’s Liberal Federation and the Primrose League during the three general elections held between 1892 and 1900, may have impressed the general public. Thought it brought them no direct political reward, it was certainly put to good use once the suffrage campaign moved up a gear from the end of the century. Women’s involvement in local government also continued to provide them with a political education and confidence-boosting experience...At this level of politics, the major gain of the 1890s was the 1894 Local Government Act, pressed for by women’s groups.... advances in local government had come increasingly to be regarded as a means of furthering the campaign for the parliamentary vote.

Source 4

Martin Pugh Votes for Women in Britain 1867-1928, The Historical Association, 1994, pages 19-20

Traditionally, perceptions have been dominated by the Pankhursts. Their view -- essentially propagandist it should be remembered -- held that militancy became a necessity in the early 1900s because decades of campaigning by the non-militants had been a failure...There are some grounds for believing that organised suffragism went into decline. Brian Harrison has shown that the income of the various groups dwindled from the late 1880s and remained low during the 1890s. Some suffragists conceded that an important opportunity had been lost in 1884 when Gladstone pushed the Third Reform Act through parliament.... This took much of the momentum out of the general issue of reform for several decades and left women somewhat isolated.... While this underlines the difficulties faced by the cause, however, it does not prove that the suffragists were not making progress. As so often, much depends upon the criteria one uses. In several ways the 1890s proved to be a period of very advantageous change for women, though some of the developments had an indirect effect and are not easy to measure...

Source 5

Jane Lewis (ed.) Before the Vote was Won. Arguments for and against Women’s Suffrage 1864-1896, Routledge, 1987, pages 7-10

The early suffragists unhesitatingly believed that middle class women needed the vote to give greater scope to their talents and working class women needed its protection. Thus they argued that the vote would enable middle class women both to broaden the range of occupations open to them and allow them to help frame laws that affected the poor, whom it was their bounden duty to visit and care for.... Inevitably both political parties feared that women would vote for their opponents if enfranchised, although the prevalence of the view that women would prove a conservative force made some Conservative MPs look more favourably on their cause for a brief period before the 1884 Reform Act. However, after 1884, the Conservative Party enjoyed two decades of almost unbroken rule and had little reason to consider the enfranchisement of women as a counter-weight to the votes of working class men. Broadly speaking, while the leaders of the Conservative Party expressed some sympathy with the feminist cause and the rank and file were implacably opposed, the reverse was true of the Liberal Party.... It was very difficult for feminists to attack the concept of separate spheres supported as it was by Victorian science, and impossible for them to question the importance attached to the traditional role of wife and mother. They usually contented themselves with acknowledging that there were natural differences between men and women, but in denying that this rendered women necessarily inferior...Millicent Fawcett argued strongly that women needed a greater say in the nation’s affairs as mothers.... But while MPs were prepared to acknowledge that women could play a role locally, for example, as Poor Law guardians inspecting the conditions of children in workhouses, they denied their capacity to judge matters concerning diplomacy or empire. Women’s role in local government could be viewed as an extension of their domestic role, but affairs of state were firmly located on the other side of the private/public divide. Thus men defended their public space in the polling booth and in the House of Commons.... the suffragists’ lobbying tactics suffered a severe defeat when the 1884 Franchise Reform Act failed to include women and by the 1890s the movement was running out of steam and was facing a much better organised opposition, which included a well-publicised group of women ‘antis’, organised by Mrs Humphrey Ward, a popular novelist. The part played by the militant suffragettes in achieving the vote is a source of historical controversy, but, notwithstanding the importance of its contribution, there is no doubt but that the early campaigners badly needed new impetus by the turn of the century.

Source 6

Ray Strachey The Cause. A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain, Virago, 1988, first published 1928, pages 283-4

During these years between the passing of the Reform Bill and the close of the century, it became apparent, bit by bit, that the effort to win the suffrage through the Liberal Party alone was unavailing.... The fear that women would vote Conservative, which had prevailed in 1870, held sway in 1880 and 1890, and an absolute deadlock ensued.... In addition to this curious and unfortunate state of affairs, the agitation had begun to grow stale by the middle of the nineties. Its supporters, indeed, were as keen and as hard working as ever....but the enthusiasm of supporters was not enough. The agitation had been going on so long that the Press and the public were tired of hearing of it. Nothing was happening in Parliament, or anywhere else, to give the subject a news value, and the arguments were, of necessity, the same as they always had been.... winning the vote seemed in the early nineties to be farther away than ever before in the history of the agitation.

The Women's Suffrage Movement 1865-1903: 4 1885-1903 failure?

Between the creation of the first women’s suffrage committee in 1866 and the formation of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, the suffragists followed a ‘constitutional’ path to reform (i.e., they acted within the commonly accepted boundaries of the law and tried to persuade parliament to agree to its demands). They believed that, if they were to be taken seriously, they had to proceed with caution. From the Pankhurst point of view, the period from the mid-1880s through to 1903 was one of failure and this perspective has coloured later accounts.

Brian Harrison[1] argues that the Reform Act 1867 and the Secret Ballot Act 1872 together set back ‘The Cause’ by relegating further electoral reform to a later date. After the initial successes of the years 1866-71, however, Harrison sees the remainder of the century as one of decline. This view is related to broader developments that occurred. The Liberal radicalism of the 1860s and 1870s gave way to a phase of Conservative dominance (1886-1905). Concern over imperial expansion and foreign threats pushed all kinds of radical causes down the political agenda. Few real gains were made in either ‘phase’. However, private members’ bills or resolutions were frequently tabled. Only in 1880 and 1898 was the House of Commons spared discussion of the women’s suffrage issue. The contemporary National Central Society for Women’s Suffrage’s own assessment of the phases of the movement seems, in this light, to be more accurate. They called 1867-72 a time of ‘general reconnoitring’, 1872-86 ‘concentrated effort’ and the period from 1886 on as one of ‘diffused activity’. What are the grounds for believing that organised suffragism went into decline?Brian Harrison shows that the income of the various suffragist groups declined rapidly in the late 1880s and remained low throughout the 1890s.  Some suffragists conceded that an important opportunity had been missed in 1884 when Gladstone pushed the Third Reform Act through parliament. He issued a strong warning to Liberal MPs against voting a women’s clause into the bill because this would encourage the Lords to reject it. The resulting enfranchising of a majority of men, many of whom were quite poor and uneducated, took the momentum out of the general issue of reform for several decades and left women rather isolated.  Soon after this, in 1886, came the great split over Irish Home Rule. This directly affected some suffragists such as Millicent Fawcett who became a Liberal Unionist. This gave an added edge to the split of the suffragist movement in 1888 over political affiliations.

The matter was, to some extent, a presentational one. At the level of achieving the parliamentary franchise the suffragists achieved nothing practical in the 1890s but this neglects the other ways in which women began to enter the political arena not merely as protectors but as active participants[2]. In several ways the 1890s proved to be a period of very advantageous changes for women, though some of these developments had indirect effects and are not easy to measure.  The introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 and the reduction of corrupt electoral spending in 1883 led in elections becoming affairs that are more orderly. This made political participation more conducive to ladies within the Liberal Federation and through the Conservative Primrose League.  Women contributed directly to this process after 1869 when parliament granted a local government vote to female ratepayers, who subsequently made up about 17.5 per cent of the local electorate. The right to vote also carried the right to stand for election to school boards, poor law boards, and after 1894, rural district and urban district councils. .

It is also important to take note of the votes cast in parliamentary divisions on women’s bills. Rubinstein has established that the suffrage movement enjoyed increased support in the 1890s: the good showing of the two suffrage Bills in 1892 and 1897; the size of the petition for enfranchisement in 1896; and the growing interest of working class women, notably in the Women’s Co-operative Guild. A significant feature of this was the shift by Conservative MPs who were no doubt sensitive to the help they were getting from women in favour of women’s suffrage. Between 1867 and 1884, a majority of Conservatives who voted had opposed women’s suffrage. Between 1884 and 1908 a majority of those voting came out in support for, at least limited suffrage. Taking the Commons as a whole there was a definite swing in favour of giving some women the vote. It must be said that many of the MPs who voted were at best lukewarm supporters. They did not expect the bills to become law because of the limited amount of parliamentary time allocated to them and nor did they regard the suffrage as a priority for the parties. A suffragist majority in the Commons had already been achieved by 1903 under the steady influence of a non-militant campaign and the demonstration women had given of their political skills.

During the 1890s, no one could have foreseen that Britain was destined to become the storm centre of the suffrage movement. Neither of the two major parties had changed their position on women’s suffrage and suffragists found themselves favoured by kind words from their political friends but received no useful assistance. What was worse was that they saw continuing defeat. Even if more MPs voted in favour of the 1892 and 1897 Bills, the suffragists still lost. The suffragist leaders tried to strike a proper balance between giving national direction and encouraging local effort. They tried to sustain the enthusiasm, of the often disappointed, stir up the apathetic, and prevent frustration from venting itself in disastrous schisms. They enjoyed mixed success across all fronts. It is a mistake to see the 1890s as one of decline.

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[1] Brian Harrison ‘Women’s Suffrage at Westminster 1866-1928’, in M. Bentley and J. Stevenson (eds.) High and Low Politics in Modern Britain, Oxford, 1983 sees the 1890s as one of decline.

[2] David Rubinstein Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s, Brighton, 1986 takes a more positive view of their achievements.

The Women's Suffrage Movement 1865-1903: 3 From 1885 to 1903

The Liberal Party was split in 1885-6. This took place after Gladstone’s ‘conversion’ to Irish Home Rule[1]. A group of Liberals – the so-called ‘Liberal Unionists’ – left the party and sat as an independent group in the House of Commons. This split also produced divisions within the suffrage movement.  While most Liberal women supported Gladstone, others such as Millicent Fawcett opposed Home Rule and became Liberal Unionists. These divisions were intensified in 1888 when a group of Liberal women on the central committee of the NSWS attempted to change the way in which the organisation was structured. Until 1888, the NSWS had followed a strictly non-party policy. In 1888, however, it was proposed that: the NSWS executive committee should have the power to make decisions that were binding on local societies; and, the number of delegates that societies affiliated to the NSWS could send to the central committee should be determined by the number of members in the local society. However, it was the third proposal that any society including women’s suffrage as one of its aims should be able to affiliate to the NSWS that proved the most controversial. This proposal would end the non-party basis of the organisation and because of this Millicent Fawcett and Lydia Becker opposed it. They argued that there were only eight independent suffrage societies, but between two and three hundred women’s political organisations. If a significant number of these were to join the central committee of the NSWS, the provincial societies would be outnumbered. They also argued that as the Primrose League was prohibited from outside affiliation, the organisations joining the NSWS would be Liberal or Liberal Unionist. This would effectively end the non-party stance and result in Liberal domination of the movement.

The older generation of feminists, irrespective of their political views, was hostile to this suggestion and formed a breakaway organisation, the Great College Street Society (officially the Central Committee of the NSWS). Liberals like Fawcett and Biggs sided with Conservatives Cobbe and Boucherett but they represented a minority view. The majority became the Parliament Street Society (officially the Central National Society for Women’s Suffrage) that accepted the new rules. The Parliament Street Society attracted the bulk of existing members and became the main body. The split in 1888 was not just over new rules, but also over whether the organisation should support bills that excluded married women from voting. While the Great College Street Society was prepared to accept such legislation, the Parliament Street Society remained divided in the issue.  The Parliament Street Society’s stance on this issue led to a further split in 1889. In July 1889, a third group was set up: the Women’s Franchise League (WFL)[2]. The WFL argued that, because the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 gave married women ownership of their property, they should be included in any legislation giving women the vote. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy[3] was one of the founders of the Women’s Franchise League in 1889. She was replaced by Ursula Bright and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1892 founding the Women’s Emancipation Union (WEU). This group campaigned to improve the position of married women and, in particular, launched a campaign against rape within marriage. Elmy had been a prominent figure in both the married women’s property and Contagious Diseases Act agitation and had been involved in suffrage campaigning since 1866[4]. Her radicalism had not made her popular among the more conservative elements within feminism.

The splintering of the movement in the late 1880s did not increase the suffragists’ chances of success. However, these divisions should not be exaggerated. This view is confirmed by cooperation between the two main groups. This occurred in the build-up to the 1894 Local Government Act. The 1894 Act was a significant advance for married women and it removed a source of division between suffrage societies. The way was now clear for suffragists to work together for a measure on which all societies could now agree – equal voting rights for women, whether single or married.  The question of women’s suffrage languished as a parliamentary issue after 1885, compared to the interest shown in the Commons in the 1870s and early 1880s. Although women’s suffrage bills were introduced on nine occasions in the Commons, and twice in the Lords, from 1885 to 1897, few of these measures made any parliamentary progress, and all of them failed. There was no motion for women’s suffrage in the Commons between 1898 and 1903 though resolutions were tabled in 1899, 1900 and 1900 but were not taken for debate.

After 1894, suffragists from all groups began to gather a petition in support of the vote. To coordinate this, a special committee was set up that included representatives from the Parliament Street Society, the Great College Street Society, the Primrose League, the Women’s Liberal Unionist Federation and the Women’s Franchise League. A conference of all women’s suffrage societies was then called in Birmingham in 1896. The organisation set up after the conference was similar to that which had existed before 1888 with a more systematic effort to cover all parts of the country largely because of its members’ involvement with local political party organisations. Each society was to cover a specific area. Paid organisers were to operate in small towns and villages without sufficient voluntary members, but larger towns and cities would be worked through large meetings. Speakers at the Birmingham Conference argued that the ‘political difficulty’ within the movement should not divide it since women’s suffrage was a non-party issue. Political associations were to remain affiliated to the movement but were not to be part of its regional organisation.

The petition, containing over 250,000 signatures was presented to Parliament in 1897. It was presented in support of the Women’s Suffrage Bill that was introduced by Ferdinand Faithfull Begg, a Conservative MP for a Glasgow seat. This Bill passed its second reading with a majority of 71; the first bill to do so since 1870 though, like other private members’ bills did not become law. This success was the catalyst for the formation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)[5]. The two London societies became one central society with eighteen provincial ones and adopted a regular democratic constitution. Between 1897 and 1903, the NUWSS coordinated the campaign for women’s suffrage and it remained the focus of the constitutionalist approach after 1903. Millicent Fawcett continued to promote the non-party approach and she urged women in all parties to work for MPs or candidates who supported women’s suffrage and to refuse to work for those who did not (a strategy she had originally devised in 1892). Because of the formation of the NUWSS, many new local and regional societies were formed. There were continuities, especially in personnel between the nineteenth century movement and the twentieth century constitutional suffrage movement but the NUWSS owed much to the organisational structures of the major political parties.

The non-militant suffragists consistently relied on the methods of Victorian pressure groups: they sent platform speakers into the provinces; extended their network of branches; printed quantities of pamphlets; organised petitions and cultivated sympathetic MPs. The result of this was reliance upon backbench MPs being prepared to sponsor franchise bills and, as a result, women’s suffrage debates became virtually an annual feature during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. This approach was much criticised by Edwardian suffragettes who argued that on such major topics as the franchise nothing less than a government bill stood any chance of passing. This emphasis on Parliament agreeing to legislation created several problems for the suffragists.  One problem involved the detail of their bill. Existing legislation left many men without the vote even after 1884 when the householder and lodger franchise was extended to the counties. About four in ten men failed to get on to the registers. Because of this, suffragists regarded it as unrealistic to attempt to enfranchise all women at once. Parliament would inevitably go for a step-by-step approach as it had done with men. A modest measure could be seen as an experiment that would not alarm male politicians. This rationale was accepted not only by constitutional suffragists but also by the Edwardian militants.

This raised the troublesome question: which women should get the vote? Most of the legislation introduced before 1914 was based on the equal-with-men formula in the hope that it would be uncontentious. In practice, this meant giving the vote to women who were householders or occupiers of property on which they paid rates. This effectively excluded married women whose right to vote in municipal elections was tested and rejected in Regina v Harrald in 1872. Most bills would therefore have enfranchised little more than a million spinsters and widows. This was a deeply flawed strategy making the suffragists appear much less democratic than they were in practice. What is more important, it ran up against politicians’ prejudice in favour of married women. Single women were suspected of having radical aims and objectives. This argument dogged the whole debate up to 1914 and when women finally did get the vote in 1918, married women were included. Arguably, the suffragists would probably have done better to make common cause with all unenfranchised men and women from the start and this might have extended their appeal.

The suffragist movement deliberately took a non-party approach. This seemed a sensible tactic because until 1912 no party adopted a policy on women’s suffrage. It also suited those feminists who were disenchanted with party politics in general. Despite this party politics proved to be a divisive force within the movement. The 1888 split developed when some branches of the new Women’s Liberal Federation tried to affiliate to the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Since the Liberal women suffragists were, at that stage, more numerous than their Conservative counterparts, affiliation was though by some to detract from the movement’s claim to non-party status. As a result, the suffragist organisation split in two and by 1893 some 63 Women’s Liberal Association branches had affiliated to the CCNSWS. This caused internal feuding and effectively diverted some of the energy of the suffragists away from their main cause.

The suffragist movement was not closer to achieving the vote in 1903 than it had been in 1885. Among the obstacles to progress was the argument that the main legal injustices towards women were now being corrected by parliamentary action, and the persistent view that women’s attributes did not include adequate powers of judgement for giving the vote. A further obstacle was the division of opinion within the movement as to whether the vote should be claimed by all adult women or only by single women. Lydia Becker (who died in 1890) and Millicent Fawcett held that the vote should only be claimed by single women. However, in 1889 the avant-garde Women’s Franchise League was formed to urge that all women, married as well as single, should be enfranchised. Finally, the situation in Parliament held out little hope for women’s suffrage as both major parties were divided on the subject. In the 1890s, there is some evidence suggesting signs of hope, on a minor scale, from both political parties. The Liberal ministry (1892-95) allowed women to become members of parish, rural district and urban district councils in 1894. However, allowing women to be elected members of borough and county councils did not occur until 1907, after six previous bills on the subject had failed since 1899. Concerning women voting in parliamentary elections, Liberal support seemed to have weakened in the 1890s while Conservative backing (for restricted women’s suffrage) seemed to be growing. The annual conferences of the Nation Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations carried several resolutions for limited women’s suffrage in the late 1880s and early 1890s.  The suffrage movement before 1903, and to a certain extent after it, was the concern of women from secure backgrounds who were fighting for a right that centrally defined respectability and responsibility. This lack of radicalism is evidence of the pervasive liberalism of the nineteenth century women’s movement. The consensus that feminist organisations should avoid party affiliations was an important principle. It did not make them apolitical but did distance them from partisan party politics. Yet, on issues such as suffrage or other measures that involved changing the law, women had no choice but to seek redress through the obvious political routes and through Parliament.

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[1] Gladstone had been trying to resolve the problem of how Ireland should be governed since 1868. His decision to move towards Home Rule (what we would today call devolution) was unpopular with the Protestant minority in the north of the country.

[2] Sandra Stanley Holton ‘Now you see it, now you don’t: the Women’s Franchise League and its place in contending narratives of the women’s suffrage movement’ in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds.) The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New feminist perspectives, Manchester, 1998, pages 15-36.

[3] Sandra Stanley Holton Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Routledge, 1996, pages 7-26 provides a useful introduction to Elizabeth Wolstenholme and the early suffrage movement.

[4] She had collected signatures for the 1866 petition and had been a founder member of the Manchester Suffrage Committee.

[5] Lesley Parker Hume The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 1897-1914, New York, 1982 is the standard work on this subject though some recent research has extended the scope of her study.

The Women's Suffrage Movement 1865-1903: 2 The 1870s and the Third Reform Act

It was in the 1870s that the women’s suffrage movement developed into a national movement. Following the defeat of the 1870 bill, the Manchester and London committees attempted to build wider support while, at the same time, lobbying MPs. They sent platform speakers into the provinces, extended their network of branches, printed quantities of pamphlets, organised petitions and cultivated sympathetic MPs. Their focus was on parliamentary lobbying, the idea being to persuade MPs to introduce private members’ bills in support of women’s suffrage. Such bills were introduced every year during the 1870s, except for 1875. Each failed on the second reading and a resolution in favour of women’s suffrage, introduced by Leonard Courtney (a radical MP) met with defeat. However, historians rightly suggest that reliance of private members’ bills was unlikely to meet with success but that this, combined with petitioning and lobbying made up the bulk of the activity of the early suffragists.  In 1872, the local groups joined into a single organisation: the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS). This was strictly a non-party organisation and it encouraged MPs of all parties to support women’s suffrage. Its Central Committee was based in London. Between 1872 and 1888, the Central Committee and the Manchester Society organised most of the parliamentary business of the movement but the local societies remained free to act as they pleased. Cooperation was achieved by the existence of a single clearly defined aim for the movement and the limitations placed on the type of tactics available to pursue this aim.

As with the London Committee in June 1867, the NSWS suffered splits in the 1870s. Historians have identified three main causes of these splits. First, the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts divided suffragists. Some worked closely with Josephine Butler, but others argued that the two movements should operate separately. Some women, among them Millicent Fawcett[1], though they favoured the stand taken by those feminists seeking the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, wished nonetheless to distance the suffrage issue, one of ‘respectability’, from the CD Act agitation with its dangerously risqué overtones. Secondly, there was some reluctance in the provinces to accept leadership from London. The London bias did not mean a take-over by London-based feminists but derived only from the need to be close to parliament. Emilie Venturi and Jane Cobden from Manchester and Laura McLaren from Edinburgh were on the central committee. It is also clear that the focus on parliamentary affairs in London never diminished the importance or strength of provincial opinion. Finally, suffragists were divided on whether or not to support legislation that gave single women the vote, but excluded married women. Despite the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, the doctrine of coverture remained in place. Some suffragists argued that, given that this was the case, it was best to campaign for votes for single women, while other argued that all women should receive the vote. In the 1874 general election, Jacob Bright, who had led the group of MPs who supported women’s suffrage, was defeated and replaced by Conservative MP, William Forsyth. When Forsyth argued that, because a Conservative government was in power, suffragists should limit their demand to votes for single women, Lydia Becker reluctantly agreed. This, however, alienated the more radical suffragists.

The dilemma facing suffragists was that women had to rely on Parliament to pass legislation giving women the vote. There was no sign of the government proposing legislation in the 1870s and the suffragist tactic of encouraging private members’ bills was unlikely to succeed. The suffragists needed a government or party-sponsored bill or majority support for an amendment to the general franchise reform bill. It was only in 1880, with the election of a Liberal government that this became a realistic option.  There was a widespread belief among suffragists that the Liberals would support reform. There had been a large majority for further constitutional reform that included votes for women at the Liberal party conference. During the debate in the Commons over the third Reform Bill in 1884, an amendment was included proposing women should have the vote on an equal basis to men (William Woodall’s equal franchise amendment). The amendment was defeated when the Prime Minister, William Gladstone made it clear that he did not support it. There were three main strands to Gladstone’s opposition. First, he was opposed to women’s suffrage in principle though it was not until 1892 that he openly admitted this. Secondly, he was concerned that the bill as a whole would be defeated in the House of Lords if such a controversial clause were included. Thirdly, he feared that, if women were given the vote most would vote Conservative reducing Liberal chances of forming future governments.  Arguably, the suffragists were too optimistic in 1884. They had not made sufficient headway in converting Liberals to their cause for Gladstone to be able to include them in legislation. Despite this, suffragists in 1912 were still claiming that Gladstone had “thrown overboard” the women to make the passage of the reform bill easier in 1884. In reality, Brian Harrison argues, “the women had never even embarked”. Historians agree that failure to achieve the vote in 1884 was a serious setback for the suffragist movement and it led to a period of division within the movement over tactics, principles and leadership and possibly to a period of decline.

The NSWS adopted a strictly non-party line in 1872. It did this on the assumption that support could be built up in both the major parties. Despite this, the Liberals who pioneered the concept of women’s suffrage and the writings of John Stuart Mill, Jacob Bright and Henry and Millicent Fawcett established a firm intellectual basis for the cause. The extension of the vote conformed to progressive Liberal principles and was probably favoured by a majority of the party’s main office holders. In each of the fifteen women’s suffrage votes between 1867 and 1886, Liberals and radicals accounted for more than two-thirds of the votes in favour of legislation. This explains the optimism when the Liberals took power in 1880, though the Liberal leadership was far less sympathetic to the case of women’s suffrage than backbench MPs and party workers. It was not simply a case of ‘anti-feminism’ but a reflection of the range of issues that the party grappled with while in government between 1868 and 1874 and 1880 to 1885. Since women were not defined as a politically important group and had no political power, women’s suffrage was not included in official Liberal Party aims. Once the Liberal Party slit in 1886 over Ireland, there was little chance of it being distracted from that by the women’s issue. On the other hand, the Liberals allowed single women to vote in local government elections in 1869 and to join School Boards after 1870. This allowed them to participate in the public domain and, as a result, encouraged attitudes towards them to change.  The position of the Conservative Party was almost the reverse. At first, in general terms, leading Conservatives tended to be more favourable to the idea that some women should be given the vote than their backbenchers. This changed, to some degree after the third Reform Act was passed. Whereas from 1867 to 1884, a majority of Conservatives opposed women’s suffrage, between 1885 and 1908 a majority of those voting came out in favour. One reason for this was the calculation that women, especially from the middle class would be likely to vote Conservative. However, the Conservative leaders did little to put this into effect when in government. There was a Conservative government in power from 1886 to 1905, except for a brief period of Liberal rule from 1892 to 1895, when in practice, the Conservatives held the balance of power.

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[1] Barbara Caine Victorian Feminists, OUP, 1992, pages 196-238 is the most convenient biographical sketch. David Rubinstein A Different World for Women: The Life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, London, 1991 is the best modern biography, a decidedly revisionist study. Janet Howarth ‘Mrs Henry Fawcett (1847-1929): the widow as a problem in feminist biography’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds.) Votes for Women, Routledge, 2000 pages 84-108 is an interesting and innovative study. Ann Oakley ‘Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Duty and Determination’, in Dale Spender (ed.) Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Women’s Intellectual Traditions, The Women’s Press, 1983, pages 184-202 looks at her ideas.

The Women's Suffrage Movement 1865-1903: 1

The broad chronology of women’s suffrage groups is as follows up to 1903:

Date	Event
1865	'Kensington’ Committee London to gather signatures for petition
1866	Women’s Suffrage Provisional Committee, London
1867	Manchester, London, and Edinburgh committees for Women’s Suffrage
1868	Bristol, Birmingham committees for Women’s Suffrage London National Society for Women’s Suffrage
1872	National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS)
1881	Women granted franchise, Isle of Man
1888	National Central Society Central Committee National for Women’s Suffrage Society for Women’s Suffrage
1889	Women’s Franchise League (WFL)
1892	National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies Women’s Emancipation Union
1897	National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies established (NUWSS)

 

The breakthrough came in 1865 when John Stuart Mill agreed to stand for Parliament on a platform that placed women’s suffrage at the top of his agenda[1]. He made it clear that he supported women’s suffrage and intended to press for it if he was elected. This was the signal for the Langham Place group to spring into action and after Mill’s election in 1865, a Ladies Discussion Group (set up by the Lanham Place group) debated the question, ‘Should women take place in public affairs?, and found that nearly all the fifty women present agreed. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon[2] then suggested that a suffrage society should be set up, but no action was taken because Emily Davies argued that such an organisation would be taken over by ‘extremists’.  The following year, when it became clear that a Reform Bill would be put before Parliament, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon approached Mill and asked him whether he would present a petition in support of female suffrage to Parliament. Mill agreed, but warned that less than a hundred signatures might do more harm than good. Bodichon then formed the first Women’s Suffrage Committee and, within a fortnight had collected 1,500 signatures. Mill presented the petition on 7^th June 1866 and succeeded in getting women’s suffrage on to the parliamentary agenda.

The second Reform Bill was put before Parliament in February 1867. By then, a second suffrage committee had been set up in Manchester. The Manchester Suffrage Committee’s first secretary was Lydia Becker and she communicated closely with the London group. She wrote an article putting the case for women’s suffrage in The Spectator and wrote to Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister. During the debates over the bill, several petitions supporting women’s suffrage were presented to Parliament by sympathetic MPs (including Mill) and on 20^th May, Mill proposed an amendment to substitute ‘person’ for ‘man’ in the clause dealing with property qualifications. This would actually have not enfranchised many women, as married women did not qualify as householders. This amendment was defeated by 196 votes to 73 (an encouragingly large minority for female suffrage on its first parliamentary airing) and the bill, without any recognition of votes for women became law in August 1867.  By the time, the bill became law, the London committee had already split (in June) and this led to its dissolution and reformation. The split was largely ‘political’ and represented the first appearance of an internal problem that was to occur repeatedly in the course of the movement. The split concerned both party allegiance and tactics. Some suffragists were Conservative (notably Emily Davies) while others were Liberal (such as Helen Taylor, John Stuart Mill’s daughter). Emily Davies argued that Conservative support was essential and that cautious tactics should be used so as not to alarm public opinion. Others, such as Helen Taylor disagreed. As a result, the committee was dissolved and Helen Taylor invited those who shared her views to form a new committee, which was called the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage. This committee immediately worked on building links with parallel groups that had emerged in Edinburgh and Manchester. This split had a lasting effect on the movement in that it left an executive that was subject to weak and often absent leadership with many formerly active women channelling their energies elsewhere. Emily Davies, for example turned her attention to higher education. It allowed the more dynamic, though politically less radical, Lydia Becker to play a major organisational role in the early years of the women’s suffrage movement.

The earliest organisations were the regional suffrage committees founded in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh and Manchester in 1867. In 1870, they began publication of the Women’s Suffrage Journal, edited by Lydia Becker, who was the first secretary of the Manchester Society that rapidly became an important focus of activity. The first London committee, like that in Manchester, was of mixed membership, radical men sharing the work with feminist women. The more prominent positions were usually filled by women: the first secretary of the London committee was Louisa Smith, Millicent Fawcett’s elder sister; on her early death in 1867 she was replaced by Caroline Ashurst Biggs who was also from a prominent feminist family. In 1870, Richard Pankhurst drafted the first Women’s Suffrage Bill. It was introduced into the House of Commons as a private member’s bill[3] and passed its first and second readings (with a majority of 33)[4], but was defeated when the Prime Minister, William Gladstone made it clear that his government was opposed to it. It was the only women’s suffrage bill or resolution to obtain a favourable division until 1897.

It was in the 1870s that the women’s suffrage movement developed into a national movement. Following the defeat of the 1870 bill, the Manchester and London committees attempted to build wider support while, at the same time, lobbying MPs. They sent platform speakers into the provinces, extended their network of branches, printed quantities of pamphlets, organised petitions and cultivated sympathetic MPs. Their focus was on parliamentary lobbying, the idea being to persuade MPs to introduce private members’ bills in support of women’s suffrage. Such bills were introduced every year during the 1870s, except for 1875. Each failed on the second reading and a resolution in favour of women’s suffrage, introduced by Leonard Courtney (a radical MP) met with defeat. However, historians rightly suggest that reliance of private members’ bills was unlikely to meet with success but that this, combined with petitioning and lobbying made up the bulk of the activity of the early suffragists.  In 1872, the local groups joined into a single organisation: the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS). This was strictly a non-party organisation and it encouraged MPs of all parties to support women’s suffrage. Its Central Committee was based in London. Between 1872 and 1888, the Central Committee and the Manchester Society organised most of the parliamentary business of the movement but the local societies remained free to act as they pleased. Cooperation was achieved by the existence of a single clearly defined aim for the movement and the limitations placed on the type of tactics available to pursue this aim.

As with the London Committee in June 1867, the NSWS suffered splits in the 1870s. Historians have identified three main causes of these splits. First, the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts divided suffragists. Some worked closely with Josephine Butler, but others argued that the two movements should operate separately. Some women, among them Millicent Fawcett[5], though they favoured the stand taken by those feminists seeking the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, wished nonetheless to distance the suffrage issue, one of ‘respectability’, from the CD Act agitation with its dangerously risqué overtones. Secondly, there was some reluctance in the provinces to accept leadership from London. The London bias did not mean a take-over by London-based feminists but derived only from the need to be close to parliament. Emilie Venturi and Jane Cobden from Manchester and Laura McLaren from Edinburgh were on the central committee. It is also clear that the focus on parliamentary affairs in London never diminished the importance or strength of provincial opinion. Finally, suffragists were divided on whether or not to support legislation that gave single women the vote, but excluded married women. Despite the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, the doctrine of coverture remained in place. Some suffragists argued that, given that this was the case, it was best to campaign for votes for single women, while other argued that all women should receive the vote. In the 1874 general election, Jacob Bright, who had led the group of MPs who supported women’s suffrage, was defeated and replaced by Conservative MP, William Forsyth. When Forsyth argued that, because a Conservative government was in power, suffragists should limit their demand to votes for single women, Lydia Becker reluctantly agreed. This, however, alienated the more radical suffragists.

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[1] Jane Lewis (ed.) Before the Vote was won, Routledge, 1988 provides significant materials for and against extending the franchise to the mid-1890s.

[2] Useful collections of material can be found in Candida Ann Lacey (ed.) Barbara Leigh Smith and the Langham Place Group, Routledge, 1987 on whom see also Hester Burton Barbara Bodichon 1827-1891, John Murray, 1949 and Sheila Herstein Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon, Yale, 1985. Jacquie Matthews ‘Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891): Integrity in Diversity’, in Dale Spender (ed.) Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Women’s Intellectual Traditions, The Women’s Press, 1983, pages 90-123 looks at her ideas.

[3] Most proposals for legislation are introduced by the government. Private Member’s Bills are introduced into the Commons by MPs who are not members of the government. While governments sometimes support private member’s bills and provide them with the parliamentary time and backing necessary for them to succeed, they do not often do so. Most private members’ bills fail because they lack support in the Commons. If the government opposes the bill, it can put pressure on MPs to vote against it or can make sure that the bill runs out of time. On the occasions when private member’s bills proposing women’s suffrage did gain a majority in the House of Commons between 1870 and 1914, the government ensured that they did not pass into law.

[4] It is important to have some understanding of how a law is passed through Parliament. A bill is drafted and introduced into either the House of Commons or House of Lords. It then goes through four stages. The first reading is a formal stage when the bill is tabled (literally placed on the table in the house). The second reading is when the principles of the bill are debated. This is followed by the committee stage, when the details of the bill are discussed by a small group of MPs who can suggest changes or amendments. The third reading occurs when amendments are voted on and a final vote is taken on the bill as a whole. The process is then repeated in the other house. If the bill passes both houses, it receives the Royal Assent and becomes law.

[5] Barbara Caine Victorian Feminists, OUP, 1992, pages 196-238 is the most convenient biographical sketch. David Rubinstein A Different World for Women: The Life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, London, 1991 is the best modern biography, a decidedly revisionist study. Janet Howarth ‘Mrs Henry Fawcett (1847-1929): the widow as a problem in feminist biography’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds.) Votes for Women, Routledge, 2000 pages 84-108 is an interesting and innovative study. Ann Oakley ‘Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Duty and Determination’, in Dale Spender (ed.) Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Women’s Intellectual Traditions, The Women’s Press, 1983, pages 184-202 looks at her ideas.

Why did women want to vote?

The 1867 Reform Act sparked off a number of claims -- some successful -- from women for registration as voters. Lily Maxwell[1], whose name had been placed accidentally on the register, voted in Manchester in November 1867. A year later Lady Scarisbrick and twenty-seven of her women tenant farmers were similarly successful: the revising barristers who scrutinised the electoral registers did not challenge their registration. In Chorlton v Lings (1868) the Court of Common Pleas decided against the women who had claimed their right to vote. From then onwards, the question of the parliamentary franchise was patiently fought through the trying channels of committees, petitions, deputation and demonstrations[2].

Following the demise of Chartism after 1848, the issue of parliamentary reform in general and of women’s suffrage in particular died away. The campaign for women’s suffrage did not re-emerge until the mid-1860s. The call for votes for women was an obvious area of feminist concern but by no means the overriding one. It was also one of the areas of least success for the movement, at least in the short term. The constant denial of the 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 men were not willing to concede[3]. Feminists approached the demand for the vote with a broad range of reasoning[4].  Their specifically political arguments centred on the issues of equality and representation. Their ethical arguments ranged from a simple declaration of justice to a belief in woman’s moral superiority and fitness. Suffragists[5] recognised the force of contemporary opinion that held that potential voters should be demonstrably fit to exercise the franchise freely and intelligently, particularly when presenting the case to Parliament.  The view of women in the various suffrage organisations -- and it was an issue that spawned a large number of societies -- differed considerably. On this, more than any other issue, profound political disagreements emerged within the feminist world.

Gaining the vote pointed to possible alliances with existing political parties and some disagreement arose from this. Feminist societies throughout the period always maintained some distance from adherence to 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 of 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 the propaganda of women themselves. Many feminists did profess political beliefs that coloured their feminist leanings, but for the most part women of vastly 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 the political philosophies current at the time.

1. For many women, this understanding led them to a surprisingly uncritical acceptance of the property terms of the Victorian male franchise. They argued that the acceptance of a restricted franchise was a matter of expediency rather than of principle[6].

2. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) from 1897 recognised existing social and political conditions more than an unyielding feminist principle. She argued that voting was a right granted only to those whose proof of good citizenship (‘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?

3. 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.

4. 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 moral argument that women’s representation would force parliamentary consideration of matters hitherto 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 also it would inevitably ignore the problems of the unrepresented.

5. 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.

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[1] Jane Rendall ‘Who was Lily Maxwell? Women’s suffrage and Manchester politics 1866-67’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds.) Votes for Women, Routledge, 2000 pages 57-83.

[2] Martin Pugh Votes for Women in Britain 1867-1928, London, 1994 is a convenient and short introduction to the subject taking account of recent research. Constance Rover Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain 1866-1914, London, 1967 is still probably the best account even though some of its interpretation is now questionable.

[3] Susan Kingsley Kent Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860-1914, London, 1990 and Jill Liddington and Jill Norris One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, London, 1978, revised edition, 2000 provide excellent and contrasting studies of the issue before the Suffragettes.

[4] Christine Bolt ‘The ideas of British suffragism’ in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds.) Votes for Women, Routledge, 2000 pages 34-57.

[5] It is important to be clear about the meaning of ‘suffragist’ and ‘suffragette’ from the outset. Suffragists supported votes for women and used non-militant tactics to attempt to achieve this from 1866 to 1918. Suffragettes were members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, formed in 1903, who also wanted votes for women but, from 1905-6 were prepared to use more militant or direct action to pressurise government into conceding their demands.

[6] 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.

Women and Politics: Into political parties after 1880

One result of the widening of the franchise in 1884-5 was the rapid growth in the number of women’s political organisations. Historians have suggested that, because the Third Reform Act 1884 substantially increased the number of voters and led to a restructuring of constituencies, some form of new political organisation was necessary to ensure that the parties could maintain the support of the voters. It was in the 1880s that the main political parties began to make use of the time and energy that women who supported them were prepared to give.

Women were admitted to the mixed Conservative Primrose League in 1884, a year after its foundation, as Dames (the female equivalent of Knights) or, if of a lesser social standing, as associated members. They worked in the mixed local Habitations: the Ladies’ Grand Council of the League, subordinate to the male Grand Council, failed to develop any very clear stance of its own. The first local Women’s Liberal Associations was founded in Bristol in 1881. However, it was only after the success of the Primrose League that the growth of WLAs accelerated. In 1887, they were welded into the National Women’s Liberal Federation, a council of 500 delegates elected by the local associations with an executive committee of thirty chosen by the council. Liberals tended to come from a more socially mixed background, dominated however by nonconformity and with a higher proportion of women already engaged in philanthropic activities. The Liberal Federation was locally responsive and less hierarchical than the Primrose League: but both organisations undoubtedly effectively deployed the talents of women.

There was a difference, however, both in outlook and policies despite the shared concept of separate responsibilities held by both Conservative and Liberal women. The Dames of the Primrose League disclaimed unfeminine assertiveness and held fast to a ‘womanly’ ideal[1].  At the same time, they demonstrated effective and practical organising skills.  They were particularly strong in rural areas where the politics of deference still had a powerful hold and where philanthropic work was linked to the influence of property.Their role as unpaid canvassers and organisers was an important one, extending the boundaries of what was acceptable for upper middle class women, as they entered into electioneering and canvassing, were instructed in political issues and showed themselves to excel in public speaking.

The Liberal Federation and its active Executive were both assertive and determined[2].  They claimed that women too should shape and define policy, especially in areas of their special concern.  Much sprang from that nonconformist and liberal ‘morality’ already tested in campaigns for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, for social purity and other moral causes.  Liberal women aimed not only to drawn in others to serve a party cause but to preserve their own separate moral and political voice.

The Liberal women deliberately encouraged women to acquire political power, both directly and indirectly. In contrast, most of the Primrose League’s active campaigners took less interest in matters specifically affecting women with the exception of the women’s suffrage issue on which members split. Rosamund Billington suggested that the early Women’s Liberal Associations were set up to combat many Liberals’ indifference to women’s suffrage, but those that were set up later did not necessarily have a suffragist agenda. The Liberal Federation began to develop its own annual conferences that covered many issues of interest to women. Though it too split on the issue of suffrage, the Federation was by 1902 calling on the Party to accept adult suffrage. Perhaps as significant, the Federation worked with many other women’s pressure groups and trade unions to achieve their common objectives: labour legislation, legal reform, national insurance provision. Liberal roots in nonconformity, in pressure group politics and in the politics of moral reform perhaps offered women a basis for feminist claims.

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[1] On the role of women in the Primrose League see Janet Robb The Primrose League 1883-1906 New York, 1968 and Martin Pugh The Tories and the People, Oxford, 1984 and the broader study by Beatrix Campbell The Iron Ladies. Why do Women Vote Tory? Virago, 1987.

[2] Less has been written on Liberal women but see H.J. Hanham Elections and Party Management, Brighton, 1959, revised edition, 1978.