Lecture 4 Votes for Women VOTES FOR WOMEN

Lecture 4: Votes for Women

‘VOTES FOR WOMEN – AND CHASTITY FOR MEN!’ ACHIEVING UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE

1867: John Stuart Mill Proposes Votes for Women in Parliament

Women’s Social and Political Union ‘Suffragists’ Peaceful, constitutional ‘Suffragettes’ Militant and sometimes violent

March of the Women! Shout, shout, up with your song! Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking; March, march, swing you along, Wide blows our banner and hope is waking. Song with its story, dreams with their glory, Lo! they call, and glad is their word! Loud and louder it swells, Thunder of freedom, the voice of the Lord!

Religion and the Suffrage

The Suffrage Dilemma • A Property Qualification? - rewards the single woman, who has ‘failed in the role of her own sex’; - admits ‘large numbers of women leading immoral lives’ - gives young ‘flappers’ the vote, not respectable married women - likely to be rich, and so Tory • No Property Qualification? - will bring in large numbers of working class men: danger of socialism

December 1910 Election 272 84 42 Turnout: 81. 1%

The Women’s Social and Political Union (1903) EMMELINE PANKHURST CHRISTABEL SYLVIA

Sir Almroth Wright, 1912 ‘The recruiting ground for the militant suffragettes is the half million of an excess female population … a class of women who have all their lives been strangers to joy, women in whom instincts long suppressed have in the end broken into flame. These are the sexually embittered women in whom everything has turned to gall and bitterness of heart and hatred of men … One half of their nature has undergone atrophy with the result that they have lost touch with their living fellows, men and women’.

MRS HUMPHRY WARD VIOLET MARKHAM

The Impact of War