idea are seen; many of the great English abbesses discharged their territorial duties as landowners, and women as custodians of castles voted for knights of the shire. In the 17th and 18th centuries in England and America, under the influence of advancing political theory, and in France in the 18th century, this idea began to take shape. In England the writings of Mary Astell (Serious Proposal to Ladies, 1697) and others led to the gradual revision of the inherited idea of the education and the true sphere of women, while in 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of the Rights of Women. In America the dawning of a political consciousness is evidenced by the claim made in 1647 by Margaret Brent to sit in the Assembly of Maryland as the executor of Lord Baltimore, and by the requests made by Abigail Adams (wife of John Adams), Mercy Otis Warren and Hannah Lee Corbin, that women taxpayers should enjoy direct representation. In France the movement towards democracy did not in the hands of Rousseau include the enfranchisement of women, and Comte taught that women were politically inferior to men; Condorcet, however, demanded equal rights for both sexes. Although, through an oversight, women could vote under the first constitution of New Jersey from 1776 to 1807, there is no doubt that women’s suffrage had made practically no progress in any country till comparatively late in the 19th century. There has been considerable discussion as to whether women had constitutionally a right to vote in England prior to the Reform Act of 1832 (see Mrs C. C. Stopes, British Freewoman). The discussion, however, is one of purely antiquarian interest, and the Reform Act made quite clear what had certainly been the recognized custom before, by introducing specifically the word “male” in the new franchise law (2 and 3 Will. IV., cap. 45, sections 19 and 20).
The earliest known handbill representing the modern “women’s suffrage” movement in England dates from about 1847, and in 1857 the first society was formed in Sheffield, the “Sheffield Female Political Association,” due largely to the work of a Quaker lady, Anne Kent of Chelmsford. In July of the same year Mrs John Stuart Mill published an article in the Westminster Review.[1] The earliest outstanding figure, however, is Lydia Ernestine Becker (1827-1890), descended on the mother’s side from an old Lancashire family, her father being the son of a German who settled in England in early youth. She became a well-known botanist, and an intimate friend of Charles Darwin. In 1858 the Englishwoman’s Journal was started, and by this time there was a vigorous agitation for the alteration of the law relating to the property and earnings of married women. Among the leaders of that movement were Barbara Leigh Smith (Mrs Bodichon) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (Madame Belloc). At the same time a famous group of women, Emily Davies, Miss Beale and Miss Buss (founders respectively of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College and the North London Collegiate School) and Miss Garrett (Dr Garrett Anderson), Miss Helen Taylor (John Stuart Mill’s stepdaughter) and Miss Wolstenholme (afterwards Mrs Elmy), discussed women’s suffrage at the “Kensington Society.”
A new era began with the election in 1865, as member for Westminster, of John Stuart Mill, who placed women’s suffrage in his election address. From that time the subject became more or less prominent in each successive parliament. Mill presented the first petition in May 1867. In 1868 the case of Chorlton v. Lings was decided against women applicants for the vote by the Court of Common Pleas, and a similar decision was given by the Supreme Court of Appeal in Scotland. From this time the efforts of the various local committees (in London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh and Birmingham) were directed to promoting a bill in parliament, and to forwarding petitions (an average of 200,000 signatures a year was maintained from 1870 to 1880). The Women’s Suffrage Journal was founded in 1870, and in the same year Jacob Bright moved the second reading of the Women’s Disabilities Bill which was carried by a majority of 33 votes. Mr Gladstone then threw his opposition into the scale, and the bill was rejected in committee by 220 to 94. In 1871 the same bill was again lost by 220 to 151, in spite of a memorial headed by Florence Nightingale, Mary Carpenter, Augusta Webster, Harriet Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe and Anna Louisa Chisholm (Mrs H. W. Chisholm). G. O. Trevelyan’s Household Franchise Bill in 1873 raised the hopes of the women’s suffragist, and Mr Joseph Chamberlain at a great Liberal meeting in Birmingham carried a resolution in favour of the proposed change. From 1874 to 1876 the bill was in charge of a conservative, Mr Forsyth, and, despite the opposition of John Bright and the efforts of a parliamentary committee for “maintaining the integrity of the franchise,” the number of supporters was well maintained. The work proceeded uneventfully from 1876 to 1884, huge meetings being held in all the chief towns. In the franchise was conferred upon women owners in the Isle of Man, subsequently upon women occupiers also. In 1883 a great Liberal conference at Leeds voted in favour of women’s suffrage under the leadership of Dr Crosskey and Walter S. B. M‘Laren. The next notable event in the movement was the defeat of W. Woodall’s amendment to the Reform Bill (1884), providing that words importing the masculine gender should include women, by 271 votes to 135, Mr Gladstone again making a powerful appeal to his party to withdraw the support which they had given in the past. 104 Liberal members crossed over in answer to this appeal. Numerous bills and resolutions followed year by year in the names of W. Woodall, L. H. Courtney (Lord Courtney, whose bill was read a second time without a division, 1886), W. S. B. M‘Laren, Baron Dimsdale, Caleb Wright, Sir Albert K. Rollit, F. Faithfull Begg (1897; second reading majority 71). Up to 1906 all those attempts had failed, in most cases owing to time being taken for government business.
The period 1906 to 1910 witnessed entirely new developments. The suffragists of the existing societies still carried on their constitutional propaganda, and various bills were introduced. In 1907 Mr W. H. Dickinson’s bill was talked out, and in 1908 Mr H. Y. Stanger’s bill was carried on its second reading by a majority of 179, but the government refused facilities for its progress. Prior to this, however, a number of suffragists had come to the conclusion that the failure of the various bills was due primarily to government hostility. Furthermore the advent of a Liberal government in 1906 had aroused hopes among them that the question would be officially taken up. Questions were therefore put by women to Liberal cabinet ministers at party meetings, and disturbances occurred, with the result that Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Annie Kenney were fined in Manchester in 1906. A certain section of suffragists thereafter decided upon comprehensive opposition to the government of the day, until such time as one or other party should officially adopt a measure for the enfranchisement of women. This opposition took two forms, one that of conducting campaigns against government nominees (whether friendly or not) at bye elections, and the other that of committing breaches of the law with a view to drawing the widest possible attention to their cause and so forcing the authorities to fine or imprison them. Large numbers of women assembled while parliament was sitting, in contravention of the regulations, and on several occasions many arrests were made. Fines were imposed, but practically all refused to pay them and suffered imprisonment. At a later stage some of the prisoners adopted the further course of refusing food and were forcibly fed in the gaols.
The failure of all the bills previously drafted on the basis of exact equality between the sexes, and the fact that both Unionists and Liberals refused to make the matter a party question, coupled with a general feeling of discomfort at the relations between the so-called “militant” suffragists and the authorities, led in the spring of 1910 to the formation of a committee (called the Conciliation Committee) of members of parliament under the presidency of the earl of Lytton. This committee, consisting of some 55 members belonging to all parties, succeeded in agreeing upon a new bill based upon the occupier franchise established by the Municipal Franchise Act of 1884. It was urged on behalf of this bill that it would establish the principle on a sufficiently
- ↑ This article was written in reference to the Women’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Mass., U.S.A., in October 1850.
