Battle is over for Suffrage Society
Stirling members of the women’s campaign for the vote met 100 years ago to wind up their organisation as its aims had “partially at least” been achieved.
The Stirling branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies gathered in the Golden Lion three months after Parliament passed the 1918 Representation of the People Act which allowed women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification to vote.
The move followed decades of campaigning by women for an extension of the franchise.
Chairing the meeting in the absence of branch president Mrs Edmund Pullar, Westerton, Bridge of Allan, was Mrs Lambert Brown, Park Place.
Mrs Brown moved a resolution expressing the branch’s “deep satisfaction that, after many years of effort, the Parliamentary franchise had been extended”.
They knew their cause was just and had been confident it would prevail, she added.
Much more would have been made of women having obtained the vote “but for the great shadow of war which hung over them by night and day”.
There was applause when Mrs Brown said that the women there knew what was being done “by their brave lads, especially their Scottish lads, in stemming the onrush of the Germans, and especially they remembered their own Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who had done so well”.
Mrs Brown said securing the vote was a great triumph when they considered the “scorn and ridicule” heaped upon women who had sought the vote.
She warned members not to be vindictive but to “go on joyously into the future” and take an interest in matters of public interest.
It would, she added, broaden their views in stead of cramping their minds , as was the case when their interests were confined to the four walls of their house.
There was laughter and applause when Mrs Brown said women who took an interest in public affairs were “far younger looking than those who were for ever moping about the house”.
Women were urged to turn their attention to social questions such as temperance legislation, infant mortality, property and divorce laws, housing and the equal responsibilities of men and women in regard to illegitimate children
Members agreed to disband the branch and set up from their number a Stirling committee for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals organisation.
Any funds left over after liabilities had been discharged were to be handed over to the committee.
Only 8.5 million, 40 per cent of the total female population, met the new right-to-vote criteria agreed in the 1918 legislation.
The same act abolished property and other restrictions for men, and extended the vote to all men over the age of 21. Additionally, men in the armed forces could vote from the age of 19. Women over 21 did not get the vote until 1928.