The struggle for suffrage
Alan Crosby considers what his ancestors would have thought of votes for women
This year we celebrate 100 years since the first women were granted the right to vote in United Kingdom parliamentary elections. They had to be 30 or over, and to fulfil various property qualifications. The same legislation, the 1918 Representation of the People Act, also introduced the vote to all males over 21. Ten years later the franchise was finally extended to all women, on an equal basis with men. It had been a lengthy struggle – the first serious suggestions that women might be given the vote came in the late 18th century, and in the years after 1900 the fight for women’s suffrage had become more militant and won immense publicity (see the feature on page 66).
According to many at the time, the prominence of working women in the First World War – driving trams, cleaning railway locomotives, producing munitions, labouring in the fields – had changed the attitudes of legislators. Although some historians dispute this, there’s no doubting the vital role women played in the war effort and on the home front, or its effect on public opinion. By the end of the war, it no longer seemed rational or reasonable to most people that women should be excluded from exercising political choices – after all, they had the same education as men; in peacetime increasingly large numbers had been working in the professions and service trades, as well as traditional industries such as textiles; and most other aspects of their inequality before the law were slowly being removed. Granting women the vote was part of a wider trend towards greater equality.
Even before 1918 many women were active in politics and political campaigning. They might not have been allowed to vote or stand as candidates, but they could be formidable forces behind the scenes. In fact many women had been entitled to vote in local government elections well before 1918: female ratepayers were given the vote by the 1869 Municipal Franchise Act, limited to single women in 1872 and extended again to some married women in 1894. It’s been estimated that by 1900 more than one million women were on local electoral registers.
From 1894 they could become members of Poor Law boards of guardians (by 1900 almost 2,000 had done so), and be elected as borough or district councillors. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917) was not only the first woman to qualify as a doctor and surgeon in Britain (see the article on medical ancestors on page 54), but also the first to become a mayor. She was elected in the little borough of Aldeburgh in Suffolk in 1908, and since the mayor was ex officio a magistrate she was also the first to serve in that role. What a remarkable set of firsts!
I’m not sure how the women of my family viewed their changing status. I doubt that they were worked up about it, and in any case they were mostly excluded until 1928. My maternal grandmother was 21 in 1919, and married in October 1922. She grew up in inner-city Manchester, and on a brick wall in the background of the only photograph of the wedding you can see a poster with the slogan “Representation of the People Act, 1918”, listing the candidates for the Manchester Gorton constituency. Only three weeks later there was a general election, in which her husband, brother and father could vote, but her mother (who although over 30 was not married to a property owner) and Grandma and two sisters, being under 30, could not. That photo has all sorts of political messages!
She was finally able to vote in the 1929 general election, which saw the return of a minority Labour government and in the Manchester Gorton constituency a very large Labour majority. Grandma probably wasn’t too pleased – she and my grandfather were classic working-class Conservatives. Voting Labour meant that you were ‘common’. They kept the blue flag flying!
There’s no doubting the vital role women played in the war effort and on the home front