British Women's Suffrage Campaign: 1866–1928 Overview

Origins in Nineteenth-Century Electoral Reform

Harold Smith emphasizes that the origins of the women's suffrage campaign in Victorian England stemmed from a larger campaign for reform concerning the franchise in general. Smith is careful to note at the very beginning of his study that there has been a recent historiographical shift, which emphasizes the "specifically women's protest against a gender system" by adding some distance between women's suffrage and the different — but related — campaigns for electoral reform in the U.K. in the earlier nineteenth century (Smith 7).

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, British qualifications to vote were determined not only by gender (males only) but also by property ownership and monetary worth, meaning that effectively only 3 percent of the adult male population could vote. There were also additional difficulties in this period related to religious qualifications for electoral office: until 1829, a Roman Catholic could not take a seat in Parliament even if lawfully elected. The situation had become untenable, and organized calls for reform were beginning to take shape.

In the case of women, the initial intellectual interest in women's rights that had surfaced in the 1820s was explicitly suppressed by the 1832 Reform Bill. After the suggestion of extending the franchise to women who met the property requirements of the Bill, Parliament instead made it explicit in the text of the law that it enfranchised "male persons" (Smith 7). Thus it would seem that the initial result of even raising the question of women's suffrage was a step backward, enshrining male supremacy specifically in the language of statute.

As a result, the campaign for electoral reform picked up in earnest after 1832, although it was often given a subsidiary role in the consideration of women's issues. In the period between 1832 and 1865, for example, women's education was considered a more pressing issue than women's suffrage. By 1865, however, the tide began to change. That year, the election of philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill as a Liberal Member of Parliament gave an advocate of women's suffrage a political and social platform. He had written his essay The Subjection of Women four years earlier, though he would not publish it until 1869. In this same period, the establishment of smaller municipal women's suffrage societies reflected a broader interest in and involvement of women in public affairs. When the 1867 Reform Act expanded the franchise yet again but still denied it to women, this proved to be a turning point: as Smith notes, it "effectively cut through the smokescreen of anti-suffrage arguments to the crucial point: suffrage was a gender issue which was resisted because it would grant women the power to undermine existing gender structures that disadvantaged them" (Smith 11).

Ideological Foundations and the Two Suffrage Organizations

In terms of the ideological justification for reform, those who insisted on women's equality as a matter of principle — following a tradition that stretched back to Mary Wollstonecraft in the late eighteenth century and continued with John Stuart Mill in the late 1860s — were actually a minority. Instead, the central issue was one in which the gradual recognition of legal rights for women where none had existed before — on matters like divorce, inheritance, and property ownership — had begun to reveal a fundamental lack of equal treatment under the law. This is probably a sufficient ideological explanation for why women's suffrage was unable to gain much political traction in the nineteenth century, when the establishment of other legal rights and social opportunities, such as education, authorship, and participation in the national political conversation, would be prioritized before the actual right to vote was insisted upon. It is worth noting, however, that both ideological strains existed simultaneously throughout the nineteenth century.

By the end of the century, the two pre-eminent organizations advocating for women's right to vote were the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). The NUWSS was formed out of various older advocacy groups that had undergone their own schisms and disagreements, resulting in a merger in 1897 under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett: the NUWSS represented the "suffragists." Their methods were measured and parliamentary, in direct contrast to those who were derogatorily referred to as "suffragettes," who were usually affiliated with the WSPU.

The WSPU was founded six years after the NUWSS, in 1903, and was spearheaded largely by the Pankhurst sisters, Emmeline and Christabel. The WSPU was the more radical organization by any standard, with a women-only membership and a revolutionary slogan that emphasized "deeds, not words." Initially, women were permitted to be members of both organizations; however, the militant and propagandistic character of the WSPU's "deeds" — which frequently involved public spectacles, protests, stunts, and other disruptive techniques — led to a 1908 standoff between the two organizations when the NUWSS publicly condemned the "militant methods" of the WSPU (Smith 26).

The NUWSS's methodology had been amply expressed the previous year with the famous "Mud March" of 1907, essentially a massive open-air gathering and demonstration of support for women's suffrage. The militancy of WSPU tactics, however, would only increase in the remaining years before the First World War, with very public spectacles such as hunger strikes — ended by force-feeding — and the death of Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of the King's horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913 and was trampled to death. Smith states that "historians traditionally have portrayed the NUWSS and the WSPU as rivals, and stressed the differences between them" (Smith 25), and it is easy to see why. There were fundamental ideological differences between the two parties: the slow and peaceable methods of the NUWSS reflected Fawcett's belief that women's nature was different from and morally superior to men's. As a result, the use of forceful shock tactics by the WSPU was viewed by the NUWSS as a discredit upon the nature of women generally. Fawcett's organization, with its underlying ideology, would also prove more hospitable to other ideological commitments such as pacifism, which aligned with her idea of the superior moral nature of women.