Suffragists, Suffragettes, and New Women

A timeline of women’s rights (or lack thereof)

1770 A law was passed against women entrapping husbands by ‘scents, paints, cosmetics, washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, high-heeled shoes or bolstered hips’.

1773 Poor Law stipulated that fathers must pay towards support of illegitimate children.

1779 The Ladies of LLangollen – Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831) and Lady Eleanor Butler – eloped and set up home together.

1780 Royalist Margaret Cavendish’s published her science-fiction utopia The Blazing World.
Justice Buller opined that a man may beat his wife.

1791 Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

1801 Census reveals that women outnumber men by 400,000 (surplus of unmarried women).

1803 Methodist conference bans women from preaching.

1809 An anonymous woman in Leominster became the last one in England to be ducked as a common scold.

1823 John Stuart Mill jailed for distributing pamphlets on birth control.

1825 Anna Wheeler/William Thompson published Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretentions of the Other half, Men, to retain them in political and thence in civil and domestic slavery.

1831 Mr Hunt MP presented Mary Smith’s petition for votes for women to the House of Commons.

1832 Reform Act increased number of voters from 435,000 to 650,000 (of a total population of 14 million). Banned women from voting. Until 1832 duly qualified women landowners could vote for MPs.

1834 New Poor Law assumed all women dependent on men. All illegitimate children to be the sole responsibility of the mother until they reached 16.

1839 Child Custody Act enabled a mother to be given custody of children under seven if the Lord Chancellor agreed and if she was of good character.

1840 Judge upholds a man’s right to lock up his wife and beat her ‘in moderation’.

1842 Ashley’s Mines and Collieries Act. Women and children under 10 were excluded from the mines, as a result within two years 1,000 Staffordshire women had lost their jobs.

1847 Ann Knight, an elderly Quaker, published the first leaflet that advocated votes for women .

1847 & 1850            Factory Acts (women and children restricted to 10 1/2 hour day).

1848 Joseph Hume MP moved a resolution in parliament to give votes to women .

1851 Women’s Suffrage Petition presented to the House of Lords.

1852 Judge rules that a man may not force his wife to live with him.

1853 Aggravated Assaults Act passed, to increase penalties for wife beating.

1856 Petition for women to retain their property upon marriage was presented. Organised by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon andBessie Rayner Parkes , its 26,000 signatories included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Carlyle (wife of Thomas), Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

1857 Association for the Promotion of the Employment of Women established.
Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act passed, by which divorce and separation became available to women. Previously, each divorce needed a separate Act of Parliament.
Matrimonial Causes Act (legally separated wife given right to keep what she earns; man may divorce wife for adultery, whereas wife must prove adultery aggravated by cruelty or desertion).

1861 Offences Against the Person Act reduced the penalty for abortion from execution to life imprisonment.
It confirmed the age of consent as 12, and made carnal knowledge of a girl under ten a felony and of a girl ten to twelve a misdemeanour.

1864 First Contagious Diseases Act passed (women living in certain garrison towns liable to be declared prostitutes and forcibly examined for venereal disease).

1865 John Ruskin spoke out against women’s suffrage.

1866 Suffrage societies started in Edinburgh, London and Manchester.
Second CD Act passed
First petition for the suffrage, signed by 1,499 eminent women, presented by John Stuart Mill. Signatories included Florence Nightingale and Mary Somerville.
Isaac Baker Brown performed many clitoridectomies at his 50 bed private clinic in London. Eventually he was expelled from the Obstetrical Society.

1867 John Stuart Mill’s speech in the House of Commons for votes for women .
Reform Act extended the vote to most working-class male householders.

1868 General Election. Many women got on the register and voted. One woman (shop owner Lily Maxwell) voted in Manchester (for Jacob Bright).
The Court of Common Pleas declared women’s suffrage illegal.
Publication of a list of MPs and other persons favourable to the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

1869 John Stuart Mill published On the Subjection of Women.
Municipal Reform Act gave women ratepayers the vote in local elections.
Third CD Act .
Women’s College opened at Hitchin (this became Girton).

1870 Women lost the right to retain British nationality when marrying a foreigner.
School Board Act allowed women to stand for election. Elizabeth Garrett (later Anderson) and Emily Davies elected in London; Miss Becker in Manchester.
First Married Woman’s Property Act .

1872 Infant Life Protection Act tries to abolish baby-farming.
Baroness Coutts became the first woman to be granted the Freedom of the City of London.
Girton College founded. Staff and students of Hitchin College moved into it.
Infant Life Protection Act.
New Bastardy Act passed. Fathers once again responsible (equally with the mother) for support of illegitimate children.

1873 Custody of Infants Act passed. Enabled a husband, upon separation, to give up custody of children to his wife.
Reported that, of 50,000 children born annually out of wedlock, 30,000 died within 6 months.

1875 Offences Against the Person Act Amendment raised the age of consent to 13.
Newnham College for Ladies opened at Cambridge.

1876 Russell-Gurney’s Act enabled universities to admit women to degrees.

1877 Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 for publishing Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, a work on birth control . They were convicted but acquitted on appeal, the subsequent publicity resulting in a decline in the birth rate. Mrs. Besant later published The Law of Population.

1878 Matrimonial Causes Amendment Act helped battered wives by allowing a judicial separation, maintenance payments and children to remain with the mother.
London U became the first to grant degrees and full membership to women.

1880 Bill giving greater protection to little girls under 13.
First suffrage demonstration, in Manchester. Followed by demos in other towns.

1882 Married Women’s Property Act passed. No difference between femme sole and femme couverte. A married woman having separate property was liable for the support of her parents, husband, children, and grandchildren becoming chargeable to any union or parish.

1883 Hugh Mason proposed a motion for women’s suffrage and was defeated (114 for; 130 against).

1884 Reform Act extended the vote to most adult men.

1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act raised the age of consent to 16, deemed sexual assault on girls under 13 as felonies and aged 13 to 16 as misdemeanours.

1886 CD Acts repealed.
Strike of 700 women matchmakers, led by Annie Besant.
The Trades Unions’ Congress resolves equal pay for equal work.

1889 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children founded.
Women’s Franchise League founded.
Suffrage rally in London on 21st June attended by 300,000 people.
Women’s Enfranchisement Bill failed.

1890 Over 685,000 women are eligible to vote in local elections in England and Wales.
Phillipa Fawcett, a Newnham student, was placed above Senior Wrangler in the Cambridge mathematics tripos, yet the university withheld degrees from women.

1891 Regina v. Jackson, aka the Clitheroe Case. A man may no longer imprison his wife to enforce his conjugal rights.

1892 Women’s Suffrage Bill failed.

1893 School leaving age raised from ten to 14

1894 Emmeline Pankhurst elected as a Poor Law Guardian in Manchester and Charlotte Despard elected in London.

1895 Edith Lanchester forced into a lunatic asylum for intending to live with her boyfriend.

1896 Women’s suffrage petition of 257,000 signatures presented to parliament.

1897 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was founded. Motto: Faith, perseverance, patience.
Over 729,000 women now eligible to vote in local elections in England and Wales.
Ferdinand Faithfull Begg MP introduced a Woman Suffrage Bill supported by a petition of 257,796 signatures. It reached a second reading then was defeated by 230 to 159 votes.

1899 International Congress of Women held in London.
Regina vs Clarence: a husband cannot be found guilty of rape even if he is suffering from VD.

1901 Census reveals a million more women than men in England and Wales.
Birth rate dropped to 28.6 per 1,000, from 36 per 1,000 in 1876

1903 Emmeline Pankhurst formed Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) with daughters Christabel and Sylvia. Motto: Deeds not Words.

1905 First militant acts in support of women’s suffrage, first arrests and first imprisonments.

1906 First suffrage committee formed by MPs.
January: Liberals win general election by an overwhelming majority. WSPU demands votes for women, promising to harass Liberals until this is achieved.
March: Daily Mail coins term ‘suffragette’ for militant suffragists.
A deputation of 300 women (led by Emily Davies) representing 50,000 textile workers, 22,000 women member of the Co-op Societies and 1,530 university graduates met the Prime Minister to demand votes for women. He urged patience.

1907 Qualification of Women Act enabled women to stand for county and borough councils and to be chairman or mayor.
February: 3,000 people march in heavy rain from Hyde Park to the Strand in a protest dubbed ‘The Mud March’.
March: Women’s Suffrage Bill, introduced by W.H. Dickinson, is talked out at a second reading.
The First Women’s Parliament attempted to force their way into Parliament to present a petition to the Prime Minister, who refused to see them.
Henry Nevinson and Henry Brailsford founded the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.

1908 February: Second reading of Stranger Bill—identical to Dickinson’s Bill of 1907—271 votes for, 92 against.
June: WSPU organises seven processions from different parts of London to converge on Hyde Park for a rally.
Women’s National Anti Suffrage League founded (10,000 members in 235 branches by 1909).
Petition against women having the vote drew 337,018 signatures.

1909 September: Marion Wallace Dunlop, a Scottish WSPU member, became the first suffragette to go on hunger strike (Winson Green prison, Birmingham). She refused to eat unless placed in the first division. After 91 hours she was released.

1910 Men’s Federation for Women’s Enfranchisement founded.
Spring-summer: All-party ‘Conciliation Committee’ drafts limited Women’s suffrage bill, giving the vote only to householders. WSPU and Women’s Freedom League suspend militancy.
November: The Conciliation Bill is abandoned.
November: ‘Black Friday’—Suffragettes march to Parliament Square and are brutally treated by police. Ellen Pitfield, Mrs. Mary Clarke (Mrs. Pankhurst’s sister), and Cecila Wolseley Haig died of injuries received.

1911 Miss Clemence Housman became the first woman to be imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes. She withheld her income tax and inhabited house duty as a protest against women’s being denied the vote.
Mrs. Pankhurst tried for conspiracy.
May: Second Conciliation Bill debated, with large majority: 167 in favour. Asquith pledges that time for a suffrage bill would be found during the life of the parliament.

1913 Emily Davison threw herself in front of King George V’s horse. She died some days later in Epsom Cottage Hospital.

1913 The Cat and Mouse Act passed. The Act permitted the release of hunger-striking suffragettes from prison when they were on the point of death and their re-arrest when they were partially recovered.
January: Franchise and Registration Bill is debated in Commons, with four Women’s suffrage amendments.
April: Arabella Scott, Agnes and Elizabeth Thomson, and Edith Hudson are arrested for attempting to set fire to Kelso racecourse stand.

1914 United Suffragists formed.

1914 February: Rhoda Robinson is arrested for burning down Allt-an-Fhionn mansion in Perthshire.
May: King’s portrait slashed at Royal Academy. Maude Edwards is arrested.
June: Suffragettes attempt to force their way into Buckingham Palace to petition the King.
August: War is declared. WSPU suspends militancy and suffrage work; all imprisoned suffragettes are released.

1917 Bill giving votes to certain women over 30 passes the Commons.

1918 The Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over 30 who occupied premises of a yearly value of not less than £5.
Bill to enable women to stand for parliament is rushed through both Houses. Eleven women stood for parliament. The only one elected was Constance Markiewicz, but as a Sinn Feiner she refused to swear the oath and was not allowed to take her seat.

1919 American-born Nancy, Lady Astor is the first female MP to sit in the House of Commons. She won a by-election in Plymouth, where her husband had been MP until raised to the Lords.

1920 Oxford University admits women to membership and degrees, but the statute limited the numbers of women to 1 for every 6 men.

1922 Viscountess Rhondda was refused a seat in the House of Lords for being a woman.

The Woman Question: More than just suffrage

The New Woman in truth and fiction

Suffragist literature

The Arguments Pro

Inequity in society leads to poorer conditions for women, who are not “protected” by men the way idealists would have it.

• Medical
• Physical
• Matrimonial
• Child-mother relations
• Educational
• Financial
• Personal freedoms

Once some battles were won, suffrage would ensure women’s ability to control their own lives, through political means.

Political means, dependence on men to change the state of things, had more or less failed; violent action became necessary:  men have always attained power through violence; women will not succeed through other means.

Taxation without representation is unjust: it worked for the Americans, but they, too, had to resort to violent action.  (And Canada, more like Emmeline Pankhurst assumed would result from Millicent Fawcett’s tactics, had to wait over 200 years… American Independence was proclaimed in 1776; the BNA Act was brought home to Canada and amended with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.)  See the cartoon Nelson 42.

Women have a common biological heritage with men: same humanity, same rights.

Women are morally superior to men: can thereby improve civilization through political influence.

The Arguments Con

Women have a distinctly separate biological makeup: same humanity, different function, different rights:

“Women are unfit for political and public work (with few exceptions), through the fact that they are ignorant of and uninterested in National and Imperial questions, and to a great extent ignorant even of municipal affairs and local matters. […] Woman’s nature, instincts, desires and natural ambitions, based as they are on physiological sex traits, including the maternal instincts, debar her from participating in the work of governing and guarding the State.” (H. B. Samuels, Woman Suffrage: Its Dangers and Delusions, 1910: Nelson 53-54)

Women are morally superior to men: need therefore to be protected from the baseness of male political and social life.

• “What is this unimaginable desire
  In women’s heads? Would you come down again
  From where you are, to be no more than men?
  Why is it that you call it getting higher
  To slip with each step deeper into the mire?
  “On Reading of Women Rioting for Their Rights,” Arthur Symons, 15 Feb. 1907
• What Symons, and many opponents (Symons wasn’t necessarily one) forgot is that the ideal of women’s moral and familial position was far from the reality of women’s lives.

There are more women than men; what if they succeeded in changing marriage and inheritance laws in ways unfavourable to men?

Women, through bearing children, were fit for motherhood and maternal duties; slipping outside this sphere, who would carry on for England? See “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” June 1889 (Nelson 25).

• “If women were to study public questions, educate themselves in political matters, engage in agitation and controversy, exercise their minds on problems of National and Imperial importance, offering and exchanging opinions on all sorts of questions of a public nature, all the time and energy involved would be taken away from their real work, the work that Nature intended and which all human societies have encouraged—domestic work and the duties of wifehood and motherhood. […] While homes have to be made and kept and beautified and enlivened, house-work is a necessity, and someone must do it. Clearly, then, the duty evolves upon the wife or daughter or female, as the case may be, whose time would most naturally be taken up in these duties and responsibilities, which re essential to the well-being of the home and the welfare of the community as work performed by man.” (H. B. Samuels, Woman Suffrage: Its Dangers and Delusions, 1910: Nelson 54)
• This tone continues in H. Owen’s “Superfluous Woman,” Nelson 55.
• “the nearer we approach to the realization of the ideal—to the dazzling goal of perfect equality between the sexes—the fewer our numbers become” (Heber L. Hart, Woman Suffrage: A National Danger, 1909, Nelson 57)

And to return to Darwin, the “unwomanly woman” was “unnatural.” Stepping outside of one’s biologically determined sphere would lead ultimately to cultural and racial degeneration.

The idea of unmarried women voting (married women were cared for, and voted for, by their husbands) was threatening: “large numbers of women leading immoral lives will be enfranchised on the one hand, while married women, who, as a rule, have passed through more of the practical experiences of life than the unmarried, will be excluded” (“An Appeal,” qtd. in Nelson 27).

Competition for men’s jobs was threatening.

Competition for power was threatening.

Women served men; how could this system be bad (for men)?

Women against suffrage were mainly of the upper classes, who wealded financial power rather than political; it sufficed for them:

“My aunt, Mary Beton, I must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay. The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post–box and when I opened it I found that she had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in a kinder garten. Such were the chief occupations that were open to women before 1918. I need not, I am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it; nor the difficulty of living on the money when it was earned, for you may have tried. But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me. To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave, flattering and fawning, not always necessarily perhaps, but it seemed necessary and the stakes were too great to run risks; and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide—a small one but dear to the possessor—perishing and with it my self, my soul,—all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart. However, as I say, my aunt died; and whenever I change a tenshilling note a little of that rust and corrosion is rubbed off, fear and bitterness go. Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.” A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929

That being said, Woolf was firmly in the camp for women’s rights, although never a suffragette.  She had inherited the boon of her forbears’ labour, to a degree, writing in 1929, when universal suffrage (all British citizens over 21 years) had been attained (1928).

Debate topic:  Women’s Place in Society

This reign of peace and justice will be greatly promoted by the influence and action of women, who have everything to gain from it. While it can efface no substantial feature of either sex, it will secure fair play to both. To borrow one of Mr. Parkman’s antitheses, it will bring us the concrete embodiment of the abstract truth uttered by St. Paul, that in the Christian harmony there is neither male nor female, but equal freedom for either sex to bear its burdens and perform its duties according to its own best wisdom and highest resolve.
Julia Ward Howe, 1879

Man for the field, and woman for the hearth;
Man for the sword, and for the needle she;
Man with the head, and woman with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey;
All else confusion.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Princess” 1847

It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself.  God created men and women different—then let them remain each in their own position. Tennyson wrote some beautiful lines on the difference of men and women in The Princess. Women would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex?
Sir Theodore Martin, in his biography of Prince Albert

These attitudes prevailed well into the early 20^th century, and indeed flourish today in some cultural pockets.  You will be assigned a position to defend; with the use of lecture notes (however weak), your own knowledge and logic, and internet access, devise a defense for your position.

• Pre-writing: Brainstorming to establish debate points