Suffrage Movement

5 Key excerpts on "Suffrage Movement"

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  Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945

  An Introduction

  • June Purvis(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Eleven Women and the vote Sandra Stanley Holton

  Introduction

  Sporadic calls for the enfranchisement of women were made from the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, when women were for the first time expressly excluded from this right. But no large-scale, organized demand arose until 1865, when a new Reform Bill was anticipated, and when John Stuart Mill, the political philosopher, was elected to Parliament on a programme that included women’s suffrage.1 By this time a women’s movement was in existence, and the vote was only one of a broad range of rights sought in the following decades.2

  In the early years of the twentieth century the suffrage campaigns took on new colour and new urgency with the emergence of a younger generation of leaders of charismatic power, and with the adoption of “militant” methods far more sensational than those of earlier decades.3 What remained a constant, however, was the Parliamentary focus of the campaigns, for this was the arena in which the question would be decided. Equally, the political interests and reform goals of suffragists were rarely restricted to the gaining of the vote for their sex. Many were also seeking an overall reform of the political and social systems of Britain. For all these reasons, the internal divisions within the Suffrage Movement often reflected party-political, and sometimes even sectarian, struggles outside the movement itself, struggles which in turn were often the outcome of class and regional tensions within British society. The nature and course of the women’s Suffrage Movement cannot be understood, then, outside the broader settings of the women’s movement, and of Parliamentary politics.4

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  Feminism

  • June Hannam(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 Women’s suffrage, 1860s–1920s

  WHY WAS WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE such a controversial issue and why did it take so long to achieve? Why did women want the vote so badly and why has it had such a central place in histories of feminism? To what extent did suffrage campaigns make a difference to the achievement of the vote? Both supporters and opponents believed that women would use the vote to bring about social and political change. But more than that contemporaries feared that if women had a political voice then the ‘traditional’ relationship between men and women in the family and the workplace would come under threat. Feminists certainly recognized the symbolic importance of the vote. It signified the possibility of women acting together across national boundaries to transform the world in which they lived. This helps to explain why it evoked such strong feelings on both sides.

  Sex was a key factor in deciding who should, or should not, be included in the franchise. The demand for women’s suffrage, therefore, highlighted women’s common interests and raised the possibility of a ‘universal sisterhood’. It was the one issue that brought women from a variety of backgrounds together in organized groups and in highly public campaigns. This in turn could foster a sense of solidarity among women as they faced intransigent opposition to their cause. Organized Suffrage Movements developed first in the ‘liberal democracies’ of Europe, North America and the white-settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand and in most cases reached a peak in the decade before the First World War. Given their size and ‘militancy’, the British and American movements took centre stage among contemporaries and also in later suffrage histories. But this should not lead us to neglect Suffrage Movements in other countries. They had their own priorities, aims and tactics which need to be recognized and should not simply be viewed through the eyes of Anglo-American campaigners.

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  Feminism

  • June Hannam(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  What is clear is that no one single explanation will suffice, and that the achievement of the franchise must be understood within the complex political, religious and social context of individual countries. It is important though not to lose sight of women’s agency and the extent to which they played an active role in their own emancipation. By itself, the existence of a strong Suffrage Movement was clearly not enough to guarantee success. In Switzerland, for example, women did not gain the vote until long after other Western European countries, but there had been an active Suffrage Movement since the early twentieth century. Women also gained the vote relatively early in countries where the Suffrage Movement was weak or non-existent. Elsewhere, however, suffrage campaigning and the publicity generated did ensure that politicians were not able to ignore the demand for the vote. There was no guarantee, for example, that women in Britain would have been included in the 1918 Franchise Bill if they had not continued to lobby the government and to make their presence felt. They also maintained their pressure until an equal franchise was granted in 1928. Similarly in the United States it was women’s hard work at a national and at a state level that ensured that the Senate would ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, in 1920, albeit with the narrowest of margins.

  The suffrage campaign was a key moment in the development of a feminist consciousness. Suffrage activists, organized in groups that were predominantly female, gained a heightened sense of solidarity with other women as they battled against hostile governments to achieve their aims. This could lead, as in the case of the WSPU, to an emphasis on the oppression of all women as a sex by men and an appeal to put gender loyalty above class and party. Although they were inspired by individual acts of courage, the emphasis was on women acting together and many suffrage campaigners gave a full-time commitment to the cause in the years immediately before the First World War. On the other hand, the Suffrage Movement revealed, and at times exacerbated, the differences between women. Suffrage groups were often hostile to each other and failed to agree on political strategies and on methods of action. At the IWSA meeting of 1906, for example, Millicent Fawcett challenged the credentials of Dora Montefiore, a member of the WSPU. Dora was only allowed to speak after the Dutch and Hungarian delegates wrote to the president asking that she should be heard on behalf of the ‘insurgent women of England’. Suffrage groups had their own colours and slogans that reinforced a sense of identification with a particular group rather than to suffragists more generally. As the social and political backgrounds from which suffrage campaigners were drawn began to widen, tensions increased between them and the leaders of the movement who were still largely well educated, middle class and moderate in outlook. For those women who remained politically active once the vote was won differences could be exacerbated as they sought to pursue their feminism through mainstream political parties as well as through women’s organizations. At the same time there was a growing tension between women’s involvement in nationalism and anti-colonial struggles and the internationalism of the women’s movement. These issues will be considered in the next chapter.

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  Feminism and the Women's Movement

  Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism

  • Barbara Ryan(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  The Woman’s Suffrage Movement and the Aftermath of Victory

  [I]f woman would fulfill her traditional responsibility to her own children; if she would educate and protect from danger factory children who must find their recreation on the street; if she would bring the cultural forces to bear upon our materialistic civilization; and if she would do it all with the dignity and directness fitting one who carries on her immemorial duties, then she must bring herself to the use of the ballot—that latest implement for self-government. May we not fairly say that American women need this implement in order to preserve the home?

  (Jane Addams, Why Women Should Vote, 1917)

  Feminism is as broad and definite as we make it. . . . Political freedom—simple permission to vote—is a very tiny part of freedom, and we want all there is.

  (Alice Park, The Suffragist, 1920)1

  The split in the early woman’s movement originated over a strategic dispute, but also resulted from antagonistic feelings which had developed on the part of the leaders. When a social movement divides into contending factions, the result can be beneficial or destructive. The possible negative effects are the amount of time spent on intra-movement sectarian quarrels and internal attack. The possible benefits are increased numbers and types of participants, and the creation of new ideas, issues, and methods. The National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association attempted to represented different segments of the population; but, because this schism was not primarily an ideological division, it was incapable of producing a significant contrast in goals or organizing efforts. Both groups were committed to the principle of equal rights for women, and both felt the vote represented that principle. As Eleanor Flexner has argued, the two groups clashed “not on whether women should vote, but on how

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  Votes For Women

  • Sandra Holton, Dr June Purvis, June Purvis(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12 ‘A SYMBOL AND A KEY’ The Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1918–1928 Johanna Alberti

  When we strove with most passion for the vote, we sought it not for itself only, but as a symbol and a key.1

  INTRODUCTION

  In February 1920, the first issue of a journal The Woman’s Leader was published. The paper was the successor to The Common Cause although it was not the official organ of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), the renamed and reconstructed National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). The leader in this first issue, under the title ‘The Woman’s Leader and the Task before It’, looked back at the years 1900–1914 when the whole of the women’s movement was concerned with the ‘breaking down of one especial barrier’, a barrier so powerful that the movement became ‘a strong and at moments a torrential stream’ which had in the end loosened that barrier. The concentrated effort required to break down the barrier against the women’s parliamentary vote meant that the movement had flowed in those years in a single channel, but, the leader asserted: ‘Now, again, the women’s movement is a double stream.’ The first of these two main streams, ‘which sometimes flow separately and often intermingle’, was ‘an effort to break down barriers, the other an effort to expand into fresh life’. The first stream included ‘the struggle for the vote’ and ‘the struggle for equal opportunities in the professions and in industry’; to the second belonged the ‘development of women’s education, of women’s citizenship, and of women’s work’. The challenge now was to ensure that women working in different ways ‘did not lose sight of one another’. The writer of the article also identified a new generation of young women with a different perspective whom the paper intended to help, not only in ‘making their own lives, but in doing good service to their country and to humanity’.2

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