Another cause for why women didn’t get what they wanted was because of a group of violent ‘ladies’ who protested for the right to vote. As you may have already guessed, they were the Suffragettes. The suffragettes had a very vulgar and disliked way of approaching people whilst trying to persuade them to help their cause, instead, they harmed it. In 1906 the British magazine Punch, designed a poster portraying the impoliteness of women suffragettes by showing a suffragette shouting and grabbing another woman (the sensible lady) from her elbow. The government named this poster (the Shrieking Sister) because the suffragettes were seen as very rude and ill-mannered. A quote beneath it read “You help our cause? Why, you’re its worst enemy”.
However, there were also a group of women called the Suffragists. Their aim was the same as that of the Suffragettes, but their techniques of persuasion were totally opposite. They used various methods such as meetings, petitions, persuasion, propaganda, reasoned argument and a few others, not violence. However their methods weren’t so useful either because they weren’t really being listened to, so they decided that they would take more violent action to make themselves heard.
The women were trying their best to persuade people that they were capable of making wise decisions for their country when it came to the elections, but the people just didn’t want to listen. The suffragettes designed the following poster which they thought would make people think twice before rejecting their cause, and in my opinion it was quite effective because it stated the pure truth.
The suffragettes would organize rallies and marches to expand their campaigns however soon after they would be arrested and imprisoned for quite harmless offences such as chaining themselves to the railing of Buckingham Palace. However after a while they began to become very serious about the whole situation and started to damage paintings in the National Gallery and the property of certain MP’s, to show that the vote meant a lot to them. What they didn’t understand was that their actions were just giving people another reason to think low of women. Another extreme act that the suffragettes carried out was that the leading suffragette, Emily Davison wanted to draw more attention to her cause so she decided that she would throw herself under the king’s horse when it was running a race. After doing so she failed to survive the severe pain, and her death was the most dramatic event in the campaign.
However the biggest and most recognized factor that helped women gain the right to vote wasn’t the sacrificing of lives; it was actually the amount of hard work and effort that the women put into running Britain whilst all the men were at war with Germany. Everywhere you’d go you’d see Government posters asking the women to come and work in factories and take over the jobs of the men. The women welcomed this opportunity with open arms because they knew that it would benefit them greatly, and would also change the way people thought of them.
During the First World War women proved to the whole of Britain that they were just as good as the men and could take on anything that the men could take on. They also showed a huge amount of responsibility and dedication towards their new ‘jobs’ even though they knew that they were going to be temporary until the men were back from the war. This showed that the vote would be used sensibly by the women and also that they were capable of making prudent decisions for their country.
In conclusion I believe that women didn’t gain the right to vote before 1914 simply because they had never had a chance to prove themselves to people or had the chance to reveal their hidden talents until the First World War occurred. However once they their capability had been acknowledged and recognized by the rest of Britain, gaining the right to vote wasn’t that big a problem.