The Vote During the mid-19th century women were regarded as inferior and insignificant as

Coursework No.1

The Vote

During the mid-19th century women were regarded as inferior and insignificant as they were not allowed to vote and had far fewer rights than men. By 1918 women had equal rights to that of a man. What had changed in 68 years? Who had changed it and why? This piece of coursework helps to unravel the mysteries behind these questions. You will read about Erratic Education, Weird Work and the Loopy Legal System and also a little bit about Strange Suffrage and Wild Wars.

There were many reasons helped women achieve the vote, one of which was changes in education.

Education

In the early 19th century, women’s education was a joke. Middle class girls were home schooled and were taught subjects like etiquette, dancing, needlework and elementary piano playing. The working class children may have gone to Sunday schools or mill schools. However, the vast majority of working-class children had no education at all! Boys in middle class families were taught the important subjects like mathematics, science and geography, these lessons had an impact on their life as they could receive higher status jobs. If women wanted the vote they would need a higher education so more jobs would open to them e.g. government jobs.

During the mid 19th century many changes in education took place. In 1848 the King’s college founded Queen’s college to educate governesses. Two of the Queen’s school graduates both founded new girls schools, Frances Buss founded the North London Collegiate School for Ladies in 1853 and in 1858 Dorothea Beale founded and became the headmistress of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Both of these schools taught subjects that were previously reserved for boys only. The schools used the latest teaching methods and entered girls for many public examinations. However, many fathers frowned upon this as they felt that girls’ schooling did not require such enthusiasm. This said, the work of Buss and Beale inspired other women. Maria Grey founded the Girls’ Public Day School Trust. She begun by opening three schools, one in Chelsea, Notting Hill and Croydon. By 1890 it ran 40 schools teaching 7,000 pupils. She went on to set up the National Union for Promoting Higher Education of Women in 1872 and in 1878 she had established the first teacher training college for women.

Women had shown that they were determined enough to receive higher education and were rewarded by the ability to apply for higher status jobs. Women now argued that they should be able to vote, as they were educated to the same extent as men. However, there was still much opposition to women receiving the vote.

Another reason why women achieved the vote was that there was now better employment now available to them.

Employment

Women who before could only work in factories now became nurses and teachers. These highly respectable positions were also highly sought after. The increasing opportunities in schools grew very rapidly and by 1900 75% of teachers were women. The main problem with being a women teacher in this century was that if they married they would have to resign. Also if you were a headmistress you would receive the same pay as a male teacher in his first ever job! In nursing the profession had changed from being full of lazy half-trained sisters to top class hard working qualified nurses due to the work of Florence Nightingale. By 1880 the amount of new hospitals had soared and in 1900, around 60,000 nurses were working in British hospitals. Nursing became an almost exclusively woman’s job. For women with a higher education, the possibilities for work grew even further. New technology like typewriters and telephones enabled literate women to work in an office. As the Post Office expanded, their need for clerks grew with it. By 1914, 90% of the government’s female workforce had been employed by the Post Office. Even though the women now had office jobs the men still received the more skilled and responsible jobs by running the businesses, for this they were paid more. Working class women now worked in groceries and shops. This was due to the rapid expansion of the British railway as the shop owners now ordered their goods from catalogues. They were much too busy to look after the shop and needed to do the paper work. Also major towns opened department stores which needed assistants and created more jobs for women. Between 1875 and 1907 about ½ million jobs were occupied by working class women in chain stores.

All these new jobs proved that women were now earning money and gaining independence. Women could now argue that they deserved the right to vote because they paid taxes (just like men) to a government they didn’t necessarily support. However, although they had jobs they were paid less and paid less in tax. Also many women found it hard to receive the higher jobs that they wanted.

Another reason why women achieved the vote is because highly respectable jobs now became open to them, which meant they had more influence at parliament. This helped them pass new laws, which ...

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Another reason why women achieved the vote is because highly respectable jobs now became open to them, which meant they had more influence at parliament. This helped them pass new laws, which gave them rights.

Legal Changes

During the 19th century there were many laws passed that benefited the woman:

The Custody of Infants Act (1839)

This act gave women the legal custody of children under 7 and access to children over the age of 7. (Providing she had not been found guilty of adultery.)

Matrimonial Causes Act (1857)

This act meant that a divorce could be obtained through a new ‘Court of Divorce’ rather than through a costly private act of parliament. Also, a woman who had been deserted by her husband gained the same rights to own or bequeath property as single women.

Married Women’s Property Acts (1870 and 1882)

This act gave married women the right to own property and to keep her earnings from her job. Although there were several loopholes in this law the second act left none.

Guardianship of Infants Act and Married Woman’s Act (1886)

The Guardianship of Infants Act stated that the mother became the legal guardian of the children in a family if the father died. In the Married Woman’s Act, a husband who deserted his spouse had to pay maintenance. Later in 1891, the courts passed a judgement that a man could not force his wife to live with him.

These changes in the law helped women to get the right to vote because the system began to understand the unfairness of the quality of their lives compared to men. The new laws started to make the government realise how badly women were being treated in the home. However this was not enough as their struggle for the right to vote was merely bypassed in the Houses of Parliament, there were still many differences between men and women. Something needed to be done.

Step forward Millicent Fawcette!

The Suffragists

The move for women to have the vote had really started in 1897 when Millicent Fawcett founded the National Union of Women's Suffrage. "Suffrage" means the right to vote and that is women wanted - hence its inclusion in Fawcett's title.

Millicent Fawcett believed in peaceful protest. She felt that any violence or trouble would persuade men that women could not be trusted to have the right to vote. Her game plan was patience and logical arguments. Fawcett argued that women could hold responsible posts in society such as sitting on school boards - but could not be trusted to vote; she argued that if parliament made laws and if women had to obey those laws, then women should be part of the process of making those laws; she argued that as women had to pay taxes as men, they should have the same rights as men and one of her most powerful arguments was that wealthy mistresses of large manors and estates employed gardeners, workmen and labourers who could vote. But the women could not regardless of their wealth.

However, Fawcett's progress was very slow. She converted some of the members of the Labour Representation Committee (soon to be the Labour Party) but most men in Parliament believed that women simply would not understand how Parliament worked and therefore should not take part in the electoral process.

This left many women angry and in 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union was founded by and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. They wanted women to have the right to vote and they were not prepared to wait. The Union became better known as the Suffragettes. Members of the Suffragettes were prepared to use violence to get what they wanted.

The Suffragettes

The Suffragettes started off relatively peacefully by harassing ministers and disrupting small meetings. It was only in 1905 that the organisation created a stir when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney interrupted a major political meeting in Manchester to ask two Liberal politicians (Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey) if they believed women should have the right to vote. Neither man replied. As a result, the two women got out a banner which had on it "Votes for Women" and shouted at the two politicians to answer their questions. Such actions were all but unheard of then when public speakers were usually heard in silence and listened to courteously even if you did not agree with them. Pankhurst and Kenney were thrown out of the meeting and arrested for causing an obstruction and a technical assault on a police officer.

The Suffragettes refused to bow to violence. They burned down churches as the Church of England was against what they wanted; they vandalised Oxford Street, apparently breaking all the windows in this famous street; they chained themselves to Buckingham Palace as the Royal Family were seen to be against women having the right to vote; they hired out boats, sailed up the Thames and shouted abuse through loud hailers at Parliament as it sat; others refused to pay their tax. Politicians were attacked as they went to work. Their homes were fire bombed. Golf courses were vandalised. The first decade of Britain in the 20th century was proving to be violent in the extreme.

Suffragettes were quite happy to go to prison. Here they refused to eat and went on a hunger strike. The government was very concerned that they might die in prison thus giving the movement martyrs. Prison governors were ordered to force feed Suffragettes but this caused a public outcry as forced feeding was traditionally used to feed lunatics as opposed to what were mostly educated women.

The government of Asquith responded with the Cat and Mouse Act. When a Suffragette was sent to prison, it was assumed that she would go on hunger strike as this caused the authorities maximum discomfort. The Cat and Mouse Act allowed the Suffragettes to go on a hunger strike and let them get weaker and weaker. Force feeding was not used. When the Suffragettes were very weak they were released from prison. If they died out of prison, this was of no embarrassment to the government. However, they did not die but those who were released were so weak that they could take no part in violent Suffragette struggles. When those arrested had regained their strength, they were re-arrested for the most trivial of reason and the whole process started again. This, from the government's point of view, was a very simple but effective weapon against the Suffragettes.

As a result, the Suffragettes became more extreme. The most famous act associated with the Suffragettes was at the June 1913 Derby when Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under the King's horse, Anmer, as it rounded Tattenham Corner. She was killed and the Suffragettes had their first martyr. However, her actions probably did more harm than good to the cause as she was a highly educated women. Many men asked the simple question - if this is what an educated woman does, what might a lesser-educated woman do? How can they possibly be given the right to vote?

It is possible that the Suffragettes would have become more violent. They had, after all, in February 1913 blown up part of David Lloyd George's house - he was probably Britain's most famous politician at this time and he was thought to be a supporter of the right for women to have the vote!

However, Britain and Europe was plunged into World War One in August 1914. In a display of patriotism, Emmeline Pankhurst instructed the Suffragettes to stop their campaign of violence and support in every way the government and its war effort.

The War

The suffragists began by persuading men to join the army while Emmeline Pankhurst staged a huge demonstration that’s aim was to allow women to work in munitions factories. This would help the war but would also benefit the WSPU (Woman’s Social and Political Union) as this would show that they were determined to help work for a better future.

When the British Army went off to fight the war, many women began to take over the jobs that before were reserved exclusively for men. They did hard manual work such as sweeping roads, carrying coal and growing and harvesting food. They also drove buses and ambulances, became policewomen and guards and even took over the higher status jobs like working in banks and businesses. This chart shows the changes in job allocations by 1918:

Some women actually aided the British soldiers by working in munitions factories and becoming war nurses. This proved that they were as tough as men in many ways. One reason was that they showed they would give their lives to support the country as some nurses were sent to work in the trenches to help sick and injured soldiers back to health. Also if they worked in munitions factories they would receive prolonged exposure to an explosive powder known as Cordite which caused chest pains and stained the skin yellow, which aptly earned them the name ‘Canaries’. Another danger in the munitions factories were the munitions themselves! If a single fault in any grenade or projectile occurred it could spell the end of the entire factory!

This work earned them the money and freedom that up until now had been sparsely spread across the women population. They had proven that they would work to hard achieve the vote. They had changed many minds about their cause. For instance, one of the main contenders against the women vote, ex-Prime Minister Asquith, said ‘Some years ago I used the expression ‘let women work out their own salvation’. Well, they have worked it out during the war. How could we have carried on with the war without them? Wherever we turn we see them doing work which three years ago would have been regarded as exclusively ‘men’s work.’ One JL Garvin printed ‘Time was when I thought that men alone maintained the State. Now I know that men alone could never have maintained it, and henceforth the modern State must be dependent on men and women alike’.

The Vote at last?

Finally, after over a half a century of struggle, a bill was passed that granted the vote to all married women, female householders and any female university graduate over 30. This was great news for the Suffragettes and Suffragists as their struggle had ended in victory! Or had it?

Although they had gained women the vote, they were still not on the same terms as men. There were still many regulations about being eligible to vote if you were a woman.

However, as women slowly gained power in the houses of parliament they began to sway decisions in their favour. Eventually in 1928, the bill was passed that granted all women over the age of 21 the vote. They were now on equal voting terms as men! Millicent Fawcette and Emmeline Pankhurst had succeeded in gaining women a fair vote. Unfortunately, just before their victory Emmeline Pankhurst was laid to rest at Brompton Cemetery, London.

My Conclusion

I feel that women deserved the vote as they had worked hard and persevered under enormous stress. They had put in 78 years of work to achieve their goal and in my opinion that’s an amazing effort. Although they had achieved the right to vote, it begs the question, What would have happened if something had been different? Would women still be able to vote fairly in 1928? If for instance, Millicent Fawcette had not started the Suffragists it would have affected how we live now! Women may still not have the vote today! All of the causes are interlocked in this very important way. Without the changes in education, women would still have poor jobs as they wouldn’t be educated enough to get better jobs. If women had the poor jobs then the suffrage movement would have failed because there would be no power behind their publicity swings. However, during the war the government would have still had to employ a vast number of women to accommodate the countries needs. In my opinion, women would have still received the vote, the only difference being the amount of time taken to receive it. I think that the biggest impact on the gaining of women’s rights was not the suffrage, the changes in education, legal changes or job quality, it was one woman who believed – ‘We deserve a better quality of life, we deserve a better future.’