Why did a campaign for Women's Suffrage develop in the years after 1870?

Authors Avatar

Wednesday 20-02-2002

Women’s Right To Vote

Assignment One: Objective 1

  1. Why did a campaign for Women’s Suffrage develop in the years after 1870?

One reason why a campaign for women’s suffrage developed was because there was a lot of progress for women in other areas in about 1890.  For example, in 1893 women in New Zealand got the vote, which fuelled the British Suffrage movement because it gave them hope that it could happen in Britain.

The obvious reason is that the campaign developed is that they wanted equality with men and thought that it was not right for it not to be.  In 1867 workingmen in towns had been given the vote, and they thought it was unfair for important women not to have it.

Since the early 1870’s women had been making more and more developments and been playing a more and more important role in society.  They could now be Mayors, nurses, doctors teachers, could vote and sit on school boards, as well as be Guardians of the poor (i.e. run the poor houses).  The 1869 and 1882 Municipal Council Acts allowed women to vote in council elections.

Many people opposed the vote for women.  Although Arthur Balfour (Conservative Party Member, and future Prime Minister) admitted that the next reform of parliament would have to include votes for women, his party was still against the idea and the movement.  The Labour Party also began to loose interest in votes for women because women were thought to vote in favour of their opposition, the Conservative Party.

Along with this there was also a rise in the number of people talking and writing about it.  They also found that more influential people began to think about it, for example J S Milton (a very influential man) wrote positively about it.

Also the 1870 education act stated that for the first time every child was entitled to primary education, irrespective of its sex.  It was felt that if females were now being given the same education as men, then they would have no reason to be unable to vote.  

2. Describe the ways in which the methods of the Suffragists and Suffragettes were different.

The most obvious, and huge, difference is that the Suffragists were peaceful and the Suffragettes were militant.  Millicent Fawcett led the Suffragists (NUWSS) who believed in winning the vote by peaceful methods of persuasion.  She said that she wanted to ‘show the World how to gain reforms without violence, without killing people and blowing up buildings and doing the other silly things that men have done when they wanted the laws altered’.  They used a variety of different peaceful tactics including distributing leaflets, organising processions, signing petitions, holding meetings and at election time, supporting any candidate that supported their cause.  Although by 1914 they had achieved nothing, without them the campaign would have been much weaker.

Emmeline Pankhurst set up the Suffragettes (WSPU) in 1903 after her home had been used for many meetings of the Women’s Franchise League.  Their methods were very different to those of the Suffragists because they were very militant.  They were fed up that nothing had happened under the NUWSS, so decided to set up their own organisation for the enfranchisement of women.  They chose direct action to make their point.  They did things like producing clever posters, organising demonstrations, braking windows, chaining themselves to railings, setting fire to post-boxes and fighting police when they were arrested.  The biggest impact they made was when they went on hunger strikes when they were imprisoned.  They were sometimes force-fed.  At first, the police sent them home when they refused to eat and got ill and rearrested them when they had got better.  This was known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’.

Join now!

The Suffragettes were very violent, planting bombs, and even burning down houses and churches.  They believed that the only way to receive the vote was to be more militant and get more attention.  The Suffragettes went through phases of militant action, ranging from peaceful, to militant, to violent and then to restrained.  They claimed they only became violent when the Government had ignored their peaceful tactics.  The leaders were also very different in that one was pacifist and peaceful (Millicent Garrett Fawcett [NUWSS]) and the violent and militant (Emmeline Pankhurst [WSPU]).

  1. Women over 30 gained the vote ...

This is a preview of the whole essay