Women's Suffrage.

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Women’s Suffrage

The suffrage campaign began in the late 1860s with the establishment of two suffrage committees in 1867, one in London and the other in Manchester. They were followed a year later by similar committees in Bristol, Dublin and Edinburgh and spread to other provincial cities. From the start there were concerns about how the question of suffrage should be handled – corresponding to anxieties about women’s agency from the early anti-slavery campaigns onwards. The London National Society for Women’s suffrage set up a model designed to deviate as little as possible from accepted middle-class norms of womanly behaviour. It stressed the feminine nature of the female campaigners for the suffrage. John Stuart Mill was President of the Society for some years in the late 1860s and insisted that the secretary of the society should always be a married woman. This contrasted with the approach taken in the north of England where there was less concern with feminine behavioural norms and more focus on establishing a large-scale campaign along the lines of the anti-corn law movement. The establishment of a national women’s suffrage campaign was due to women such as Lydia Becker who travelled round the country speaking at suffrage meetings. She also edited the Women’s Suffrage Journal from 1870 until her death in 1881. Becker made a close connection between women’s lack of the franchise and their disabilities in other arenas such as education, employment and the law and this was another contrast with the London society which focussed on the suffrage campaign not wanting to dilute the message by looking at the treatment of women more generally. Becker drew upon the work of Frances Power Cobbe on domestic violence. Becker publicised Cobbe’s appeal for Isobel Grant, a woman sentenced to death for killing her husband during a drunken fight. In the same week, a habitual wife-beater who killed his wife was sentenced to one week in prison. Cobbe asked why should a woman be ‘hanged for stabbing her husband in a sudden tipsy quarrel, when homicides of like kind by men are almost uniformly punished as “manslaughter” only?’

 

The way campaigns were run were a thorny issue for all feminists. Partly because they knew that they had to convince male members of Parliament to take up their case for them in the Commons. Becker, even though she was considered radical by the London society’s norms also exercised caution in selecting the issues for treatment and the organisation of her campaign. She would not, for example, raise the issue of prostitution in the Journal, except for implicit references against ‘repressive legislation’ more generally and would not mark the death of George Eliot in 1881 as she had transgressed the standards of contemporary propriety by having an affair with the married George Lewes.

There was also a debate among early suffrage campaigners about whether only single women should have the vote. Supporters of the women’ suffrage bills in Parliament insisted on including a clause explicitly excluding married women from the suffrage. Becker and Millicent Garrett Fawcett would not insist on the inclusion of married women arguing in Fawcett’s words: ‘believing as I do, that all practical grievances will be removed by the enfranchisement of single women, I, for one, should be perfectly contented with a Women’s Suffrage Bill which did not enfranchise married women.’ However, other women, including Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy were more radical, viewing the explicit exclusion of married women as contributing to the oppression of coverture and the continuing degradation of married women. The early suffrage campaigners were also not in favour of extending the vote to all women. They demanded votes for women on the grounds of natural justice, but did not advocate full adult suffrage. Their claim was for the vote on the same terms as men, under existing franchise arrangements. The right to vote was based on the ownership of property and the suffragists argued that as owners of property women, too, should be allowed to vote. It was particularly objectionable for these middle-class women to see property qualifications being lowered in 1867 and especially in 1884 to the point where many working-class men could vote but propertied women could not. As Frances Power Cobbe put it in 1874:

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‘the picked class of women who would be admitted by Mr Bright’s Bill to the franchise are needed to restore the just balance in favour of an educated constituency against the weight of the illiterate male voters now entrusted with the suffrage’.

 

To some extent it was this fuzzy focus that led to the slow progress of the women’s suffrage campaign in the 1870s and 1880s. In addition the early suffrage movements actively avoided becoming mass campaigning movements (in contrast with the sexual purity movements) and therefore remained low-key lobbying organisations. The early movement was also essentially a ...

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