The Women’s Suffrage Movement
By Molly Housego and Neil R Storey
5/5
()
About this ebook
Related to The Women’s Suffrage Movement
Titles in the series (100)
British Postcards of the First World War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Church Misericords and Bench Ends Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Chocolate: The British Chocolate Industry Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBuckles Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Britain's Working Coast in Victorian and Edwardian Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBritish Campaign Medals 1914-2005 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poole Pottery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Victorians and Edwardians at Play Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Perambulators Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Victorians and Edwardians at Work Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5VW Camper and Microbus Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Medieval Church Architecture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The English Seaside in Victorian and Edwardian Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsButtons Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Railway Posters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Peat and Peat Cutting Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5British Gallantry Awards 1855-2000 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5London’s Statues and Monuments Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Clarice Cliff Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTractors: 1880s to 1980s Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeauty and Cosmetics 1550 to 1950 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Portmeirion Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5British Motorcycles of the 1960s and ’70s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5British Campaign Medals 1815-1914 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLondon Plaques Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Flying Scotsman: The Train, The Locomotive, The Legend Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAirfix Kits Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Farming in the 1920s and 30s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fashion in the Time of Jane Austen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Building Toys: Bayko and other systems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related ebooks
Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Suffragettes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Suffragette: The History of the Women's Militant Suffrage Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVotes For Women!: The Pioneers and Heroines of Female Suffrage (from the pages of A History of Britain in 21 Women) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA History of Britain in 21 Women: A Personal Selection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5WOMEN & ECONOMICS Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFeminism, Sexuality, and Politics: Essays by Estelle B. Freedman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSuffragette Planners and Plotters: The Pankhurst, Pethick-Lawrence Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Women's Victory and After: 1911-1918: Personal Reminiscences, Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete History of the Suffragette Movement - All 6 Books in One Edition): The Battle for the Equal Rights: 1848-1922 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism in Four Dimensions Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5A History of the World in 21 Women: A Personal Selection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume I: From Prehistory to the First Millennium Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fight Like a Girl: 50 Feminists Who Changed the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Living with History / Making Social Change Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My Own Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Introductions, Femspec Issue 15 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Social Science For You
A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Men Explain Things to Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art of Witty Banter: Be Clever, Quick, & Magnetic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Verbal Judo, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Close Encounters with Addiction Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Oprah's Book Club Selection) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Denial of Death Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twelve Years a Slave (Illustrated) (Two Pence books) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Women’s Suffrage Movement
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
The Women’s Suffrage Movement - Molly Housego
READING
ORIGINS OF THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE, IN OTHER WORDS the right to vote, was not a right enjoyed by all British people in the nineteenth century. The right was limited to men with considerable property or land: in 1831 just 4,500 men out of a population of more than 2.6 million people were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. The situation had also become farcical because the electoral areas were out of date and un-reformed – the new industrial cities such as Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester had no members to represent them in Parliament, while some ‘rotten boroughs’, such as Dunwich on the coast of Suffolk, once a bustling town and port but reduced through erosion and storm to a village with a population of thirty-two in 1831, were still sending two MPs to Westminster.
Cavalry charge to disperse the open-air meeting of the Manchester Patriotic Union on St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819. Over six hundred people were injured and fifteen died as a result of the incident, which became known as the Peterloo Massacre.
Pressure had come in the late eighteenth century from radical reformers such as Thomas Paine (the author of Rights of Man, 1791) and continued throughout the nineteenth century, notably during the 1830s and ’40s from the Chartists, who demanded ‘Universal Manhood Suffrage’ as part of their six-point charter, and from the less radical Reform League in the 1860s. These waves of pressure for parliamentary reform resulted in three main Reform Acts in 1832, 1867 and 1884, which extended the franchise first to all householders who paid rates in ‘constituency boroughs’ and then to ‘county constituencies’. As a result, some 6 million men (almost 60 per cent of the adult male population) joined the voting registers but women were still denied any vote at all.
Appeals and arguments for widening the franchise to include women can also be traced back to the eighteenth century, when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), a year after Paine’s Rights of Man. Female suffrage was advocated by the respected philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham in his book A Plan for Parliamentary Reform (1818), and was also argued for as part of a wider platform of universal suffrage by radical orators such as Henry Hunt. Hunt stood for equal laws, equal rights, annual parliaments, universal suffrage and the secret ballot (a legend he would later emblazon upon the labels of the boot-blacking bottles he manufactured). He was asked by the Manchester Patriotic Union to address a rally of over sixty thousand on St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819; on the platform with him were a number of others who were due to speak for reform, and beside them was a woman carrying a banner bearing the legend ‘Female Reformers of Roynton – Let us die like men and not be sold like slaves’. Shortly after the arrival of Hunt, local magistrates, disturbed by the enthusiastic greeting he had received, ordered his arrest and the dispersal of the crowd. This order was carried out with extreme violence by the military, including a cavalry charge with sabres drawn. Fifteen people died and over six hundred were injured in the incident, which became known as the Peterloo Massacre – it was often recalled by those who fought for suffrage over the ensuing years with the cry of ‘Remember Peterloo!’
In 1832 the so-called ‘Great Reform Act’ had explicitly excluded all women from voting in national elections by using the term ‘male’ rather than ‘person’ in its wording. Henry Hunt had been elected member for Preston in 1830 and had argued that any woman who was single, a taxpayer and had sufficient property should be allowed to vote both before and after this legislation had been passed, and in response to the Reform Act presented the first petition in support of women’s suffrage to Parliament in 1832. The petition was, however, mocked and Hunt was exposed to antagonism for his efforts.
Although the issue of women’s rights and changing roles in society was discussed by both men