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The Political Aspects of Women's Suffrage During the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

John D. Fair
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Extract

The women's suffrage movement in Great Britain has suffered from the misconception that it was through the urgings, exertions, and sacrifices of women exclusively prior to 1918 that the vote was finally achieved. Such writers as the Pankhursts and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who were also participants in the struggle, have set the tone of historical interpretation by describing their success in such titular terms as My Own Story,…The Story of How We Won the Vote, and Women's Victory…, a lead dutifully followed by others who have written since the passage of the Reform Bill. Almost without exception these accounts, which include Roger Fulford's Votes For Women, stress the more exciting prewar aspects of the story, thereby conveying the mistaken impression that the conferral of the suffrage was the natural consequence of feminist agitation. Those more enlightened authors who recognize the adverse effect which the militant suffragists had on their own cause and the absence of any kind of solicitation during the war have subscribed to the equally misleading explanation that it was women's participation in the war which won the vote. Such is the perspective gained from reading Monstrous Regiment by David Mitchell. A close examination of the politics of the reform question, an approach heretofore eschewed by nearly every writer of the period, reveals that the extension of the suffrage to women did not “just happen” as a result of the manifold conversions in political and public spheres, for whatever reason. Indeed the question of giving women the vote would never have arisen during the war had Parliament not been confronted with the urgency of granting the vote to soldiers and sailors on active duty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , Fall 1976 , pp. 274 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1976

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References

1 Unfortunately the two most recent additions to the bibliography of women's suffrage deviate little from this pattern. Rise Up, Women! (London, 1975)Google Scholar by Andrew Rosen, though excellent, is limited to an examination of the Women's Social and Political Union before the war. The coverage provided by Morgan, David in Suffragists and Liberals (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar is more comprehensive, but by the author's own admission is focused on the suffrage campaign “as it entered its climacteric phase and failed.” (p. 1) The period during the war is treated as something of an afterthought and in a discursive and not totally reliable manner. Surely some more definitive cause can be ascertained for the suffragist victory than Morgan's conclusion that “it was political force which triumphed in the changed curcumstances of the war.” (p. 155).

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15 The Times, March 11, 1914, p. 9Google Scholar. Sylvia Pankhurst, the second daughter of Emmeline, estimated that militant destruction in the first seven months of 1914 exceeded that for the entire previous year. The damage done to the Rokeby Velasquez alone was £45,000. Pankhurst, E. Sylvia, The Suffragette Movement (London, 1931), p. 544.Google Scholar

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