Votes for Women

I am taking a course on FutureLearn called Beyond the Ballot. It is about the campaign by women in Britain to get the vote in the early part of the 20th century. 

I am learning a lot about the different groups involved in trying to win the vote and about the organisations and individuals who were opposed to it happening. 

The suffragettes are one group of women who decided to take direct action to forward their cause. Their motto was " Deeds not Words " and they committed acts of what would now be called terrorism on a large scale. I had heard of women chaining themselves to railings as they did outside Buckingham Palace and parading with placards  but I did not know about the blowing up of the contents of post boxes or the arson attempts on buildings and the physical assaults on politicians such as Prime Minister Asquith.

Come this way madam

The suffragettes who took part in demonstrations or committed outrages as they were known were liable to arrest, trial , and , if  the crime was serious  enough , imprisonment. 

These women felt they should be classed as political prisoners and not seen as regular criminals. Some protested against their imprisonment by going on hunger strike. This led to the government sanctioning the force feeding of the women. There was an outcry against what was effectively  a form of torture and so the government in response  legislated for women to be temporarily released from prison when they became so weak that they might die. The women were allowed out to recuperate but they could be re-arrested once they were deemed to have sufficiently recovered. This was known as the CAT AND MOUSE ACT.

Suffragists on the other hand had a different approach to the quest . They  tried to achieve the vote by campaigning peacefully  for M.P's to pass legislation but time after time the legislation could not get through the Houses of Parliament. The NSWSS was the organisation working for constitutional  change. Its president was Millicent Fawcett.

Note the stress on  being  law abiding.

The  rival groups , the suffragettes had  been formed by  women who were tired of the lack of progress. The chief of these was the WSPU  led by Mrs Pankhurst which wanted to draw attention to the cause by any means necessary. In recent years more attention has been paid to the violence  used and the destruction caused which had been downplayed by those who wrote up the history of the movement after the vote was achieved for all women in 1928.

I guess the moral is that many women sacrificed time and even liberty to get us the vote so we must always use it when given the chance.