Feminism by Margaret Walters Page A

example, pointed out that ‘our gracious e v
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    Queen fulfils the very arduous duties of her calling and manages te: su
    also to be the mother of many children’. But Victoria notoriously ffr
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    exclaimed in horror against the ‘mad wicked folly of women’s gists
    rights’.
    The Langham Place circle around Barbara Leigh Smith played an important part in the long struggle for the vote, as in so many other campaigns. Early in 1866, they organized a suffrage petition, with 1,499 signatures, which argued that ‘person’ should be substituted for ‘man’, and that all householders, without distinction of sex, should be enfranchised. Emily Davies, who had worked so effectively for women’s education, formally handed the petition to John Stuart Mill, whose book The Subjection of Women had just been published, and he presented it to parliament in June 1866. It was – as they had expected – defeated, by 194 votes to 73; but even this was welcomed as an encouraging start. Its effectiveness was perhaps confirmed by the number of hostile responses it attracted.
    The Spectator , for example, sneered that no more than twenty 71
    women in the country were politically capable; women in general made political discussion ‘unreal, tawdry, dressy’.
    In October 1866, Leigh Smith and a group of friends met at Elizabeth Garrett’s home in London to form a suffrage committee, which, the following year, became the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. They organized petitions which brought together more than 3,000 signatures. Leigh Smith also produced a pamphlet on
    ‘Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women’; several establishment papers, including the Cornhill and the Fortnightly Review , refused to print the argument for women’s votes. Around the same time, a woman called Lydia Becker formed a similar society in Manchester; she had been drawn to the cause after hearing a paper given by Leigh Smith; she formed a local Women’s Suffrage Committee, and in 1870 founded the Women’s Suffrage Journal . Pro-suffrage groups soon followed in Edinburgh, Bristol, and Birmingham; they proved important in keeping the issue alive through the decades ahead, and keeping up pressure minism
    on parliament. Public meetings were arranged, particularly in Fe
    London and Manchester. Richard Pankhurst, who was involved in the Manchester group, had founded the Englishwoman’s Review in 1866, and this helped publicize the suffragists’ cause.
    It was perhaps inevitable that the suffragists were at times plagued by disagreements, particularly about tactics; Barbara Leigh Smith soon withdrew from any formal participation in the London committee – she disagreed with John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, who insisted that it was useful to have men on the committee – though she later served as its nominal secretary. For all his early support, Mill shrank back nervously from later developments and more aggressive tactics; he disapproved, particularly, of the ‘common vulgar motives and tactics’ of some women in Manchester. And the campaign to win the vote was to prove more difficult, and much longer-drawn-out, than its early supporters could have predicted. The issue was debated in 72
    parliament (and defeated) year after year, all through the 1870s.
    One Tory remarked in 1871 that women – who were sensitive and emotional by nature – should be protected ‘from being forced into the hurly-burly of party politics’. Woman’s proper sphere was the home; her duty – and her deepest pleasure – to be a good wife, or sister, or daughter. Moreover, if women had much influence in parliament, it would lead to ‘hasty alliances with scheming neighbours, more class cries, permissive legislation, domestic perplexities and sentimental grievances’. The largest vote in favour of women’s enfranchisement came in 1873, with 157 men in agreement.
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    Suffrage abroad
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    At the same time, British suffragists (and their opponents) e