Feminism by Margaret Walters Page B

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    watched developments abroad with interest. One woman ote
    remarked that ‘scarcely anything does more good to wom-
    : su
    ffr
    en’s suffrage in England than seeing those who speak from agists
    personal experience’. In fact, Antipodean examples seemed particularly encouraging. In New Zealand, women could vote from 1893; in Australia, state after state granted women the vote during the 1890s, until in 1902 women could finally vote in Federal elections. A conservative (male) professor remarked, darkly, in 1904, that ‘I think Australia is doomed’. (On the other hand, Australian Aboriginals, male or female, could not vote until the late 1960s.) In America, the states, one by one, enfranchised white women; by 1914, women could vote in 11 states, though they had to wait until 1919 for the national vote.
    Denmark enfranchised women in 1915, and the Netherlands in 1919.
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    It is hardly surprising, given contemporary beliefs about a woman’s role, that, for decades, suffragists achieved only small and undramatic victories, though, in the long run, these would prove very important in winning over public opinion. But, in the face of rejection and ridicule, they persisted. At the same time, many women were gaining experience and confidence by taking increasingly active roles in local government and other public bodies; they served on school boards and poor-law boards. And they were learning to speak in public; as the suffragist Lady Amberley once remarked, ‘people expressed surprise to me afterwards to see that a woman could lecture and still look like a lady’. Moreover, the campaigning women emerged from every political persuasion, with Conservatives like Frances Power Cobbe and Emily Davies as committed to the cause as Liberal and Radical women.
    By the 1890s, as a growing number of men were enfranchised, women’s sense of disparity and injustice increased sharply. They pointed out that men who were poor and barely literate had been minism
    given the vote, while well-educated women, who paid rates and Fe
    taxes, were still excluded from full citizenship. It has been argued that 1897 saw a real breakthrough: a bill in the House of Commons received a majority of 71 in favour of women, and the pattern was repeated in following years. None of this was translated into actual reform, but suffragists certainly felt encouraged.
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    Chapter 7
    Fighting for the vote:
    suffragettes
    The term ‘suffragette’ was coined in 1906 by the Daily Mail ; it was a derogatory label that the growing militant movement adopted as their own and transformed. It was only very gradually that some suffragists, at least, had come to realize that they were achieving very little by peaceful means. But as early as 1868, Lydia Becker had claimed, dramatically but with some insight, that ‘it needs deeds of bloodshed or violence’ before the government can be ‘roused to do justice’.
    By the early 1870s, a few women were taking the idea of ‘no taxation without representation’ literally, and refusing to pay. But there was little real change until 1903, when the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by the Pankhurst family. They had already been protesting actively in their native Manchester against attempts to ban meetings held by the Independent Labour Party.
    Dr Pankhurst had in 1870 drafted the first Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill, which was then presented to parliament by Jacob Bright. (It passed on a second reading, but was quashed by William Gladstone.) Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst had served as a Poor Law Guardian, and had remarked that ‘though I had been a suffragist before I now began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right, but as a desperate necessity’. Her daughter Christabel had probably been influenced, not only by her parents but by listening to, and writing a profile of, the American suffragist 75

    5. The cover of Ethel Smyth’s 1911 song-sheet for the WSPU proclaims
    ‘The March