BPG
Female enfranchisement; full revision notes
Important Bills
➢ Conciliation Bills:
▪ After the 1910 election, an all-party, 36 member, conciliation party was established and
chaired by Lord Lytton. They proposed three Parliamentary Franchise Bill’s in 1910,
1911, 1912 and all three failed. The WSPU halted militancy between 1910/11
• 1910: passed first and second reading but Asquith was determined it did not
progress, although not directly. Lead to Black Friday – 300 women march to Houses
of Parliament, led to extreme violence against protestors.
• 1911: introduced as private members bill and won a majority of 255. Asquith
announced he was in favour of manhood suffrage and the suffragettes could
propose an amendment.
• 1912: bill was defeated at the second reading by 14 votes (41 pro suffragists
opposed the bill, 91 abstained). Irish Republicans believed the debate over suffrage
would distract from Home Rule. 8 members of Asquith’s cabinet voted against the
bill.
▪ Formally, the Liberal party was in favour of these bills, but a number of Liberal and
Conservative backbenchers opposed them for a number of reasons:
• Feared it would damage electoral chances; only wanted propertied women to vote;
some were against female suffrage in general.
➢ 1918 Representation of the People Act:
▪ Enfranchised women over the age of 30 as long as they were married to a qualified male
voter (in total, about 40% of women); enfranchised all men; allowed women to stand for
election to parliament
▪ Electorate triples from 8m to 20m, with 9m more women accounting for 40% of total
electorate. In 1918, 80% of voters had never voted before.
➢ 1928 – Representation of the People Act enfranchises women on the same basis as men
(though the voting age was still 21 at this point).
What the obstacles to their enfranchisement were – The Parties
1a) The Parties: Why Liberals didn’t give them the vote
Nick Owen: - not just political, put personal pressure
• 1. Why did the Liberal Government after 1906 fail to pass a women’s suffrage bill?
○ This is the ‘political failure’ – usually explained in terms of Asquith opposition,
additional weight of property in electorate etc
• 2. Why did the New Liberals do so little to address women’s demands, both the demand for
the vote, and the demands ‘beyond the vote’?
○ This is the ‘intellectual failure’ – eg marriage, motherhood, women’s work and
careers, child-rearing, the domestic, relations between sexes
○ There are exceptions of NL neglect, but there are not many + NLs later
acknowledged they had been slow to understand women’s demands
• But: the answers are not simple:
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○ 1. New Liberals were personally much touched by the women’s suffrage campaign –
it split them politically, but also personally – New Liberal men were touched by
women’s suffrage militancy closely and personally, in their marriages, their families
and in their intimate friendships and their sexual lives. There were resentments,
arguments and family upsets. Marriages and relationships came under strain, and
even broke up under the pressure.
○ 2. New Liberals were also both touched personally and divided by the new
perspectives that women were taking on questions ‘beyond the vote’.
• Owen: The Nation group of New Liberals (formed 1909, a periodical)
○ Inc. Massingham, Hobson, Lawrence Hammond, Ponsonby (Lib MP), Masterman,
Brailsford, Hobhouse, editor of The Economist Hirst – Lloyd George and Churchill
close to the group at the time
○ Thrown into disarray when Jane Malloch, the wife of one member of the group (the
journalist H.N. Brailsford), and a member of the WSPU, courted arrest on the orders
of the Pankhurts, and was imprisoned and threatened with forced feeding
○ Forced feeding was publicly defended and instigated by another member of the
Nation group – Charles Masterman (government minister at the Home Office, and
responsible for the policing o the suffragettes)
○ Hobson – noted, privately , that Liberal men were disturbed by the spectacle of
prefiguratively free women, even when publicly and rationally, they supported
women’s suffrage
○ Owen – argues that the personal pressure, and emotional stress, was consciously
deployed by the militant suffragettes in order to break the disinterestedness of
Liberal men
▪ But: The women had brought the ‘wrong’ dispositions (personal ones) into
the public sphere, and the ‘wrong’ concerns (political ones) into the home.
• Concludes:
○ Standard histories of the New Liberalism are remarkably silent on the question of
women’s suffrage
○ They note that the New Liberals were mostly in favour, and that they opposed the
impatient demands of the militants
○ Also that the New Liberals said little about women’s suffrage in their published work
○ At the Nation lunch, women’s suffrage was the most divisive and emotive subject.
○ Rather than unite Liberal men in cool ‘sympathy’, with its weak action tendency,
militant tactics were designed to split them using hot emotions with strong action
tendencies
○ Angering men, therefore, should not be regarded as a failure. Militancy was a
divisive, overheated emotional strategy which accepted its alienating effect on some
supporters as the price to be paid for motivating other
• Also notes: The New Liberals prided themselves on the dynamism of their liberalism, and
their duty to use the political to serve the needs of the population, but failed to extend this
concern to women
○ Hobhouse: duty ‘to restate political principles in terms of the living needs of each
generation’
○ Personal was unacknowledged - Marriage, families, women’s limited opportunities
and their implications were not merely external objects of concern for New Liberal
men, unlike poverty (which they could write about in a dispassionate way since they
were not poor themselves)
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○ But the New Liberal men did have marriages and families themselves, yet this
personal element was missing from their writings
○ They believed that although it was right and proper that women should be free, they
could not be equal, if that meant having the same opportunities as men
○ This was because ‘nature’ and the collective good of society set limits to women’s
opportunities
○ As New Liberals, they believed that the good of society meant individuals had to
sacrifice some of their personal freedoms. Women would have to accept that certain
careers – even certain lives, such as the life of the mind
○ The New Liberal men also thought that women, and especially educated women,
would in the end accept this restriction on their freedom.
○ This was not for the conservative reason that such restrictions were natural
○ Women would accept limitations on their freedom, the men thought, because it
followed from the direction modern thought was taking, away from individual
selfishness towards the collective welfare of all
▪ *** really interesting point – as this suggests suffrage expansions wasn’t
necessarily in line with New Liberal ideology***
• Furthermore, The New Liberal men, in very many cases, had married women from a very
small pool, who were the first generation of women to go to university. These women faced
a (new) dilemma, that of the choice between marriage and a career.
○ Then men largely believed (like JS Mill) that educated women, even once politically
free, would go on choosing the ‘career’ of marriage, household and motherhood.
○ But it was becoming apparent to New Liberal men that many educated women were
unhappy about this choice – and this was apparent personally as their female
relationships (wives, daughters, sisters etc), were most affected by it
○ They could not easily ignore it, because the women expressed their unhappiness in
their own writing eg about unbalanced educational opportunities, the ‘destiny’ of
marriage, the expectations that even educated women would be primarily
responsible for domesticity and child-rearing rather than pursuing their own careers
○ In The Nation, the same bemused questions came up again and again: why was it
the most educated women who were reluctant to marry, or to bear children? Since
racial health – ‘eugenics’ – required the best and most able to breed, what would be
the consequences for the race if this went on?
○ Also note – women weren’t unaware of their lack of opportunities, it was specifically
wrote about it – specifically the unhappiness’s listed above
• The New Liberals’ separation of the personal and political made it hard for men and women
to think and write together.
○ Even when acknowledging issues beyond the vote, men and women wrote about
them separately
○ However we can find them writing together in a series of feminist debates that
appeared in the periodical The Freewoman (1910-11) – not a New Liberal text
○ Where are there overlaps and were are there gaps?
• Interestingly, New Liberal detachment from the personal is exemplified in their campaigns
before the First World War for male sexual purity. The New Liberals’ approach was to
address the personal (sex, in this case) politically without making the political itself personal.
○ It therefore admitted personal questions as matters of political concern only insofar
as they touched public ones – only considered prostitution when t touched
something already public eg the street (‘public nuisance’)
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○ Street-crime or the surplus of unruly and under-employed young men too old for
school and too young for adult work (‘public order’)
○ Infectious disease or the emerging science of population demographics and ‘race
fitness’ (‘public health’)
○ The nature of male sexuality itself was not addressed publicly.
○ This is an example of a disjoint approach– NL response was directed outwards, to
address the problem in others
○ The work of the Alliance barely intersected with women’s criticisms such as the
W.S.P.U. campaigns of 1912 -13. When men were forced by women to acknowledge
their complicity, considerable distress resulted.
• Masterman – he was involved in three different approaches to the problem of male purity
○ Disjoint approaches
○ Conjoint approaches – addressing the problem in each other
○ Reflexive approaches - individuals addressed the problem as individuals, each in
themselves
○ See if any of this is relevant
• Overall what we learn:
○ Enlarged understanding of the New Liberalism, by offering a new explanation of
what was arguably its greatest failure
○ Enlarges understanding of the women’s suffrage movement, by providing a new
account of its tactical choices, which goes beyond ‘persuasion’ and ‘alienation’
○ Enlarged understanding of responses to women’s suffrage, by offering an account
that goes beyond simple ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ responses, to a more nuanced
understanding of male support
• Women’s suffrage was a paradox: a liberal cause yet constantly frustrated by influential
Liberals.
• Why was it a liberal cause?
○ Ideology that until women had gained real freedom, no one would know what they
were actually capable of.
○ Initial stages their campaign relied on dedicated band of Liberal members. E.g.
Fawcett and Woodall.
○ Liberals were natural supporters of women’s suffrage – Liberal tradition since Mill
(“The Subjugation of Women”)
• Why was problematic for Liberals:
○ During 60s and 70s the Liberal Party was still of evolving from a host of provincial
interests and radical pressure groups, each was keen to use the national party as a
vehicle for achieving their objectives.
○ By women’s movement pursuing single-issue tactics, they exacerbated the
incoherence which already afflicted Liberalism- played in Conservative hands who
accused Liberals of being preoccupied with sectional interests.
○ Lack of discipline in parliament
○ Gladstone found women’s movement an unwanted complication.
○ 1884 Gladstone blocked Woodall’s amendment of the extension of the franchise.
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