Women & Right to Vote

After World War One, Women in American and Europe won the right to vote. The change in the women’s status was a result of the effects of World War One. Winning the right to vote was important in changing women's role in society. Before winning the right to society did not see women as full legal people. This meant that women could not do business, own property, or be involved in legal matters without the approval of a man, usually a father or a husband. Winning the right to vote was important because it gave women the political and legal rights that they had been denied for most of history.

In North America and England, women known as suffragettes had been campaigning for the right to vote since the middle of the nineteenth century. Many suffragettes were subjected to harassment by governments for their political actions, and some were even jailed.

World War One had a crucial impact on the struggle for women and the right to vote because women demonstrated their ability to work in the war effort. During the war, millions of women had entered into the workforce to support the home front. Even though many of these women returned to their traditional rules after the war, the confidence and experience of working outside the home stayed with them.

In the years following the war, women won the right to vote in most of Europe and North America. In 1918, women won the right to vote in Germany, Austria and England (for women over age 30). The following years, women in the United States(1920), Belgium, the Netherlands and the newly created countries of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Irish Free-State and got the right to vote. However, some countries kept women from voting for several more decades - like France, which did not give women the right to vote until 1945 (after World War Two).

This expansion of legal rights was matched by new technologies, particularly the automobile, which freed women from their traditional roles in housekeeping and family. During the 1920’s, popular culture, as seen in movies, in Europe and America showed liberated women who smoked, drove cars, and lived their lives with the freedom traditionally held by men. While it would take decades for women’s equality to become the norm in Western societies, over the course of the twentieth century women in much of the world reached political, social, economic, equality with men.

Biography - Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 England to a family that was involved in liberal and radical politics. She was one of ten children in her family. One of her earliest memories was of her father remarking, “What a pity she wasn’t born a lad”. Pankhurst became interested in the cause of women getting the right to vote after attending a public meeting on the issue when she was 14. In 1878, she married Richard Pankhurst, who was 24 years older but supported her political activism in the Women’s Franchise League (An early organization for winning women the right to vote). Together they had five children before he died in 1898.

In 1903, Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) as a more radical organization to fight for women’s right to vote. In organizing the WSPU, Pankhurst said the slogan would be “Deeds, not words”. Pankhurst’s oldest daughters were also leaders in the WSPU. The WSPU began by holding “Women’s Parliaments” in London that coincided with the official meetings of Parliament. The WSPU had a strategy of targeting political parties with protests to force them to put issue of women’s voting rights on the Parliamentary agenda. One British Newspaper wrote about one of these meetings using the diminutive term "suffragette" (instead of the standard "suffragist") to describe the more militant members of the WSPU. Pankhurst and her supporters seized upon the term and adopted it to separate themselves from the more moderate groups.

The slogan of “Deeds, not words” began to have meeting in 1908 after a large rally of 500,000 activists in London was ignored by Parliamentary leaders. Following the rally, a group of young WSPU members protested this by throwing rocks and breaking windows in Prime Minister’s house. While Pankhurst did not tell her supporters to do this, she did not object to the tactic of breaking windows. After this, members of the WSPU would engage in more acts of destruction to draw attention to their cause including using a hatchet to carve “Votes for Women” in the Prime Minister’s carriage and even cases of arson.

Pankhurst was arrested the first time in 1908 when she tried to deliver a petition to the Prime Minster in Parliament. At her trial, she famously said, “We are not here because we are law-breakers; we are here in our effort to become law-makers.” She spent six weeks in prison which brought recognition to her cause and made it a useful tool for getting public attention and support. Shortly after being released, she was arrested again after striking a policeman. In total she would be arrested seven more times. Pankhurst and many of the WSPU members who were arrested went on hunger strikes to protest their imprisonment. The prison authorities responded to these protests by force-feeding the women by using steel gags to hold their mouth open and feeding them through a tube. This policy caused public outrage and police began to worry about the health of the WSPU members in prison – especially the fear of the public backlash if a WSPU member should die in prison. The police switched to a policy of “cat and mouse” where they would arrest and then release WSPU members before they became too weak from not eating.

When World War One began Pankhurst considered the treat from Germany greater a more pressing concern then winning the right to vote. She made an agreement with the government for the WSPU to suspend all action during the war. She began to use her influence and spoke for women to support the war effort. She also established a home for war orphans (children born to women whose boy friends were killed in the war) and even adopted four children herself.

In 1918, as the war was ending, British Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act which allowed women over 30 to vote. Pankhurst organized the Women's Party to act on behalf of issues that concern women. However, the party did not win many votes. In 1926 she joined the Conservative Party and ran for Parliament – but was not elected. She died in 1928.

Source # 1 - Video clip on the reasons Suffragettes were regarded as terrorists -click here