The Complete Guide to Women's Suffrage

1. The Woman Who Did Not Legally Exist

What marriage did to a woman's rights before anyone mentioned voting.

Imagine that on the day you marry, you stop existing as a person in law. Your money becomes your husband's. Your wages, if you earn any, are his. If you leave, the children are his and he can forbid you to see them. You cannot sign a contract, sue anyone, or make a will without his permission. This was English law within living memory of your great-great-grandparents, and it has a name: coverture.

Coverture: The legal doctrine that on marriage a woman's identity was absorbed into her husband's. The eighteenth-century jurist Blackstone described husband and wife as one person in law — and, as campaigners pointed out, that person was the husband.

The vote was never the whole point. It was the lever. A group with no vote could be ignored by every politician, and was: campaigns to give married women property rights, to allow divorce on equal terms, to open the professions and universities, all ran into the same wall. Nobody who made the laws had to answer to the people the laws were about.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

Wrote the argument in 1792, over a century before anyone acted on it.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women appeared foolish because they were educated to be ornamental, and that a society which trains half its people to be charming and dependent should not then complain that they are. She was widely read, then buried for decades after her husband published an honest memoir of her private life and scandalised readers into dismissing her ideas.

The nineteenth century chipped away at the wall. The Custody of Infants Act (1839) let some mothers petition for access to their young children. The Married Women's Property Acts (1870, 1882) finally let a wife keep her own earnings and property. Each of these took years of campaigning by women who could not vote for the Parliament passing them.

In 1867 the philosopher John Stuart Mill proposed replacing the word 'man' with 'person' in the Reform Act. It was defeated by 196 votes to 73 — but 73 MPs voting for women's suffrage in 1867 told campaigners the argument was winnable, and they organised around that number for the next fifty years.

What just happened

• Coverture erased a married woman's separate legal identity
• Wollstonecraft published the case for women's education and rights in 1792
• Property and custody reforms came slowly, won by women who could not vote

The vote mattered because everything else depended on it: a group that cannot remove a politician does not have to be listened to.

For forty years the campaign was patient, respectable and constitutional. It got tantalisingly close, repeatedly, and then it stopped moving at all.

2. Forty Years of Doing It Properly

The suffragists: petitions, pamphlets, and the limits of politeness.

From the 1860s onwards, local suffrage societies collected petitions, lobbied MPs, held meetings and published arguments. In 1897 they merged into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies under Millicent Fawcett. Their members were called suffragists. Their method was persuasion, and by 1900 they had built the largest women's political organisation in the country, with tens of thousands of members.

They had already won some ground. From 1869 women ratepayers could vote in local elections; they could sit on school boards and, later, county councils. Women were serving as Poor Law guardians, running hospitals and administering schools. The strange result was that a woman could help govern a town but not vote for the Parliament that funded it.

The arguments, as they were actually made

The blockage was not really public opinion. It was parliamentary arithmetic. Private members' bills for women's suffrage passed second readings several times and then ran out of time, because governments would not give them the parliamentary days they needed. And the Liberal government elected in 1906 with a huge majority contained many supporters of the principle — and a leader, Asquith, who was firmly against it.

By 1913 the constitutional suffragists were organising a 'Pilgrimage': thousands of women walked to London from as far away as Newcastle and Cornwall, holding meetings in every town on the way. Around fifty thousand gathered in Hyde Park. It is the largest event in the campaign, and it is almost never the one people remember.

What just happened

• Suffragists campaigned constitutionally from the 1860s and united under Fawcett in 1897
• Women already voted and served in local government
• Bills repeatedly stalled for lack of parliamentary time, and Asquith opposed the principle

Forty years of doing everything correctly produced local votes, huge memberships and no national franchise — which is the context for what a group of women decided to do next.

In 1903, in a front room in Manchester, a widow with four children decided that asking politely had failed.

3. Deeds, Not Words

The Pankhursts turn a campaign into a confrontation.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)

Founded the WSPU and made the vote impossible to ignore.

She had grown up in a political household, married a radical barrister who wrote suffrage bills, and been widowed with children to support. She had spent decades inside the constitutional campaign and concluded that it would be respectfully listened to and permanently ignored. The Women's Social and Political Union, founded in 1903, took a motto that was an accusation: Deeds, not words.

13 October 1905 — The Free Trade Hall, Manchester

Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, a mill worker, stand up at a Liberal meeting and ask whether a Liberal government will give votes to women. They ask again. And again. They are dragged out, and outside they deliberately commit a minor offence to be arrested. In court they refuse to pay the fine and go to prison instead. The story is on every front page the next morning.

That is the invention of the whole method. The point was never the question — it was the arrest. A campaign nobody covered had discovered that confrontation bought newspaper space that fifty years of petitions never had.

The suffragettes — a name coined mockingly by the Daily Mail, which the WSPU cheerfully adopted — escalated from heckling to chaining themselves to railings, to smashing shop windows with hammers carried in muffs, to burning empty buildings and postboxes. They took care not to kill anyone; the targets were property, and the aim was to make the country ungovernable at the level of nuisance.

They were also brilliant at spectacle. They designed their own colours — purple for dignity, white for purity, green for hope — and staged processions of thousands in matching sashes. They published newspapers, produced merchandise, and turned court appearances into speeches. Modern political campaigning learned an enormous amount from them.

What just happened

• The WSPU was founded in 1903 with the motto 'Deeds, not words'
• Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst engineered the first arrest in 1905
• Militancy escalated from heckling to window-smashing and arson, targeting property

The suffragettes solved a problem the suffragists could not: how to make a campaign that the press and Parliament had learned to ignore impossible to ignore.

The government's answer created the most disturbing chapter of the whole story — and it began when the prisoners stopped eating.

4. Hunger, Force, and the Cat and Mouse Act

What the state did when it could not afford a dead suffragette.

Suffragette prisoners demanded to be treated as political prisoners rather than common criminals. Refused, they went on hunger strike. The government faced a choice between releasing them — which would make prison meaningless — and letting them die, which would create martyrs. It chose a third option: force-feeding.

A woman was held down by wardresses. A tube was forced through her mouth or nose into her stomach and liquid poured in. Prisoners described nosebleeds, vomiting, torn tissue, teeth broken by the metal gag, and pneumonia from liquid entering the lungs. It was carried out repeatedly, on some women dozens of times. Doctors publicly protested that it was neither medically safe nor anything other than what it looked like.

“I resisted, but I was overpowered … the pain was intense and at last I must have given way, for the gag was pushed between my teeth.”

Her account was published by the WSPU and used in a court case. It is one of the most cited pieces of first-hand testimony from the campaign.

The Cat and Mouse Act: Its real name was the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act 1913. Hunger-striking prisoners were released when dangerously weak, then re-arrested once they recovered to serve the rest of the sentence. The nickname — the state as a cat playing with a mouse — came from the suffragettes, and it stuck so completely that almost nobody uses the official title.

4 June 1913 — The Derby, Epsom Downs

Emily Wilding Davison ducks under the rail and steps into the path of the King's horse, Anmer. She is struck at speed and dies four days later. In her bag are a return train ticket, a diary with plans for the following weekend, and two suffragette flags — which is why most historians now think she intended to attach a flag to the horse, not to die.

Her funeral procession brought thousands of women in white through London. The press coverage was hostile as often as sympathetic, and militancy was dividing the movement badly: the constitutional suffragists argued publicly that arson was costing them support in Parliament, and the WSPU itself was splitting over the leadership's autocratic control.

What just happened

• Hunger strikes were answered with force-feeding, repeated hundreds of times
• The 1913 Cat and Mouse Act released and re-arrested weakened prisoners
• Emily Wilding Davison died at the Derby, probably attempting to attach a flag

The state's response gave the campaign its most powerful evidence — a government physically forcing tubes into women who had asked to vote — while the escalation also alienated potential supporters.

Then, in August 1914, the campaign stopped overnight — and the argument was won in a way nobody in it had planned.

5. The War, and the Vote

1918: a franchise reform that was mostly about men.

When war broke out the WSPU suspended militancy entirely and threw itself into the war effort; the constitutional suffragists split, with many campaigning for peace. Women moved into munitions factories, transport, offices, farming and nursing on an enormous scale. By 1918 something close to a million women had worked in munitions alone.

Commonly believed: Women were given the vote as a reward for their war work.

Actually: It is the tidiest story and it does not survive the detail. The 1918 Act gave the vote to women over thirty who met a property qualification — deliberately excluding most of the young, working-class women who had actually filled the munitions factories. If war work were the reason, the Act was aimed at precisely the wrong people.

The war work itself was harder and stranger than the phrase suggests. Women filling shells handled TNT daily, and the chemical turned their skin and hair yellow — they were nicknamed 'canaries', and the joke covered the fact that the exposure damaged livers and killed some of them. Others drove trams, delivered coal, worked lathes in engineering shops that had barred women for a century, and ran farms. Wages rose. So did the number of women who had their own money for the first time.

Then, when the men came home, most of them were expected to give it all back. Employers had signed agreements to restore pre-war practices, and hundreds of thousands of women left industrial work within a year of the armistice, many with no choice about it. That is the detail that makes the reward story hardest to sustain: a country genuinely grateful for war work does not spend 1919 removing it.

What actually forced the issue was a technical problem. Existing law required twelve months' residence to qualify to vote, which would have disqualified millions of returning soldiers — the men who had just fought the war. Reform was unavoidable, so Parliament had to reopen the whole franchise, and once it was open, the suffrage question could not be dodged. Fear of militancy resuming after the war added urgency.

How the vote actually arrived

Emmeline Pankhurst died in June 1928, a few weeks before the Equal Franchise Act received royal assent. She had begun campaigning as a young woman in the 1880s. The full equal vote took a further ten years after the first partial one, and it took another generation before women appeared in Parliament in any numbers.

Did militancy win the vote, or delay it?

• It won it: Fifty years of respectable petitioning produced nothing at national level. Within a decade of the WSPU's founding, women's suffrage was the most discussed political question in Britain, and no government could pretend it was fringe. Attention is a precondition of change, and militancy bought it.
• It delayed it: Bills were close to passing before 1912. Arson and window-smashing gave undecided MPs a respectable reason to refuse — nobody wants to be seen legislating under threat — and split the movement. The largest suffrage organisation in the country was always the constitutional one, and its patient work built the majority that eventually passed the Act.

What just happened

• Militancy was suspended in 1914 and women entered wartime work in huge numbers
• The 1918 Act enfranchised women over 30 with property, excluding most munitions workers
• Equal voting rights arrived in 1928, weeks after Emmeline Pankhurst's death

The vote came from a combination of decades of argument, a franchise crisis about soldiers, and a government unwilling to face renewed militancy — not from gratitude.

Now you know the story

The women in this story were not asking to be admired. They were making an argument, and they made it for eighty years before it was accepted. If you want to know what it felt like from inside, go and ask Emmeline Pankhurst why she thought breaking windows was the reasonable option — she has an answer ready, and it is not the one you expect.

• Explain what 'civil death' meant for a married woman in law, and why the vote followed from it
• Tell the difference between suffragists and suffragettes, and why it mattered
• Describe force-feeding and the Cat and Mouse Act without flinching from the detail
• Weigh the real argument: did militancy win the vote, or delay it?

Back to Women's Suffrage →

General learning. Related material appears within Pearson Edexcel International GCSE History breadth study B8 (Diversity, rights and equality in Britain, 1914–2010), which Incandio has not yet built — do not treat this course as coverage of it.