The call for votes for women did not emerge out of a vacuum. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, called for women to have a voice in Parliament; the great radical orator, Henry Hunt, wanted the Great Reform Act of 1832 to be amended to include women; and Susanna Inge and Anne Walker, among others, attempted to direct Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s to include votes for women.
In each of these instances, however, the call for votes for women was often bound up with the issue of universal suffrage, which, when looked at more closely, often meant universal male suffrage. When the issue of female suffrage was raised in movements led by men it was invariably regarded as being secondary to the aim of extending the male franchise.
Then in the 1860s a distinct women’s suffrage campaign emerged. In 1866 the first mass petition calling for the vote to be extended to women was presented to Parliament and the following year the House of Commons debated an amendment to a Reform Bill proposing women’s suffrage for the first time. 1867 also saw the formation of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, followed by other groups and societies around the country.
What was it about the 1860s that made this decade ripe for the emergence of the women’s suffrage campaign?
To answer this question we first need to look at some underlying factors.
Chartism, the campaign to abolish the slave trade, efforts to repeal the Corn Law and a host of other causes had provided, by the 1860s, a training in activism for many of the women who would go on to be leading figures in the campaign for votes for women. Organising petitions, public speaking and canvassing MPs were all skills that had been developed over the preceding decades.
Educational reforms earlier in the century also led to there being a growing number of educated, articulate women who felt frustrated by the limited opportunities society offered and were equipped with the skills to press for change. For many of these women, the vote was seen as the only way to overcome the obstacles placed in the way of them fulfilling their potential.
The growth of the state also plays a part in this story. Far from being the ‘night watchman’ state of the earlier decades of the century, concerned largely with public order, taxation and foreign policy, the reach of the government was growing. As the state grew it increasingly involved itself in areas of the economy and society that brought it into more direct contact with the lives of women. If the government was going to pass laws that effected how women lived their lives it seemed only reasonable, so campaigners argued, that women should have a say in how those laws were made.
There were also a growing number of male MPs who were sympathetic to the question of women’s suffrage. John Stuart Mill, the leading Liberal intellectual of his generation, was one such supporter. Mill had included votes for women in his own election campaign and published in 1869 The Subjection of Women in which he argued that the absence of female voices in politics had led to their interests being neglected.
However, important though these factors are none explain why it was the 1860s as opposed to the 1850s or 1870s that saw the emergence of the organised national campaign for women’s suffrage.
To answer this question we need to look at the breakdown in the bipartisan resistance to electoral reform that had held since the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Pressure to reform Parliament and to extend the franchise to more men had been growing for some time, with the National Reform Union and Reform League both being founded in 1864. Then, in 1866, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, proposed that the voting qualification of £10 for householders should be dropped to £7. This would have extended the vote to around 200,000 men, including for the first time skilled members of the working class. Gladstone’s proposal split the Liberals and the Bill was defeated.
A new Conservative government then took office and Benjamin Disraeli, a rising star of the party, proposed his own package of reform. In part, this was in response to external pressure. The National Reform Union and Reform League had coordinated a series of protests that had culminated in the Hyde Park riots of July 1866. It was clear that the reform question was not going to go away.
To prevent the situation getting worse the Conservatives sought to introduce reform that would be extensive enough to calm the public mood but not so radical as to challenge the political establishment. Disraeli also calculated that by being the party to deliver a measure of reform the Conservatives would reap the reward in votes and embarrass and divide the Liberals.
It was in this context that the Kensington Society, a committee of women suffrage campaigners, organised their 1866 petition, which contained over 1,500 names. John Stuart Mill received the petition in Westminster Hall and the following year tabled an amendment to Disraeli’s Bill that proposed to extend the vote to women. Mill’s amendment received 73 votes, more than he was expecting, but far short of the number needed to see the amendment become part of the Second Reform Act.
Despite this outcome the organisation of the petition, the first of over 15,000 petitions that would be presented over the next 50 years, and the re-opening of the question of electoral reform in Parliament proved to be a major stimulus to the women’s suffrage campaign.
In opening the door to the possibility of extending the vote to more men, Gladstone and Disraeli inadvertently spurred women to seek a vote of their own and a voice in Parliament.
By Dr Matthew Smith
Matthew is the Project Director of the Citizens Project and a Senior Fellow in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
