Women's suffrage: Suffragists and Suffragettes
The Campaign for Women’s Votes
Women in Britain paid taxes, ran businesses and raised families, but were excluded entirely from voting in parliamentary elections. By 1897 a moderate campaign for women’s suffrage — the right to vote — had been building for over thirty years. Women's suffrage was debated in Parliament as early as 1867, when John Stuart Mill proposed an amendment to extend the vote to women. It was defeated, but the debate never went away.
The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), founded in 1897 and led by Millicent Fawcett, campaigned through legal, peaceful means: petitions, public meetings and lobbying Parliament.
The Suffragists: NUWSS
Millicent Fawcett became president of the NUWSS in 1897 and led it for over twenty years. The Suffragists (as members of the NUWSS were known) believed in working within the law. They organised peaceful demonstrations, collected hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, and lobbied sympathetic MPs. By 1913 the NUWSS had around 54,000 members, organised in over 400 local societies. Fawcett argued that women’s capacity for rational argument was the best proof that they deserved the vote — and that violent tactics would undermine the cause.
The Suffragists made real but slow progress. Several private members’ bills to extend the vote to women came close to passing in the early 1900s but were blocked or talked out. Prime Minister Asquith was personally opposed to women’s suffrage, and the Liberal government, despite its progressive credentials, refused to act.
The Suffragettes: WSPU
Frustrated by inaction, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester in 1903 alongside her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. The WSPU’s motto was “Deeds, not words.” At first the WSPU pursued peaceful methods alongside the NUWSS, but from 1908 it escalated to increasingly militant tactics: smashing windows, chaining themselves to railings, setting fire to post boxes and empty buildings, and disrupting public meetings.
When arrested, Suffragettes mounted hunger strikes in prison to force the government to release them or risk the scandal of a campaigner dying in custody. The government responded in 1913 with the Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed hunger-striking prisoners to be released until they recovered their health and then re-arrested. Critics called it inhumane and designed to keep women in a permanent state of legal jeopardy without the martyrdom of a prison death.
Emily Davison was a committed Suffragette who had been imprisoned multiple times and force-fed during hunger strikes. On 4 June 1913 she ran onto the racecourse at the Epsom Derby and was struck by the King’s horse, Anmer. She died from her injuries four days later. Her funeral procession through London was attended by tens of thousands of supporters. Historians debate her intentions: some argue she intended to attach a WSPU banner to the horse as a protest; others believe she intended to die for the cause. Either way, her death drew international attention to women’s suffrage.
The Cat and Mouse Act 1913 allowed the government to release hunger-striking Suffragettes temporarily when they became seriously ill, then re-arrest them when they recovered. It was designed to prevent a Suffragette dying in custody and becoming a martyr.
Divisions Within the Campaign
The WSPU was increasingly dominated by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, who ruled it autocratically. Sylvia Pankhurst was eventually expelled for her socialist and working-class focus, which conflicted with the WSPU’s increasingly narrow middle-class emphasis. The NUWSS and WSPU also disagreed fundamentally on tactics: Fawcett consistently argued that violence and property destruction alienated public sympathy and gave opponents grounds to deny women the vote on the basis that they were “irrational.”
The First World War and the 1918 Act
When war broke out in August 1914, both the NUWSS and the WSPU suspended their campaigns. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst actively encouraged women to support the war effort and pressure men to enlist — a dramatic reversal that caused a split with Sylvia Pankhurst, who opposed the war. During the war, women took on vital roles — in munitions factories, as nurses, as land army workers, and in transport — that made it almost impossible to sustain the argument that they were unfit to vote.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote to women aged 30 and over who met a property qualification, enfranchising approximately 8.4 million women. Men over 21 received the vote without property qualification. Full equal voting rights for women — voting at 21 on the same terms as men — came only with the Equal Franchise Act 1928.
Historians debate which factors mattered most. The Suffragette view emphasises that militancy forced the government to act. But the age and property restrictions in the 1918 Act suggest the government had not fully accepted equality — they deliberately excluded young working-class women who had done most of the war work. The Suffragist view emphasises that the NUWSS’s patient lobbying and the wartime service of women together created the political conditions for reform. It is most accurate to see the 1918 Act as the product of long-term constitutional pressure (NUWSS), changed attitudes from wartime service, and the political inconvenience of continuing to exclude women once millions of men had also been disenfranchised by the loss of the residential qualification during the war.