WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE

By 1900, votes for women was an issue whose time had come. Political rights had been on the feminist agenda since the French Revolution, but it was not until the 1860s and 1870s that women organised specifically to achieve the vote.

The suffrage campaign, then, did not emerge out of the blue. In northern Europe it is possible to trace a fairly seamless line from the temperance and social purity activism of the 1870s and 1880s to the demand for political representation in the 1900s. In Britain and in Germany, feminists had dem­onstrated their success on the ground by engaging in social and moral reform organisations. In Britain, many thousands of temperance activists drawn, for the most part, from the ranks of urban middle-class women, saw them­selves first and foremost as moral reformers. But their day-to-day encounters with working-class families and their unsuccessful attempts to convince the government to introduce temperance legislation, provided both public polit­ical practice and a catalyst for some to become advocates of the vote, for it was only through granting women the parliamentary franchise that temper­ance campaigners could see their way to success.⁶⁴ Similarly, in Germany, where the majority of feminists within the moderate wing of the move­ment were initially hostile to a campaign for women's political rights, the campaign to abolish the state regulation of prostitution turned the majority in favour of suffrage in order that feminists and women in general might have a means of influencing government policy on matters affecting them, and in order that women's ‘moral voice' might be heard on the political stage.⁶⁵

The intransigence of the opposition to women's suffrage suggests that political rights were indeed the last bastion of separate spheres to be breached in the light of earlier successes in the fields of legal reform and educational opportunity.

The story of the fight for the vote — particularly in Britain — is often dominated by the tactics of the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the so-called suffragettes, formed in 1903. Frustrated with the constitutional approach of the National Union for Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) — the suffragists — the suffragettes, led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, embarked upon a strategy of civil disobedience which drew massive public attention to the cause of votes for women, positive and negative. WSPU members across the country took the suffrage battle to the streets, the homes of politicians and the play parks of the rich.

We have tried to be womanly, we have tried to use feminine influence, and we have seen that it is of no use. Men have invariably got reforms for their impatience. And they have not our excuse for being impatient... it is because we realise that the condition of our sex is so deplorable that it is our duty even to break the law in order to call attention to the reasons why we do so.⁶⁶

However, an exclusive focus on the actions of the minority (WSPU) detracts from the truly international character of the struggle for political rights, and risks ignoring the dogged and just as determined activities of the majority of feminists across Europe who mostly advocated peaceable and lawful campaigning. Only in Ireland, where nationalist women were engaged in the independence struggle, was such violent activity seen outside Britain. Elsewhere in Europe, suffrage campaigners addressed meetings, organised mass demonstrations and circulated petitions and pamphlets. Most suffrage associations rejected the militant tactics of the WSPU on the grounds that such methods would be counterproductive. Some found their antics dis­tasteful, certainly unfeminine. In Germany, where suffragists legitimately feared the repressive power of the state so soon after the relaxation of legal restraints in 1908 which had forbidden Prussian and Saxon feminists from political association, militant tactics were condemned by moderate femin­ists as undignified, ridiculous, a sign of ‘desperado politics'.⁶⁷ Conversely, French suffragists were accused of endangering the very existence of the Third Republic; female enfranchisement, it was argued, given women's ‘innate' conservatism and Catholicism, would strengthen the forces of reac­tion and anti-republicanism. Although some individual feminists such as Madeleine Pelletier and Nelly Roussel did speak out against this notion and, in Pelletier's case, adopted tactics akin to those of the British suffragettes, the rights of women were subordinated to the need for the stability of the French state until 1945.

But tactical differences concealed a united aim, a fact acknowledged by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847—1929), president of the NUWSS. She con­demned the use of physical violence but recognised that such ‘novel and startling methods' had the effect of drawing ‘a far larger amount of public attention to the claims of women to representation than ever had been given to the subject before.' Moreover, diversity in method, she argued, had con­tributed to the growth of the campaign across the country and ‘however acute were the differences between the heads of the different societies, the general mass of suffragists throughout the country were loyal to the cause by whomsoever it was represented.'⁶⁸

Across Europe, suffragists were joining in common cause. In 1913 the International Woman Suffrage Association met in Budapest. The mood was optimistic. French feminists were hopeful the municipal franchise would soon be reformed in favour of women; in Britain, suffragists were confident the government could hold out no longer. In her address to the international suffragists, the American Carrie Chapman Catt (1859—1947), reflected this confidence, stating: ‘our movement has reached the last stage... Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge! It is the inevitable premonition of victory.'⁶⁹ The primacy of foreign policy and the outbreak of war just a few months later merely postponed the successful outcome of her prediction. Although the suffrage campaign was put on ice during the war, by 1918 a combination of the political process, war and revolution, and a realisation that women's votes would more likely lead to stability than not, resulted in the inclusion of women in the franchise of a swathe of European states from Russia to Britain. Their sisters in France and Italy were to be disappointed. Their struggle continued for another 30 years.