WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
A SHORT HISTORY OF A
GREAT MOVEMENT
By MILLICENT GARRETT
FAWCETT, LL.D.
PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL UNION OF WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE SOCIETIES
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
67 LONG ACRE, W.C., AND EDINBURGH
NEW YORK: THE DODGE PUBLISHING CO.
It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed "with pomp of waters unwithstood"--
Road by which all might come and go that would,
And bear out freights of worth to foreign lands;
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish, and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake--the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In everything we're sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
--W. Wordsworth.
WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS
We suffragists have no cause to be ashamed of the founders of our
movement--
"In everything we're sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold."
Mary Wollstonecraft[1] started the demand of women for political
liberty in England, Condorcet in France,[2] and the heroic group of
anti-slavery agitators in the United States. It is true that Horace
Walpole called Mary Wollstonecraft "a hyena in petticoats." But this
proves nothing except his profound ignorance of her character and aims.
Have we not in our own time heard the ladies who first joined the
Primrose League described by an excited politician as "filthy witches"?
The epithet of course was as totally removed from any relation to the
facts as that which Horace Walpole applied to Mary Wollstonecraft.
William Godwin's touching memoir of his wife, Mr. Kegan Paul's _William
Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries_, and Mrs. Pennell's Biography
show Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of exceptionally pure and exalted
character. Her sharp wits had been sharpened by every sort of personal
misfortune; they enabled her to pierce through all shams and pretences,
but they never caused her to lower her high sense of duty; they never
embittered her or caused her to waver in her allegiance to the pieties
of domestic life. Her husband wrote of her soon after her death, "She
was a worshipper of domestic life." If there is anything in appearance,
her face in the picture in the National Portrait Gallery speaks for
her. Southey wrote of her, that of all the lions of the day whom he had
seen "her face was the best, infinitely the best."
The torch which was lighted by Mary Wollstonecraft was never afterwards
extinguished; there are glimpses of its light in the poems of her
son-in-law Shelley. The frequent references to the principle of
equality between men and women in the "Revolt of Islam" will occur to
every reader.
In 1810 Sydney Smith, in the _Edinburgh Review_, wrote one of the most
brilliant and witty articles which even he ever penned in defence of an
extension of the means of a sound education to women.
In 1813 Mrs. Elizabeth Fry began to visit prisoners in Newgate, and
shocked those who, citing the parrot cry "woman's place is home,"
thought a good woman had no duties outside its walls. She had children
of her own, but this did not shut her heart to the wretched waifs
for whom she founded a school in prison. A little after this England
began to be stirred by the agitation which resulted in the passing
of the Reform Bill of 1832. It is one of life's little ironies that
James Mill, the founder of the Philosophical Radicals, and the father
of John Stuart Mill, who laid the foundation of the modern suffrage
movement, was among those who, in the early nineteenth century,
justified the exclusion of women from all political rights. In an Essay
on "Government" published in 1823 as an appendix to the fifth edition
of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, he dismissed in a sentence all claim
of women to share in the benefits and protection of representative
government, stating that their interests were sufficiently protected
by the enfranchisement of their husbands and fathers. It is true that
this did not pass unchallenged; a book in reply was published (1825)
by William Thomson. This book had a preface by Mrs. Wheeler, at whose
instigation it was written.[3]
The Reform Movement was agitating the whole country at this period,
and political excitement led to political riots, burning of buildings,
and general orgies of massacre and destruction. The Government of the
day had their share in the blunders and stupidities which led to these
crimes, and in none were these qualities more conspicuous than in the
riot at Manchester, which came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre in
August 1819, in which six people were killed and about thirty seriously
injured.
What connects it with the subject of these pages has already been
hinted at. Women as well as men had been ridden down by the cavalry;
they were present at the meeting not merely as spectators, but as
taking an active part in the Reform Movement. A picture of the Peterloo
Massacre, now in the Manchester Reform Club, is dedicated to "Henry
Hunt, Esq., the chairman of the meeting and _to the Female Reformers
of Manchester_ and the adjacent towns who were exposed to and suffered
from the wanton and furious attack made on them by that brutal armed
force, the Manchester and Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry." The picture
represents women in every part of the fray, and certainly taking their
share in its horrors. In the many descriptions of the event, no word of
reprobation has come to my notice of the women who were taking part in
the meeting; they were neither "hyenas" nor "witches," but patriotic
women helping their husbands and brothers to obtain political liberty;
in a word, they were working for men and not for themselves, and this
made an immense difference in the judgment meted out to them. However,
it is quite clear that even as long ago as 1819 the notion that women
have nothing to do with politics was in practice rejected by the
political common-sense of Englishmen. No one doubted that women were,
and ought to be, deeply interested in what concerned the political
well-being of their country.
Some political antiquarians in this country have expressed their
conviction that in early times when the institution of feudalism was
the strongest political force in England, women exercised electoral
rights in those cases where they were entitled as landowners or as
freewomen of certain towns to do so.[4] This view has been combated
by other authorities, and has not been accepted in the law courts,
where special emphasis has been laid on the fact that no authentic
case of a woman having actually cast a vote, as of right, in a
Parliamentary election can be produced. The claim that in ancient
times women did exercise the franchise, whether capable of being
established or not, certainly does not deserve to be dismissed as in
itself absurd and incredible. I believe it has been called by some
anti-suffragists "an impudent imposture," in the most approved style
of the "what-I-know-not-is-not-knowledge" pedant. Whatever it may be,
it is not this. In a book published in 1911,[5] there is a passage
which goes far to prove that even as late as 1807 the right of women
possessing the necessary legal qualification to vote in Parliamentary
elections was recognised as being in existence. One of the Spencer
Stanhopes was a candidate during the general election of 1807, and
Mrs. Spencer Stanhope writes to her son, John, that her husband's party
was so certain of success that they had announced that their women folk
need not vote. "Your father was at Wakefield canvassing yesterday....
They determined not to admit the ladies to vote, which is extraordinary
and very hard, considering how few privileges we poor females have.
Should it come to a very close struggle, I daresay they will then call
upon the ladies, and in that case every self-respecting woman should
most certainly refuse her assistance."
The contention is that the Reform Act of 1832, by substituting the
words "male person" in lieu of the word "man" in the earlier Acts,
first placed upon the women of this country the burden of a statutory
disability. This process, it is argued, was repeated in the Municipal
Corporation Act of 1835, and is the reason why the admission of women
to the municipal franchise in 1870 is spoken of in many of our suffrage
publications as the "_Restoration_" of the municipal suffrage to women.
The point appears more of antiquarian than of practical interest. If
substantiated, it only illustrates anew the fact that under feudalism,
and as long as feudalism survived, property rather than human beings
had a special claim to representation, but it assumed a larger degree
of importance from what followed in 1850 and 1868.
In 1850 Lord Brougham's Act was passed, which enacted that in all Acts
of Parliament "words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed
to include females unless the contrary is expressly provided." In the
Reform Bill of 1867 the words "male person" were abandoned, and the
word "man" was substituted, and many lawyers and others believed that
under Lord Brougham's Act of 1850 women were thereby enfranchised.
Under this belief, the reasons for which were set forth by Mr. Chisholm
Anstey, barrister and ex-M.P., in two legal pamphlets published, one
just before and one just after the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867,
a large number of women rate-payers claimed before the revising
barristers in 1868 to be placed upon the Parliamentary register. Under
the able leadership of Miss Lydia Becker 5346 women householders of
Manchester made this claim, 1341 in Salford, 857 in Broughton and
Pendleton, 1 lady in S.E. Lancashire, a county constituency, 239
in Edinburgh, and a few in other parts of Scotland. The revising
barristers in most of these cases declined to place the women's names
on the register; and in order to get a legal decision, four cases were
selected and argued before the Court of Common Pleas on November 7,
1868. The judges were the Lord Chief Justice Bovill, with the Justices
Willes, Keating, and Byles. Sir John (afterwards Lord) Coleridge, and
Dr. Pankhurst were counsel for the appellants. The case (technically
known as Chorlton _v._ Lings) was given against the women, on the
express ground that although the word "man" in an Act of Parliament
must be held to include women, "_this did not apply to the privileges
granted by the State_." This judgment, therefore, established as law
that "the same words in the same Act of Parliament shall for the
purpose of voting apply to men only, but for the purpose of taxation
shall include women."[6]
Some women's names had been accepted by revising barristers, and were
already upon the register. A question was raised whether they could
remain there. The barrister in charge of this case, Mr. A. Russell,
Q.C., argued that when once the names were upon the register, if they
had not been objected to they must remain; one of the judges thereupon
remarked that if this were so there would be no power to remove the
name of _a dog or a horse_ from the register if once it had been
inscribed upon it. This was eloquent of the political status of women,
identifying it by implication with that of the domestic animals. _The
Times_, in anticipation of the Chorlton _v._ Lings case coming on for
hearing, had an article on November 3, 1868, in which it said: "If
one supposes it ever was the intention of the legislature to give
women a vote, and if they do get it, it will be by a sort of accident,
in itself objectionable, though, in its practical consequences,
perhaps harmless enough. On the other hand, if they are refused, _the
nation will, no doubt, be formally and in the light of day committing
itself through its judicial tribunal, to the dangerous doctrine that
representation need not go along with taxation_." With the decision in
Chorlton _v._ Lings, the last chance of women getting the suffrage by
"a sort of accident" vanishes, and very few of us can now regret it,
for the long struggle to obtain suffrage has been a great education
for women, not only politically, but also in courage, perseverance,
endurance, and comradeship with each other.
If the nineteenth century was a time of education for women, it was no
less a time of education for men. We have not yet arrived at an equal
moral standard for men and women, but we have travelled a long way on
the road leading to it. A George I. openly surrounding himself with
mistresses, and shutting up his wife for life in a fortress for levity
of behaviour; a George IV. who measured with similar inequality his
own and his wife's connubial transgressions, would not be tolerated
in the England of the twentieth century. The awakening of women to
a sense of their wrongs before the law was a leading feature of the
women's movement in the early nineteenth century. The Hon. Mrs. Norton,
the beautiful and gifted daughter of Tom Sheridan, a reigning toast,
a society beauty, and with literary accomplishments sufficient to
secure her an independent income from her pen, was subjected to every
sort of humiliation and anguish as a wife and mother which the mean
and cruel nature of her husband could devise. Mr. Norton brought an
action against Lord Melbourne for the seduction of his wife, and the
jury decided without leaving the box that Lord Melbourne was wholly
innocent. This did not prevent the petty malice of her husband from
depriving Mrs. Norton entirely of her three infant children, one of
whom died from an accident which ought never to have happened if the
child had been duly cared for. To read her life[7] is comparable to
being present at a vivisection. Mrs. Norton had one weapon. She could
make herself heard; she wrote a pamphlet in 1836 called "_The Natural
Claim of a Mother to the Custody of her Children as affected by the
Common Law Right of the Father_." One result which followed from Mrs.
Norton's sufferings, coupled with her power of giving public expression
to them, was the passing of Serjeant Talfourd's Act in 1839, called
the Infants' Custody Act, giving a mother the right of access to her
children until they are seven years old. This is the first inroad on
the monopoly on the part of the father of absolute control over his
children created by the English law. The division of legal rights
over their children between fathers and mothers has been described by
a lawyer as extremely simple--the fathers have all and the mothers
none. Serjeant Talfourd's Act did not do much to redress this gross
injustice; but it did something, and marks the beginning of a new epoch.
Little by little things began to change. Mrs. Somerville and Miss
Caroline Herschell were elected members of the Royal Astronomical
Society in 1835. Mrs. Browning wrote "Aurora Leigh," and thereby
touched the whole woman's question with an artist's hand. Thackeray,
in _Esmond_, pointed the finger of scorn at the "politicians and
coffee-house wiseacres," who are full of oratorical indignation against
the tyrannies of the Emperor or the French King, and wonders how they,
who are tyrants too in their way, govern their own little dominions at
home, where each man reigns absolute. "When the annals of each little
reign are shown to the Supreme Master, under whom we hold sovereignty,
histories will be laid bare of household tyrants as cruel as Amurath,
and as savage as Nero, and as reckless and dissolute as Charles." This
was a new note in literature. Mrs. Jameson and the Brontë sisters
contributed much in the same key. Anne Knight, a Quaker lady of Quiet
House, Chelmsford, issued about 1847 a small leaflet boldly claiming a
share for women in political freedom. There can be little doubt that
the presence of a pure and virtuous young woman upon the throne had
its influence in leading people to question seriously whether there
was any real advantage to the nation at large in shutting out from
direct political power all women who were not queens. In 1848[8] Mr.
Disraeli, in the House of Commons, had said, "In a country governed by
a woman--where you allow women to form part of the other estate of the
realm--peeresses in their own right, for example--where you allow women
not only to hold land but to be ladies of the manor and hold legal
courts--where a woman by law may be a churchwarden and overseer of the
poor--I do not see, where she has so much to do with the State and
Church, on what reasons, if you come to right, she has not a right to
vote."
Other influences were operating to open political activity to women.
Their help and co-operation were warmly welcomed by the Anti-Corn Law
League. Cobden, at one of the great meetings of the League held in
Covent Garden Theatre in 1845, said that he wished women could vote. A
few years later than this the Sheffield Female Political Association
passed a resolution in favour of women's suffrage, and presented a
petition in this sense to the House of Lords. The refusal to allow
women who had been duly appointed as delegates in the United States
to take their places in the Anti-Slavery Congress held in London in
1840 roused a great deal of controversy, especially as William Lloyd
Garrison, the leader of the Anti-Slavery Movement in America,[9]
declared that if the ladies were excluded he would share their
exclusion with them; he did this, and sat with them in a side gallery,
taking no part in the discussion. The opponents of the women took
refuge, as they have so often done before and since, in an affirmation
that they were the special repositories of the Divine Will on the
subject, and declared that it was contrary to the ordinances of the
Almighty that women should take part in the Congress. The treatment
they had received in London naturally caused great indignation on the
part of the American ladies, among whom were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott. When they returned to their own country they immediately
began to work for the political enfranchisement of women, and the first
Women's Rights Convention was held in the United States at Seneca Falls
in 1848. This was the beginning of definite work for women's suffrage
in the United States.
In England in the 'fifties came the Crimean War, with the deep stirring
of national feeling which accompanied it, and the passion of gratitude
and admiration which was poured forth on Miss Florence Nightingale for
her work on behalf of our wounded soldiers. It was universally felt
that there was work for women, even in war--the work of cleansing,
setting in order, breaking down red tape, and soothing the vast sum of
human suffering which every war is bound to cause. Miss Nightingale's
work in war was work that never had been done until women came forward
to do it, and her message to her countrywomen was educate yourselves,
prepare, make ready; never imagine that your task can be done by
instinct, without training and preparation. Painstaking study, she
insisted, was just as necessary as a preparation for women's work as
for men's work; and she bestowed the whole of the monetary gift offered
her by the gratitude of the nation to form training-schools for nurses
at St. Thomas's and King's College Hospitals.
When a fire is once kindled many things will serve as fuel which to
a superficial glance would seem to have no connection with it. The
sufferings and torture of women during the Indian Mutiny heroically
borne helped people to see that Empire is built on the lives of women
as well as on the lives of men.
"_On the bones of the English
The English flag is stayed_,"
means that women as well as men have laid down their lives for their
country.
In 1857 the movement among women for political recognition was
stimulated in quite a different way. In that year the Divorce Act was
passed, and, as is well known, set up by law a different moral standard
for men and women. Under this Act, which is still in force (1911), a
man can obtain the dissolution of his marriage if he can prove one
act of infidelity on the part of his wife; but a woman cannot get her
marriage dissolved unless she can prove that her husband has been
guilty both of infidelity and cruelty. Mr. Gladstone vehemently opposed
this Bill. It is said that "in a ten hours' debate on a single clause
he made no less than twenty-nine speeches, some of them of considerable
length."[10] All these things prepared the way for the movement which
took definite shape in the next decade.