Women's Rights In Nineteenth-Century England

Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.; 1965), pp. 95, 96.

ʻUpper-class women in the eighteenth century enjoyed a certain rough equality with their men-folk, though in politics they were limited to the right to own the property on which all political power was based. One bemused foreigner said of them:

They do whatsoever they please and do so generally wear the breeches . . . that it is now become a proverb that England is the hell of horses and the paradise of women; and if there were a bridge from the island to the continent, all the women in Europe would run thither.

ʻThe middle-class society at the end of the [eighteenth] century, however, very firmly thrust women into a subordinate position; almost at once the Women's Movement came into being, and over the ninety years from the 1820s to the outbreak of the Great War a great deal was achieved in the way of social and political emancipation: married women's property acts were secured; the local government franchise was won; medical degrees were wrested from the guardians of hallowed privilege; at discreet distances from the ancient universities women's colleges were founded.

The preliminary question one must ask before discussing how votes for women were achieved in the war period is not what had women so far achieved, but why had they not achieved more.

On several occasions favourable majorities had been secured in the House of Commons for private membersʼ bills to give women the franchise, but the feminists never managed to get up the head of steam which automatically forms itself behind a measure sponsored by a government firmly established in power, or which can be directed behind a measure if there is an organized public opinion strong enough and intense enough.

ʻFor all their valiant propagandist work, the feminists still had against them two fortresses of prejudice: the prejudice of men, and the prejudice of women, who feared to be thrust out from cloistered femininity into the harsh male world of politics.

Within Parliament the feminists, who had influential supporters in both Liberal and Conservative parties, fell victims to the party structure.

As Mrs Fawcett neatly put it:

“The Liberals were an army without generals, the Conservatives generals without an army.”

In this particular impasse the women were especially helpless excluded from Parliament, it was impossible for them to argue a parliamentary case.

As Punch made a suffragette explain, “We could not get the vote because we had not got the franchise.”ʼ

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