Women's Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement

by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett

This opposition was successful, and the Bill was defeated in face of overwhelming evidence derived from the numerous cases which were quoted of women exercising the municipal vote, and sitting as members of local governing bodies without producing any of the disastrous consequences so confidently predicted. Where women have the municipal vote there is no opposition to it in any quarter, because it is overwhelmingly evident, as Mr. Gladstone once said, that "it has been productive of much good and no harm whatever."

English suffragists can only heartily rejoice that English anti-suffragists are so much more intelligent than those of the United States. It shows that they are capable of learning from experience. Women have had the municipal vote in Great Britain since 1870, and they have voted for Poor Law Guardians and School Boards (where such still exist) from the same date. They were rendered eligible for Town and County Councils in 1907 by an Act passed by Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman's Government. Suffragists are far from complaining that anti-suffragists rejoice with them at these extensions of civic liberty to women. Though the battle is over and the victory won, it is very satisfactory to see the good results of women's suffrage, where it exists, recognised and emphasised even by anti-suffragists. Mrs. Humphry Ward has advocated the systematic organisation of the women's vote in London local elections in order to have increased motive power behind some of her excellent schemes for making more use of playgrounds for the benefit of the London children. She has also spoken several times in public in favour of the increased representation of women on local government bodies; and has even gone very near to making a joke on the subject, saying, in justification of her attitude, "That it was not good to allow the devil to have all the best tunes," and not wise for the anti-suffragists to allow the suffragists to claim a monopoly of ideas and enthusiasm.[24]

Still it is rather significant that she comes to the suffrage camp for the ideas and enthusiasms. Her male colleagues have not shown themselves very ardent in the cause of equal rights for women in local government. In 1898, when the London Borough Councils were established in the place of the Vestries, an amendment was moved and carried in the House of Commons rendering women eligible for the newly created bodies as they had been on the old ones. When the Bill came to the House of Lords, this portion of it was vehemently opposed by the late Lord James of Hereford (afterwards one of the vice-presidents of the Anti-Suffrage League), and his opposition was successful, notwithstanding a powerful and eloquent speech by the late Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister, in support of the eligibility of women on the new Borough Councils. Again, when in 1907 the Bill rendering women eligible for Town and County Councils reached the House of Lords, it had no more sincere and ardent opponent than Lord James. He saw its bearing upon the question of women's suffrage, and the absurdity involved in a state of the law which allows a woman to be a Town or County Councillor, or even a Mayor, and in that capacity the returning officer at a Parliamentary election, but does not permit her to give a simple vote in the election of a member of Parliament.

"If," said Lord James, "their Lordships accepted this measure making women eligible for the great positions that had been specified in great communities like Liverpool and Manchester, where was the man who would be able to argue against the Parliamentary franchise for women?"

The Bill became an Act, notwithstanding Lord James's opposition, and within twelve months he had become a vice-president of the League for Opposing Women's Suffrage and for "Maintaining the Representation of Women on Municipal and other Bodies concerned with the Domestic and Social Affairs of the Community."

It has been said by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Violet Markham, and other anti-suffragists that it is not very creditable to women's public spirit that four years after the passing of the Local Government Qualification of Women Act of 1907, so few women[25] are serving on Town and County Councils. The chief reason for their insignificant numbers is that at present only those women may be elected who are themselves qualified to elect. Outside London this disqualifies married women, and in London it only qualifies those married women who are on the register as municipal voters. It also disqualifies daughters living, under normal conditions, in the houses of their parents. The range of choice of women candidates is, therefore, very severely restricted. Similar disqualifications in former years applied to the post of Poor Law Guardian. When a simple residential qualification was substituted for the electoral qualification the number of women acting as Poor Law Guardians increased in a few years from about 160 to over 1300, of whom eight out of nine have the residential qualification only, nearly half of them being married women. It helps people to realise how the present law limits the range of choice of women to serve on locally elected bodies to ask them to consider what would be the effect on the number of men who could offer themselves for election if marriage were a disqualification for them also. A Bill for allowing women to be elected to Town and County Councils on a residential qualification has been before Parliament for the four sessions 1908-11. It is "non-contentious," but it has never even got a second reading. Bills concerning women lack the motive power behind them which is almost invariably necessary for the successful passage of a Bill through all its stages. Mrs. Humphry Ward and Miss Markham have some justification for their contention that the suffrage movement has largely absorbed the energies of the more active-minded women, and prevented them from offering themselves as candidates in municipal elections. This is inevitable. Not every one possesses the boundless energy of such women as Miss Margaret Ashton, Miss Eleanor Rathbone, or Mrs. Lees, who combine active suffrage propaganda with work of first-class importance as members of councils in large and important towns. But when once the battle for suffrage is won, and the qualification is made reasonable for women, it is almost certain that the number of women elected on municipal bodies will largely increase. In Norway, where women's suffrage has been in operation since 1908, although the population is only a little over 2,000,000, the number of women elected on Town and County Councils in 1911 was 210, and as many as 379 have been elected in addition as "alternates." It appears, therefore, that the secondary object of the Anti-Suffrage League, "the representation of women on municipal bodies," would be best served by extending the Parliamentary franchise to women.

The Anti-Suffrage League in England has made a great point of the number of petitions and protests which they have obtained from women municipal voters declaring their antagonism to women's suffrage in Parliamentary elections. The suffragists, however, attach little or no importance to the figures which have been published. When suffragists conduct a canvass of the same people on the same subject the result is entirely different.[26] Much criticism has been made upon the manner in which the anti-suffragists have obtained the signatures to their petitions and protests against women's suffrage, and we know that in some cases signatures have been asked for "as a protest against being governed by these lawless women." Now there are almost as many fallacies in this sentence as there are words. Many ardent suffragists, probably the majority of them, are opposed to the use of physical violence as a means of obtaining political justice. Moreover, women are not lawless. Women in this country, as all criminal statistics prove, are about nine times more law-abiding than men.[27] If people object to being governed by the more lawless sex, it is not women who should be disfranchised. And besides these considerations there is another—the voter, whether male or female, does not govern. He, when he gives his vote, has to decide between two or more men representing different sets of principles, to which he wishes to confide the various tasks of government.

The Anti-Suffrage Review of January 1911 contained an article called "Arguments for use in Poor Districts," which throws a flood of light on the methods by which these signatures of women against women's suffrage have been obtained. The article represents an anti-suffrage lady going round with a petition against women's suffrage. She approaches the house of a working woman and appeals to her whether, after she has looked after her children and her home, she has not done all that a woman has time for, and "had better leave such things as the Government of India and the Army and Navy, and all those outside things to the men who understand them." A more extraordinarily dishonest argument, if argument it can be called, can hardly be imagined. If it were sound, it would exclude from all share in political power not only working women, but also working men—all who live by the sweat of their brow, and all hard working professional and business men. If the argument were a sound one, the best Government would be a bureaucracy like that of Russia, where the great tasks of government and the management of the Army and Navy "are left to the men who understand them," and where the peasant, the artisan, the professional man, and the merchant have nothing to do with laws but to obey them, and nothing to do with taxes but to pay them. But this system has never commended itself to the political instincts of the British nation. Some of the anti-suffragists at any rate could see this plainly enough when this "argument" was applied to the continued exclusion of working men from the franchise. Mr. Frederic Harrison has written words on this very subject which are as applicable to women to-day as they were to men at the time when they were first published:—

"Electors have not got to govern a country; they have only to find a set of men who will see that the Government is fresh and active.... Government is one thing, but electors of any class cannot and ought not to govern. Electing, or giving an indirect approval of Government, is another thing, and demands wholly different qualities. These are moral, not intellectual, practical, not special gifts—gifts of a very plain and almost universal order. Such are, firstly, social sympathies and sense of justice, then openness and plainness of character; lastly, habits of action and a practical knowledge of social misery."[28]