How Women Won the Right to Vote

This Friday, your Students’ Union will be hosting the SO:WOMEN Conference, a day where students and staff across the University and local colleges are welcome to come and explore and collaborate in a celebration of women’s liberation and rights.

With the General Election on the horizon, your SU wanted to take a look back into the fight for women’s voting rights, which took just over 60 years of peaceful campaigning, protest and militant tactics:

The campaign for women’s right to vote began in 1867, as The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was formed to campaign for female suffrage. Led by Millicent Garret Fawcett (1847 – 1929), over 250,000 people gathered in Hyde Park in 1908 in support of women’s suffrage. A second rally was held in 1913 with women travelling from all over the country in support of women’s voting rights.

In 1903, The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was formed and led by Emmeline Pankhurst. Although this group was also middle class, it heckled politicians, held marches, members chained themselves to railings, attacked policemen, broke windows, slashed paintings, set fire to buildings, threw bombs and went on hunger strike when they were sent to prison. One suffragette, Emily Davison, ran out in front of the King's horse during the Derby of 1913 and was killed.

The East London Federation of Suffragettes was formed in 1914 by Sylvia Pankhurst and was made up of working-class women. This rejected the violence of the WSPU, and mainly concentrated on social reform. In June 1914, Sylvia Pankhusrt famously took a delegation of working class women to lobby Prime Minister Asquith who did not think that working class women were intelligent enough to have the vote. This proved to Asquith that working class women were intelligent enough to vote.

After the First World War, the Representation of the People Act granted women over 30 the right to vote. Widely perceived as a ‘reward’ for their contributions to the war, the act caused a backlash as men over 21 were granted the right to vote at the same time.  Ten years later, in 1928, the Conservative government passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act giving the vote to all women over the age of 21.

Thanks to the brave suffragettes and suffragists who fought so hard to win the right to vote for women all over the UK, women today are able to vote in this year’s General Election, enabling them to have an equal say on who represents us and how we are all represented.