Enquiry 2 What were the suffrage campaigners fighting for?

1. Enquiry 2What were the suffrage campaigners fighting for?

2. Enquiry overview Lesson 1: What were the nineteenth-century campaigners fighting for? Lesson 2: What were the radical suffragists fighting for? Lesson 3: Were the suffragettes and the suffragists fighting for the same things? Lesson 4: What were different people within the suffrage movement fighting for? Lesson 5: What had been won by 1918? Outcome activity: Write an extended explanation answering the enquiry question.

3. Lesson 1What were the nineteenth-century campaigners fighting for?

4. Lesson 1 overview • Content covered in the lesson: • Lacking the vote means no influence over public policy. • The Second and Third Reform Bills and petitioning process. • The Langham Place and Kensington groups and Lydia Becker’s involvement in Manchester. • Key legislation. • Plenary: Was it only middle-class women?

5. Lacking the vote means no influence over public policy In 1867, Parliament gave the vote to every man who owned their own house or land and to anyone renting who was paying more than £10 a year. This doubled the number of men who could vote in England – though the poorest were still left out. No women could vote. Q:Why might this make a difference?

6. The Second and Third Reform Bills and petitioning process • In 1866, the Second Reform Bill came up for debate in the House of Commons. This was designed to extend the franchise to more people and so provided an opportunity for women to try to be included. • In 1865, the philosopher John Stuart Mill had been elected as a Liberal MP. He was a supporter of extending the vote to women and, as an MP, he was able to bring petitions to the House of Commons to try to influence laws that were being passed. • In 1866, Mill and the Kensington Society worked together to compile a petition for women to be included in the new Reform Bill, which Mill would present during the debate. Members of the Kensington Society managed to get 1,521 signatures in a very short time but their petition was treated as a joke by most other MPs, and women were not included in the Act when it was made law. • In 1884, another opportunity arose as the Third Reform Bill came before Parliament. Once again, campaigners for women’s suffrage organised another, larger petition. However, although the Third Reform Act enfranchised around 60% of the male population, no women were included.

7. The Langham Place and Kensington groups and Lydia Becker’s involvement in Manchester The Langham Place Group was founded in 1857 by Barbara Bodichon to campaign on issues that affected women, and to campaign for granting the vote to women. The Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage held its first meeting in January 1867. Its secretary was a woman called Lydia Becker. The longer I live the more I see the necessity of women taking an intelligent part in all that concerns the welfare of their country, and I am sure that if they had the power of voting they would feel more decidedly than they do, that they are an important part of the Commonwealth. Barbara Bodichon When the ‘woman question’ presents itself to my mind. I do not think of elegant ornaments of drawing rooms, but of the toiling thousands, nay millions of my country women, to whom life is no pleasant holiday but a stern reality, whose (lot) we are trying to soften. Fantastic notions about ‘woman’s sphere’ are unknown in a world where women gain their own bread by their own labour – and frequently have to bear the burdens of the men in addition to their own. Lydia Becker

8. What were the suffrage campaigners fighting for? Activity: What did campaigners want to use the vote for? Your challenge is to try to work out the reasons why women wanted the vote. • Tasks: • Construct a concept map of all the things that your group thought the vote was for. • Share your ideas and exchange concept mapsto create a whole-class map including all the different groups. • Groups: • Group 1: The Langham Place Group • Group 2: Lydia Becker and the Manchester Suffrage Society • Group 3: Harriett Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill

9. Key legislation Q:Would all the groups have been satisfied with these changes? If not, why not? 1869: The MunicipalFranchise Act This allowed some women to vote in town council elections and to take on roles in local government as Poor Law Guardians and school board members. 1882: The Married Women’s Property Act Before this, everything a woman owned became the property of her husband once she married. Now women could keep hold of some of their property. 1886: Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act This got rid of the law that had forced women who were ‘suspected prostitutes’ and who had a relationship with a man who later got an STD to be quarantined against their will 1888: The Local Government Act Some women could now vote for local councillors. In 1894, some could also stand as candidates in parish elections.

10. The nineteenth-centurycampaigners People in the suffrage movement The suffragettes The radical suffragists What were the suffrage campaigners fighting for? Plenary: Was it only middle-class women? Which women would be left out of these campaigns by the dawn of the twentieth century?