How Women Won The Right To Vote

Welcome back my fellow learners, my last article was dedicated to all my male readers, however, today is aimed solely at the ladies. So enjoy because without these courageous ladies listed below we females would still be bare foot and chained to the kitchen with no voice.  

It all started with a young lady called Millicent Fawcett in 1897 who created the National Union of Women's Suffrage, the word Suffrage literally means the right to vote.

This unique and out of time young lady strongly believed in peaceful protests, she was of the mind that violence would only give men the continued idea that women could not be trusted with the right to vote, which come on people, how many killings and wars were started by men???? Can anyone say Hypocrisy?

Anyway where was I? Ah yes, Millicent rightly argued that women could hold trusted posts on school boards, but could not be trusted to vote? Her strongest argument was that wealthy women could be in charge of vast estates and employ gardeners and workmen, who by the way could vote, but the lady of the manor could not be trusted to vote. Unfortunately Millicents progress was depressingly slow, however, she did manage to convert some men in parliament, which by the way was the soon to be Labour Party at the time.

Due to her lack of progress many women soon became angry, and quite rightly so, and in 1903 another splinter cell was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst known as the Womens Social And Politcal Union, she was joined in her crusade by her 2 daughters Sylvia and Christabel, which again begs the question, where was her husband when all this was going on, and what was his reaction to all this? This cell was soon to be infamously called the Suffragettes. These ladies meant business and were prepared to use any method needed to get their point across, even violence.

This all came to a head in 1905 when both Christabel and Annie Kenney invaded a political meeting based in Manchester at the time to ask 2 liberal politicians if they believed women should have the right to vote. These 2 little known men at the time were none other than the great Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey. However, their question went unanswered by both men, probably due to shock, as this sort of behaviour was unheard of at the time.

Anyway, things escalated from there with these brave women doing jail time, once incarcerated they refused to eat, in those days force feeding inmates was not heard of, so the prison system decided to leave them to starve, only releasing them when they were on the point of imminent death, the way the government saw it, if they died once out of prison they were not held accountable.

So ladies there you have it, some things never change women are still treated like second class citizens and have to suffer in silence to get the same respect men are immediately given, so you could say the fight still goes on, just more silently.