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Women and the Vote |
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| SUFFRAGISTS | OR | SUFFRAGETTES |
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women began to campaign for the vote they were faced with a number of
important decisions. How should they go about their protest? Who should
they target? What was the best way to keep their demands in the public
eye?
At first the movement had a lot of support from the Liberal party. Many individual MPs supported their demand for the vote. By 1902 a women called Eva Gore-Booth gathered over 67,000 signatures and took them to parliament. She said that their campaign had to be like an glacier ...'slow and unstoppable'. They had one big problem. While many individual Liberal MPs supported the vote for women the party was against it because they knew it would only be richer and well educated women that gained the vote. These may well then be Conservative supporters. While the Conservative party would not support the idea of women suffrage because many of its MPs were totally opposed to the principle of women being involved in politics. Quite clearly both parties believed there were more important issues for politics than women and the vote. By 1900 there had been 15 attempts by individual MPs to introduce the vote for women- all fifteen failed.
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The
suffragettes rejected all this slow and careful approach. They said that
the only way to get justice was to force men to give them the vote.
Direct Action was the answer. They would protest and do whatever was
needed to get into the news. They held the view that no publicity is bad
publicity.
The group split the campaigners into two. Many middle class women found this style unacceptable. The direct action approach that the suffragettes used caused people to decide very firmly which side they would be on. People who were against women getting the vote used these activities as a way of scaring people from their cause.
A newspaper cartoon that showed the 'irrational' suffragette. |
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