GREEN, WHITE AND VIOLET
GREEN, WHITE AND VIOLET
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Today about two-thirds of all people who can vote at a general election (basically anyone over 18) in the United Kingdom actually vote. Yet not so long ago people died trying to get the right to vote, the bitterest battles coming over votes for women.
The First (Great) Reform Act happened in the year 1832, and only then after many failed attempts and over fifty years of efforts. It made voting rules uniform across the country, but usually only the rich were allowed to vote. Things really started to change with the Second Reform Act in 1867, which allowed the middle classes to vote - provided of course they were male! That same year the first ever move to allow some women to have a vote was thrown out or parliament. But it did lead that same year to the formation of the first Women's Suffrage Society in London, to campaign for women's votes. The word 'suffrage' comes from an old Greek word meaning, of all things, 'anklebone'! The reason is that, in the democracies of Ancient Greece 2500 years ago, each person entitled to vote had a decorated anklebone, which they dropped in the voting box.
Though there was a woman on the throne of England, a woman's life in the 1800s was incredibly difficult. Married women were not even allowed to own property until 1870, and could lose everything if their marriages broke down. But the Suffragist movement did gain some successes. Also in 1870 women were allowed to vote and serve on school boards for the first time. By 1888 they could also vote and serve on town councils (and village ones six years later). The national vote remained elusive; the Third Reform Act of 1884 gave the vote to virtually all men over 21, but a move to give it to rich women was rejected. Yet suffrage movements continued to be set up across the country, leading to the establishment of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) under Millicent Fawcett in 1897.
One way of showing support for the movement was through jewellery. There was a sudden fashion for jewellery that was green, white and violet, which was in fact a coded message. The colours' initials stood for 'Give Women Votes'. Of course if challenged they would simply claim they were silly women who didn't understand such things - as parliament kept telling them!
The suffrage movement believed in peaceful protest, but their lack of success led to a split. In 1903 a small splinter movement formed the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) under the formidable Emmeline Pankhurst. Her 'suffragettes' believes in direct action, and were soon being arrested for breaking up meetings of the two main parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. They were bitterly denounced by the 'suffragists' of the NUWSS, who believed this would lose the movement public support. This belief was quite correct.
In 1907 the Liberal government again proposed a law giving some votes to women, but although a majority of MPs were in favour of this move, those against managed to delay it until it ran out of time. The hardline actions of the suffragettes had earned them a considerable opposition in parliament, one determined to block any change. A second attempt in 1909 also ran out of time, because of the ferocious argument that flared up that year over the Budget, which led the government of Herbert Asquith to call a general election. The Liberals won, just, and reintroduced the idea a third time in 1910, but their government was shaky, and they had to call another general election before it could be passed into law.
Both sides of the female suffrage movement were enraged when, on being returned in 1911, Asquith dropped his support for them. The following year suffragettes attacked the House of Commons and smashed shop fronts in the West End of London. In 1913 they went still further. During the famous Derby horse-race that June, one suffragette, Emily Davidson, threw herself under King George V's horse Anmer, and died of her injuries. Emmeline Pankhurst was finally put in jail - but was let out the following year, because by that time no-one really wanted to worry about a little thing like women's votes.
1914. World War One. Both suffragists and suffragettes stopped all campaigning and supported the war effort for the next four years. Soon, anyone who thought a woman could not do a man's work was proved decisively wrong. Their reward came at the close of the war, for in 1918 under the Representation of the People Act of that year, most women over 30 years of age were granted the vote. It was not the full-scale triumph that they had wanted, but everyone knew that could not be long postponed. Just ten years later the government equalized the voting ages, and women over 21 could also now vote.
History is a mixture of facts and our views of those facts. In today's politically-correct society it is fashionable to claim that it was the militants that won women the vote, even though the facts do not bear this out. In eleven years, the militants completely failed to increase support for giving women the vote to the point where Parliament had to act, as the anti-slavery campaigners had succeeded in doing a century before. If anything, their 'direct action' approach actually alienated more people, and out the cause back. But if history teaches us anything, it is that many people will always try to rewrite history to suit their own political agendas. As the Duke of Wellington once famously remarked to one historian about the battle of Waterloo, 'I advise you to leave it exactly as it is'!!
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