Women in the United Kingdom won the parliamentary vote in two stages, in 1918 and 1928, after a campaign lasting more than half a century. It was fought by patient constitutional suffragists and, from 1903, by militant suffragettes, in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland alike. The First World War transformed the politics of the question, and the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave about 8.4 million women the vote.
Exclusion and early arguments
The Great Reform Act of 1832 extended the vote to more property-owning men but described voters as "male persons", formally shutting women out. A few voices objected: in 1818 Jeremy Bentham had argued for female suffrage, and after 1832 the MP Henry Hunt proposed votes for single, propertied women. Women did gain ground in local government, where unmarried women ratepayers received the municipal vote in 1869. In 1865 the philosopher John Stuart Mill was elected to Parliament openly supporting votes for women, and in 1867 the shopkeeper Lilly Maxwell, added to the register by mistake, cast a vote in a by-election that was later ruled illegal, giving the cause valuable publicity.
The suffragists
Organised societies appeared in the 1860s. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon gathered nearly 1,500 signatures for a petition in 1865, a Manchester society, with Lydia Becker as secretary, followed in 1867, and groups in London and Edinburgh soon after. In Ireland, Isabella Tod founded a suffrage society in Belfast in 1873, and a Dublin association followed in 1874. Mill presented a petition with 21,557 signatures in 1868, and from 1870 bills to enfranchise women were debated again and again in the Commons, without success. In 1897 Millicent Fawcett brought the scattered groups together in the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, which campaigned by peaceful lobbying and mass demonstrations such as the "Mud March" of February 1907.
The suffragettes
In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union, which she ran with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, with the motto "deeds, not words". Frustrated that the Liberal government, and especially H. H. Asquith, kept blocking reform, its members heckled ministers, smashed windows, and later turned to arson and bombs. Imprisoned suffragettes went on hunger strike from July 1909 and were force-fed; the "Cat and Mouse Act" of 1913 let the authorities release and re-arrest them. The Conciliation Bills of 1910–1912, which offered a limited vote, all failed. On 4 June 1913 Emily Davison was fatally injured by the King's horse at the Derby. Historians still debate the effect of militancy: several conclude that it revived the campaign at first but hindered reform once it escalated after 1912.
War and the 1918 Act
When the First World War began in August 1914, the WSPU suspended its campaign and backed the war effort, while the NUWSS kept lobbying quietly. Women took on munitions and other work once reserved for men, and the old franchise rules, which could strip soldiers of their votes, had to be rewritten anyway. A Speaker's Conference, meeting in secret from October 1916, recommended votes for some women. The Representation of the People Act of 6 February 1918 enfranchised all men over 21 and women over 30 who met property conditions, and a further act that November allowed women to stand for the Commons. Women voted in a general election for the first time on 14 December 1918.
Equal franchise
In 1928 a Conservative government passed the Equal Franchise Act, giving women the vote at 21 on the same terms as men. The suffragettes' tactics were later copied abroad, most notably in the United States by Alice Paul, and the British campaign is part of the wider history of women's suffrage.
On our maps
Our 1914 and 1920 maps show the United Kingdom, then still including all of Ireland, either side of the 1918 reform.