I was completely mis-educated about suffrage at school.
We covered the topic of suffrage twice (junior and senior school) and during those lessons I learnt:
- The women who campaigned for votes called themselves suffragettes.
- The campaign for women’s votes happened in the early 20th century.
- Men already had the right to vote.
- Women didn’t get equal voting rights until the 1970s[1].
All the above statements are incorrect.
In 2016 the BBC ran a reality documentary called The Victorian Slum[2]. Slum buildings in London had recently been restored and, before the site opened to the public, the BBC had been given access to show families living in these working class conditions of 150 years ago.
The series covered the living conditions in various decades from the 1830s to the 1910s. In the last episode, one of the improvements for working class people was the advent of women’s suffrage. The women in the show were taken on mock demonstrations and given a history of women’s fight for suffrage.
I was watching the show with my wife. She asked, “Why did it take so long for women to get the vote?”
It sounded like a straight-forward question and I opened my mouth to give a straight-forward answer; something along the lines of “it is an indictment on society back then”, that “a woman’s place was in the home and it took a long time for a patriarchal society to accept equality”.
One problem though - I didn’t know how many years it took women to get the vote.
Women first got the vote in 1918, I was taught that at school, but I had no idea which year men got the vote. That piece of information was missing from my brain - not something I had forgotten or wasn’t sure about; no one had ever brought up the subject.
It seemed simple enough. At work the following day I typed “men’s suffrage” into Google. The results were a shock.
Of the first 20 search results only 2 were about men’s suffrage. One was a newspaper article titled “Why has almost everyone forgotten about men’s suffrage”, which I found rather ironic. Clearly everyone has forgotten about men’s suffrage but given a platform to talk about it, talk about it; don’t complain about how no one else is talking about it.
The only other page on the internet which acknowledged men had to fight for the right to vote was a page on a web site called “A Voice for Men”.
The article was well written and had references to other sources where the author had gathered information and statistics. The reason I had not found those pages through Google is because they talk about suffrage in general terms - the “Representation of the Peoples” acts. Many websites spell out the effects for women for the 1918 Representation of the Peoples act but no websites mention men and their right to vote from the 1832, 1868, 1884 and 1918 acts.
As a result it is very difficult to find information about men’s suffrage. At the time of writing there are now more articles mentioning men’s suffrage, however, the first 20 search results from Google for “men’s suffrage” contain twice as many pages about women’s suffrage than men’s suffrage. That’s not because Google is sexist, it’s because people don’t write about men’s suffrage.
Even the UK government web site, which documents the history of suffrage in the UK[3], does not mention when or how men won the right to vote.
For the record, here is a summary of the timeline for suffrage in the UK:
- 1832 wealthy male landowners get the vote
- 1867 wealthy urban men get the vote
- 1884 most men get the vote
- 1918 most women get the vote, all men get the vote
- 1928 all women get the vote
- 1971 voting age changed from 21 to 18
The progression of suffrage can be visualised with Moran diagrams.
Moran diagrams allow us to measure discrimination using the gradient of the discrimination line; a steeper line indicates the discrimination is more unfair and one-sided. You can see how the sexist discrimination increased through the 1800s as more men were given the vote, until equality was finally introduced in 1928.
You could say it took 34 years for women to get the vote (based on when most men/women got the vote) or 10 years (based on when all men/women got the vote).
Regardless of how you measure it, it’s hard to explain how an injustice went on for so long. You first need to understand the sexist stereotypes our society imposed on women at that time, the sexist stereotypes our society imposed on men and how the concept of voting was a novelty for everyone.
"It was of the time” might sound like a cheap cop-out. It’s easy to look back 100 years and accuse a society of being stuck in the past.
To understand what it means to be “of the time”, consider the sexist laws we have today on the mutilation of children. The laws we introduced in 1985, 2003 and 2015 apply only to girls. There is no sign that gender equality for our children will be obtained anytime soon but I am sure it will happen one day.
100 years from now, people will look back and accuse us of being stuck in the past. We saw children being mutilated and decided to protect girls. They will not understand how laws for a basic human right could be introduced for only one sex.
This year, 2018, has been celebrated as 100 years of women’s suffrage. There have been many articles in the news about suffragettes, highlighting the ignorance I learned from my school lessons.
I was taught that suffragettes won women the vote in a movement that ran in the first part of the 20th century. In fact the suffrage movement ran much longer, starting in the 1860s, and was championed by women who called themselves ‘suffragists’ not ‘suffragettes’.
The early fight, which went on for 40 years, was completely peaceful. It was only when women started burning buildings and throwing themselves under horses did people sit up and take note. These are the events that get included in documentaries and our school curriculum.
It’s unacceptable that we fail to teach the boring facts about suffrage to school children. The fight for men’s suffrage and the majority of the fight for women’s suffrage was peaceful protest. Yet we choose to ignore it and focus on the violent acts. And in doing so glorify them, whilst so much of the hard work was political and peaceful.
I have learned so much about suffrage by finding the answer to such a simple question. I cannot believe it took over 30 years for me to find that information. Or that those facts are covered up so wholeheartedly by our society.
written 17th March 2018
updated 27th December 2019 to include Hughes/Moran diagrams
[1] https://electoralregisters.org.uk/timescales
The 1969 Representation of the People Act came into force in 1971. The woman who came to my school to talk about women's suffrage must have thought this final change to our voting rights was the act that gave women equality.
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082q72z
The Victorian Slum, BBC2, 2016
[3] http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/politics/timeline/
History of suffrage on the UK government website.