RG

IN CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY

Feminism

FOCUS

Civil disobedience

BEFORE

1792 Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, an early defense of women’s equality.

1865 Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill campaigns successfully for parliament on a platform of women’s suffrage.

1893 New Zealand is the first major country to grant women the vote.

AFTER

1990 The Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerhoden is forced to accept women’s suffrage (the other cantons had accepted it in 1971).

2005 Women are granted the right to vote and stand for parliament in Kuwait.

By the early 1900s, the right to vote was gaining acceptance around the world, but the right for women to do so lagged behind. New Zealand had been the first major country to grant the vote to women, in 1893, but progress in Europe and North America was achingly slow, hindered by obstinate politicians, conservative public opinion, and often vicious press campaigns. Activist Emmeline Pankhurst, with others, established the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Britain in 1903. Known as “suffragettes,” their militant action and civil disobedience soon included window smashing, assaults, and arson. In 1913, campaigner Emily Davidson died after throwing herself under the king’s horse at the Derby race, and a hunger strike of imprisoned suffragettes was met with force-feeding.

When Pankhurst, speaking later in 1913, said, “either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote,” she was laying claim both to the suffragettes’ moral authority to act as they saw fit in furthering a just cause, and emphasizing their apparently implacable determination to win it. However, this determination lasted only until World War I in 1914, when the WSPU dropped their campaign in order to support the war effort. Women over the age of 30 were granted the right to vote in Britain at the war’s end, with all adult women able to vote by 1928.

RG

Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested outside Buckingham Palace in May 1914. The WSPU strongly advocated direct action in pursuit of its goals.

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