British women get the vote

On 6 February 1918 the Representation of the People Act received royal assent. For the first time in British history it gave women the vote, though not all of them. Women could vote if they were 30 or over and themselves occupied premises of modest rateable value, at least £5 a year, or were the wives of such men, and also graduates in the university constituencies. The Act also abolished almost all property qualifications for men: the vote went to everyone who had reached 21, and to a soldier who had served in this war even from the age of 19. The number of voters rose from about 7.7 million before the war to more than 21 million, including about 8.4 million women. They made up nearly two fifths of the electorate.

The war and reform

Before the war the fight for votes for women was one of the bitterest disputes in British politics. The moderate suffragists of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Fawcett, lobbied MPs with petitions and meetings, while Emmeline Pankhurst’s militants smashed windows, set fire to buildings and went on hunger strike in prison. In August 1914 both organisations rallied to the state. Women replaced men in munitions factories, in transport, offices and hospitals, and in July 1915 tens of thousands of them marched through London demanding the “right to serve”. Many former opponents concluded that after such a war women could no longer be refused the vote.

What forced the politicians into reform, however, was above all the question of the soldiers. Under the old rules the right to vote depended on residence in the constituency, so millions of men in the trenches and at sea were losing it, while the Parliament elected in 1910 kept extending its term by successive Acts. At the turn of 1916 and 1917 a conference of members of both Houses chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons, James Lowther, drafted a new franchise. The Speaker left the question of women, the most contentious, until last, and the conference proposed a limited vote. The age limit of 30 was set so high mainly so that women would not form a majority of the electorate, since after the losses of the war there were far more of them in the country than men.

The votes

David Lloyd George’s government adopted the proposals, and the Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, introduced the bill in the House of Commons in May 1917. On 19 June MPs passed the clause on votes for women by an overwhelming majority of 385 to 55. It promised to be harder in the House of Lords, which contained many die-hard opponents. They might have been led by Lord Curzon, a member of the War Cabinet and president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. On 10 January 1918, however, Curzon declared that he would vote neither for striking out the clause nor against it, because the Commons would restore it and the Lords would lose the dispute. “I cannot vote either way upon this Amendment, for I am loth to assume the responsibility of embarking upon a course which I might not be able to pursue,” he said. Lord Loreburn’s amendment, which sought to strike out the women’s vote, was rejected by 134 votes to 71. The final text was agreed at the beginning of February.

The Act came into force on the day it was passed. It also introduced polling on a single day throughout the country and limited the possibility of voting in several constituencies. Women politicians had to wait a little longer: the right to stand for the House of Commons was given to women by a separate Act, passed in November 1918 just before the first election under the new rules. British women won the vote on equal terms with men, from the age of 21, only in 1928.