Votes for Women: Myths and Reality
Walter L. Arnstein offers a study of the movement for female emancipation, from the 1860s until 1918.
The British commemoration in 1968 of the fiftieth anniversary of what is alternately called ‘the first installment of votes for women’ or ‘female emancipation’ has given new publicity to a number of widely held beliefs about the history of the women’s suffrage movement: That the movement began in the 1860’s as the harebrained notion of an ultra-radical group; that it won no practical success whatever until the militants took over the movement during the first decade of the twentieth century; that the vote which women won in 1918 represented the triumph of that militant movement.
As a brief review of the history of the British women’s suffrage movement should make clear, the first statement is at best a half-truth and the other two are entirely erroneous.
It was John Stuart Mill who included female suffrage in his 1865 election programme and who sought to amend what became the Reform Act of 1867 so that it would enfranchise women as well as men householders. ‘A silent, domestic revolution’ had, in his opinion, occurred.
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