Introduction
Hello everyone, welcome to blog three of my civic blog series. To recap, we will be covering issues that women face, and (hopefully) any advancements/progress that have been made concerning that issue. Today, we will be covering women’s right to vote. The name that was given to this fight is women’s suffrage. I will briefly cover the fight that occurred across Great Britain. Then, I will delve into the importance of suffrage to the livelihood of women as a whole. Women’s suffrage has been fought for over the course of centuries. Women have been excluded from voting dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. This issue was first seriously considered in the 19th century, once the first few democracies in Europe had been established.
The Great Britain
Mary Wollstonecraft was credited with being one of the first women to advocate the right to vote for women in Great Britain. Wollstonecraft was a passionate advocate for educational and social equality. Beginning in the 1860s, women’s suffrage gained huge prominence, with women’s suffrage societies forming all across Britain. In the 1870s, these organizations, with their combined women’s power, submitted petitions to the Parliament demanding the right to vote for women, with almost three million signatures.
1869 marked a turning point in this fight when the Parliament granted female taxpayers the right to vote in municipal elections, which soon expanded to allow women to sit on county and city councils.
When World War One began, the public also began to approve of women voting, pushing favor onto the women’s side. This was due to suffragists and their respective organizations putting a lot of time into the war efforts, causing them to be recognized by the Parliament. Finally, in 1918, the Representation of the People Act was passed, which allowed women about ⅔ of the women in Great Britain to vote. It was not until 10 years later, when the Equal Franchise Act was passed that the remaining ⅓ of women gained the right to vote.
The Importance of Voting
In a democracy, the right to vote is what allows us to participate in civic life – “to have a voice in choosing the elected officials whose decisions impact our lives, families, and communities” (Voting Rights). When women did not have the right to vote, none of their views mattered, they were considered as less than a person, as people whose views did not matter to a country – though they made up at least 50% of that country’s population. This applies to minorities such as African Americans, who were also not given the complete right to vote in the United States until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voting is considered to be a human right, and without it, a huge part of a person’s voice is taken away from them.
Works Cited
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “women’s suffrage”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 26 Dec. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/woman-suffrage. Accessed 11 February 2024.
Voting Rights. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. https://civilrights.org/value/voting-rights/. Accessed February 11 2024.