Tuesday 06-02-2018 - 11:00

This week marks 100 years years since women gained the vote in Britain. The right to vote lead to many other life chaging rights being granted for women across the UK:

-1919 In Britain a new law allows women to become lawyers, vets and civil servants. The Women's Engineering Society is formed. Britain also gets its first female MP.

-1928 In Britain all women over 21 are allowed to vote the same as men. 

-1929 Margaret Bondfield becomes the first woman cabinet minister in Britain

To name a few. 

Suffrage in Lancaster

The campaign for a vote for women started in earnest in 1866, the first branch of the Radical Suffragists formed in 1908 and in 1911 its own Women's Suffrage Society. Lancaster's women were Suffragists who, compared to the famous London-based Suffragettes, were non-militant. Along with 50,000 other Suffragists, they marched down to London in June 1913 wearing the scarlet, white and green colours of the suffrage movement to join the Non-Militant Suffragist March, headed up by Millicent Fawcett, President of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. Lancaster did have its own share of radical Suffragettes, though; Selina Martin was arrested for her campaigning on multiple occasions, hailed a 'hero' by the Lancaster Guardian and drawing some much-needed sympathy and admiration for the cause locally. 

 

Winning the Vote

Following decades of campaigning, Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act in 1918, allowing Britain's first women to vote (and allowing all men - not just property owners). Not all women were included, however: only women over 30 who held property, were married to someone who held property, or were a university graduate. Full suffrage did not come until 1928, when women fully received the same voting rights as men. It's worth noting that our near neighbours on the Isle of Man granted women the right to vote in 1881, 37 years before mainland Britain. 

 

Today

Our first 100 years in Parliament have overseen a huge amount of change for women in Britain: better rights to work, and improved working conditions; the introduction of the National Health Service with dedicated natal and maternal healthcare; the widespread availability of birth control; and a host of equality legislation. There is still a way to go though. Today, there are more men named John running the top UK businesses than women. Women continue to earn significantly less than men in the workplace, and women students graduating this year can expect to see a difference in their pay from their male course-mates from as early as their first year of work. Outside of the workplace, women continue to suffer huge injustices even here in the UK. Whether it's street harassment, the rise in domestic violence cases against women, or higher rates of poverty for women, there's work to be done in the next 100 years of voting.