During the late 19th century and early 20th century, new ideas of change arose throughout England and America. The prominent topic of this time, gender equality, caused the emergence of many notable women’s rights activists and female leaders. British suffragist and writer Millicent Garrett Fawcett is the prime example of a woman who stood up for the rights of all females in her country. She was the leader of the nonviolent movement for gender equality in England, mainly focusing on women’s voting rights. Fawcett’s individuality set her apart from the average woman. Because of this along with her high intelligence, her campaign grew rapidly among British women. She based her arguments upon rationality, opposing many other activists’ means …show more content…
Her group gained attention controversially thought the use of militant tactics. WSPU members participated in events such as rioting at political conventions and damaging both private and government owned property. Due to the acts of violence committed, polices forces arrested many members of Pankhurst’s group, thus starting a conversation both in media and between regular people. Some British began to question the morals of this radical group. Do the ends really justify the means in this case? This conversation only strengthened the movement and people began to pay more attention to strong female leaders like Pankhurst and Fawcett. Particularly, Millicent Fawcett’s nonviolent group gained even more support as many British didn’t agree with Pankhurst’s way of making her point. In 1914, World War I broke out and the thought of supporting the war divided activists. Many members of the NUWSS, Fawcett’s organization, opposed the war and were generally pacifists. But, Fawcett herself came out in British political newspaper, The Common Cause, supporting the war saying, ‘Women, your country needs you. As long as there was any hope for peace, most members of the National Union probably sought for peace, and endeavoured to support those who were trying to maintain it.’ Her stance on the war caused many of her members to leave the movement. Even though she lost some supporters, …show more content…
Firstly, it is important to note the key differences between suffragists and suffragettes. Even though the words have similar dictionary definitions, when put into historical context, they clearly different. Both words are defined by Merriam-Webster as “one who advocates extension of suffrage especially to women.” This definition is true for the two groups, but suffragettes and suffragists achieve their goals through different means. The suffragettes, led mainly by Emmeline Pankhurst, took a more violent and direct approach as they saw nothing getting accomplished by Fawcett’s group. The belief that the end justifies the means was certainly adopted by the suffragettes as members regularly committed crimes all for the sake of their cause. One of the most notable illegal activities Pankhurst’s group regularly participated in was window breakings. They broke the windows of important British buildings and monuments as a response to the lack of acknowledgement the group received from the British government. All of their violent attacks were committed shine a light on their frustration and ultimately change hearts and minds. Other issues within the British government overshadowed women’s suffrage so these people found it their duty to stress its importance. On the other hand, Fawcett’s group decided to protest verbally instead of physically. The NUWSS had many talented female
Their quiet persuasion gained alot of support. Also, only two weeks before the out break of the World War, the Suffragists were negotiating with the Government over their right to vote. However, there was alot of anti-suffrage from people, for example Queen Victoria and working class men.
Before the Suffragettes, women were not able to vote and the move for women to have the right to vote really started in 1897 when Millicent Fawcett founded the National Union of Women’s Suffrage. Fawcett strongly believed that women should have the right to vote but also believed in peaceful protests, patience and logical arguments. She felt that if any violence occurred then men would believe that women could not be trusted and therefore should not have the right to vote. She also made the argument that if women were made responsible for sitting on school boards and paying taxes that they should be part of the process to make the laws and should have the same rights as men. A main argument of hers was that even though some women who were wealthy mistresses of large manors and estates employed gardeners, workmen and labourers who were able to vote but women still could not, regardless of their wealth and social class. However, the progress of Fawcett was very slow and although she converted some of the members of the Labour Representation Committee (The Labour Party) but the majority of men felt that women would not understand how parliament functioned and therefore should not take part in the electoral
They were led by Millicent Fawcett and they thought that peaceful demonstrations were the way forward. They had started a pilgrimage and were travelling around the country, they had started in the south of the country and they worked their way up to Carlisle. They had various other plans of getting the votes for women. The NUWSS were very strategic when it came to came to campaigning because they had to protest and make it sink into people why they wanted to vote, but they also had to think about being peaceful at the same time. Here are just some of the thing the Suffragists did.
Generations of women fought courageously for equality for decades. The ratification of the Nineteenth amendment was vindication for so many women across the country. After having spent so many years oppressed and unable to make way for themselves, women everywhere were growing tired of being unable to own property, keep their wages and the independence that an academic education gave them. The decades that ensued brought with them various female activists, men that supported them and a division of its own within the movement. The women’s suffrage movement lasted 71 years and cam with great discourse to the lives of many women who fought for the cause.
It was Theodore Roosevelt, who stated that, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care”, conveying the idea that with no voice comes no change. In the morning of August 26, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified, which centralized mainly on the enfranchisement of women. Today, they have the legal right to vote, and the ability to speak openly for themselves, but most of all they are now free and equal citizens. However this victorious triumph in American history would not have been achieved without the strong voices of determined women, risking their lives to show the world how much they truly cared. Women suffragists in the 19th century had a strong passion to change their lifestyle, their jobs around the
Although the war and women's efforts during the war were a significant factor in gaining the vote for women, the campaigning of the suffragist's has been argued to have been of more significance. The National Union of women's suffrage societies or the NUWSS aka the Suffragists was an association composed of mainly middle class women who were well educated and brought up believing in equal rights for women. The reason there were very few working class women in the NUWSS was because they were generally not supported by their husbands as working class men believed that women should remain below them and did not believe in equal rights. The leader of the NUWSS was Millicent Fawcett; a middle class woman, married to a lawyer and was brought up believing in equal rights. Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS employed peaceful tactics such as holding peaceful protests in the form of marches and wrote newspaper articles in order to campaign for women's rights. There has been much dispute
The battle for suffrage was a long and slow process. Many women tried to initiate the fight for suffrage, like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. “These were the New Suffragists: women who were better educated, more career-oriented, younger, less apt to be married and more cosmopolitan than their previous generation.” (pg 17) Eventually, in 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified; allowing women to vote, but it was not any one person or event that achieved this great feat. It was the confluence of certain necessary factors, the picketing and parades led by Alice Paul, militaristic suffrage parties and the influence of the media that caused the suffrage amendment to be passed and ratified in 1920. But most importantly, they successfully moved both
The journey of women’s suffrage beings with an aspired women named Alice Paul, who revolutionize the rights for women everywhere. Walton refers, how the inspiration all had flipped-the switch in Alice Paul when she heard speech on the “Votes for Women,” from a women named, Christabel Pankhurst, which was interrupted abruptly due to Christabel spitting in a police offers face, and being taken to jail. Walton refers to the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) as being seldom out of the news during the winter of 1907,
Women’s suffrage groups existed before the Great War but they received little attention. In the beginning, women did not have any property rights.
The suffragists were people who fought to get the right to vote. In this case, they were fighting for women’s right to vote. Susan B. Anthony was an important leader in the American Women Suffrage Movement. Her accomplishments eventually earned her a place on a silver dollar coin (Learn). Raised in a Quaker household, Anthony fought for the things she believed in (Learn). Quakers believe that women and men are equal in the eyes of God (Lutz). She was a temperance worker, an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a fighter for other rights, such as equal rights for every body and better pay for women teachers (Learn). Anthony traveled around lecturing people and trying to win women the right to vote (Learn). At the age of 80, Anthony managed to convince the University of Rochester to
Many women believed that the right to vote would improve their position among everybody. In Europe, the most vocal and active women’s movement was the British Women’s Movement, which was divided mainly into two groups. The first group was organized by Millicent Fawcell, who believed that women must demonstrate to Parliament that they should have the right to vote. Along with Fawcell, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia founded in 1903 the Women’s Social and Political Union. The main actions of this group was to call to attention the media and use of unusual publicity stunts to get their attention. These women used forceful tactics to get their message heard by pelting government officials with eggs, chaining themselves to lampposts, smashing out windows of department stores, and burning railroad cars. Even though these women did these daunting tasks only in Finland, Norway, and some American states allowed women the right to vote before 1914. Another topic that was important to women besides the right to vote was peace movements. A famous women became the head of the Austrian Peace Society, who was Bertha von
This new generation of activists fought with this new agenda for almost 20 years until a few states in the West began to extend the vote to women. The Eastern and Southern states still refused to give in, but this didn’t stop the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1916, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the NAWSA, worked vigorously to get women’s organizations from all over the country together and fight side by side. “One group of activists, led by Alice Paul and her National Woman’s Party, lobbied for full quality for women under the law” (Divine). She used mass marches and hunger strikes as strategies, but she was eventually forced to resign because of her insistence on the use of militant direct-action tactics (Grolier). Finally, during World War 1, women were given more opportunities to work, and were able to show that they were just as deserving as men when it came to the right to vote. On August 18th, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified, allowing women to vote. This drawn-out and arduous battle opened a new window of opportunity for women all over the country. Significant changes in both social life and job availability began to create what is now referred to as the “new women.”
Women were trying to get the vote for many years before 1900, however this was not a serious concern and they were not doing much to achieve this. However in 1900 this all changed. The NUWSS (Suffragists) and the WSPU (Suffragettes) were set up in the early years of 1900; their goal was to allow women to get the vote. Their reason was that women were already allowed to work on city councils and become doctors, some notable ones too such as Florence Nightingale. The NUWSS believed that if women were house owners and had respectable jobs they should be allowed to vote. This is because men who were allowed to vote could be white slave owners and lunatics so why could these men vote and
The NUWSS had wide-ranging support, from both men and women from working and middle-class backgrounds. The approaches of different regional branches of the NUWSS varied, from passive to fairly militant, and the lack of specific location attached to the source also suggests that this could have been publicised cross-country. By softening their approach with the language of motherhood, the NUWSS could increase their audience and avoid alienation of their diverse audience, appealing to both moderates and those who were more radical. The form of the source may lend some support to this, as leaflets could achieve large circulation and reach a large audience. It is clear that the suffragists sought to create some form of cohesion and unity in their organisation, perhaps seen in this source by the “us versus them” mentality. The suffragists frequently address the reader as "you" and refer to "we", uniting the reader with the movement and pulling the entire suffrage movement into a single group. Though this level of unity was not actually a reality, with multiple suffrage organisations existing such as WSPU and Women's Freedom League, their presentation of the movement as such suggests a desire, and perhaps a need in the face of opposition, to appear
Women’s reactions to the war were divided among themselves. Though there were women championing the cause of WWI, there were others who opposed to the idea of a war. Right up to the outbreak of World War I, feminists on both sides pledged themselves to peace, in international women's solidarity. Within months of the war's outbreak, however, all the major feminist groups of the belligerents had given a new pledge - to “support their respective governments.” Campaigners for women's suffrage quickly became avid patriots and organizers of women in support of the war effort. National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), a leader in women’s right in Britain, championed the cause of WWI; through their collective efforts, NUWSS pressed for political