Women's Right to Vote

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Women's Right to Vote

The move for women to have the vote had really started in 1897 when

Millicent Fawcett founded the National Union of Women's Suffrage.

"Suffrage" means the right to vote and that is women wanted - hence

its inclusion in Fawcett's title.

Millicent Fawcett believed in peaceful protest. She felt that any

violence or trouble would persuade men that women could not be trusted

to have the right to vote. Her game plan was patience and logical

arguments. Fawcett argued that women could hold responsible posts in

society such as sitting on school boards - but could not be trusted to

vote; she argued that if parliament made laws and if women had to obey

those laws, then women should be part of the process of making those

laws; she argued that as women had to pay taxes as men, they should

have the same rights as men and one of her most powerful arguments was

that wealthy mistresses of large manors and estates employed

gardeners, workmen and labourers who could vote........but the women

could not regardless of their wealth..............

However, Fawcett's progress was very slow. She converted some of the

members of the Labour Representation Committee (soon to be the Labour

Party) but most men in Parliament believed that women simply would not

understand how Parliament worked and therefore should not take part in

the electoral process. This left many women angry and in 1903 the

Women's Social and Political Union was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst

and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. They wanted women to have the

right to vote and they were not prepared to wait. The Union became

better known as the Suffragettes. Membe...

... middle of paper ...

...t this time there were 460,000

women in the military and over 6.5 million in civilian war work.

Without their contribution, our war effort would have been severely

weakened and it is probable that we would not have been able to fight

to our greatest might without the input from women. Ironically, in

Nazi Germany, Hitler had forbidden German women to work in German

weapons factories as he felt that a woman's place was at home. His

most senior industry advisor, Albert Speer, pleaded with Hitler to let

him use German female workers but right up to the end, Hitler refused.

Hitler was happy for captured foreign women to work as slaves in his

war factories but not German. Many of these slave workers, male and

female, deliberately sabotaged the work that they did - so in their

own way they helped the war effort of the Allies.

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