Work of the Suffragettes
Throughout time women have been thought of as second best to men. They
haven’t been given equal opportunities or political rights. The first
time a law was passed to try and make a change was in 1839, when a law
was made saying that if a marriage broke down, and the parents
separated, children less than seven years old should be looked after
by their mother. Since then and 1891 more laws were passed giving
women the rights to; divorce a husband who was cruel to them or had
left them, a law allowing them to keep the money they earned and one
giving women the choice of whether they lived with their husbands or
not. Although women had more rights than in the past, the attitude in
Victorian Britain was still that women should stay at home and look
after their husbands. The culture of the time meant that very few
women were skilled in an obvious profession and, therefore, there were
hardly any jobs that paid them well. Even Queen Victoria, the most
powerful woman in the world at the time -hardly did anything to help
the cause of women. In 1870, she wrote "let women be what God
intended, a helpmate for man, but with totally different duties and
vocations."
In the late 19th century, women wanted one very basic right -the right
to vote. The first movement fighting for women's political rights was
started in 1897 when Millicent Fawcett founded the National Union of
Women's Suffrage. Fawcett believed in the power of change through
persuasion and was strongly against the use of violence. She argued
that those women who had money and employed men as gardeners and
cooks, were unable to vote, yet unfairly the men they employed did.
Another of Fawcett's arguments was that those women that worked paid
the same amount of tax as men who were employed, but the men could
vote and the women couldn’t. However, Fawcett's progress was very slow
as her arguments were not listened to and most men in Parliament still