A quick look at how and why the Liberals smashed the Conservative majority in 1906 (and the political situation that so fascinated Sybil).

From Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain

Though women did not receive the vote and were not permitted to stand for Parliament until 1918, laws were passed prior to this, which increased the role women played in their local government. In 1869, the Municipal Franchise Act gave unmarried women ratepayers the vote in council elections, thereby restoring the right lost to them under the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act. After the passage of the 1870 Elementary Education Act, they could vote and stand for election to the new school boards, in 1875 the first female Poor Law Guardian was elected, and under the 1894 Local Government Act, women could vote and stand for the Parish and District Council, all of which opened up a wider sphere of political work hitherto barred for women. Soon after the first election for the Parish and District Council, close to 2000 women were engaged in administrative work on school boards, poor law boards, parish vestries, and various parish and district councils. By the turn of the century, women could vote and stand for these positions throughout Great Britain and Ireland.

Between 1908 and 1914, politics were trapped in a frightful deadlock. The General Election of 1906 led to a landslide defeat of the Conservative Party and their Liberal Unionist allies, tipping the balance of power to the Liberal Party and the rapidly emerging Labour Party. Topics such as women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, trade unionism, old age pensions, and sweated labor, to say nothing of Home Rule, unemployment, and child welfare, aroused heated debates from the Palace of Westminster to social and political gatherings across the nation. Times were changing swiftly and violently, and no act of social reform aroused as much controversy and firestorm as the People’s Budget of 1909.

The People’s Budget was the brainchild of David Lloyd George and was championed by his ally, Winston Churchill, who was accused of being a traitor to his class. Lloyd George, a Welsh politician who gained fame by his vehement opposition to the Second Boer War, was the Chancellor of the Exchequer (what would be known as the Secretary of the Treasury in the US) in 1909, and made social reform the linchpin of his political platform. Though it could be said that the Liberal Party adopted a measure of socialistic platforms to keep the Conservative Party in check, and to stem the rise of the Labour Party, Edwardian society was changing, and politicians were kicked into the twentieth century, whether they liked it or not.

After the Liberals introduced old age pensions for the sick and infirm, Lloyd George shocked both sides of the political spectrum with the budget he revealed on April 29, 1909, which proposed taxes on luxuries, liquor, tobacco, incomes, and land, and an increase in death duties (introduced in 1894) and duties on undeveloped land and minerals, a levy on unearned increment, and a supertax on incomes above £5000 (6d. on the pound). This influx of taxes would support such programs as pensions, unemployment insurance, health insurance, free school meals for children, etc, and the costs of building the dreadnoughts the Royal Navy claimed it needed to shore up defenses against Germany. The budget galvanized the Liberal Party to action, and they fought for the Finance Bill throughout the summer, but a blow was struck when the House of Lords vetoed the budget, and the tug-of-war resulted in another General Election in January 1910.

A greater blow was struck to the House of Lords, who, though they passed the budget April 29, 1910, experienced their first real challenge of power. So great was the battle for the People’s Budget, Liberal politicians threatened to make King Edward (and after his death in May, King George) ennoble Liberal MPs so they could then sit in the House of Lords and pass the bill. This constitutional crisis did not come to pass, but 1911 saw the passing of a Parliament Act which “prevented the Lords from vetoing any public legislation that originated in and had been approved by the Commons, and imposed a maximum legislative delay of one month for “money bills” (those dealing with taxation) and two years for other types of bill.”

Further Reading:
British Social Politics by Carlton Hayes
Edwardian Life and Leisure by Ronald Pearsall
Mr. Lloyd George by E. T. Raymond

Of equal importance with the women’s suffrage movement was the extension of the franchise. Not surprisingly, until the dawn of the twentieth century, most men were ineligible to vote in Britain’s general and bye-elections, and of those who could vote but were of little power, their votes were frequently directed towards candidates backed by peers or other influential men. The Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 were not enough; ridding the land of “rotten boroughs” or permitting male landowners or householders to vote still left a very large percentage of English men absent from the voting polls. Couple this with the fight for secret ballots in the 1870s and plural voting (not actually abolished until 1948), and the typical General or By-election of the Edwardian era was a circus.

The history of the franchise reform bills in England during the 19th century represented the struggle for democracy in the country. Because the class system was so entrenched in society, most–especially politicians–believed that only certain classes had the right to vote, and the fight for enfranchisement was a bitter one until the Representation of the People Act 1918. Until then, the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act (1883), the Third Reform Act (1884), and an Act of 1885, held many suffragists at bay. The first act criminalized bribing and intimidation of voters and standardized the amount of money a politician could spend on their campaign, the second extended the same voting qualifications as existed in the towns to the countryside, and the third redistributed parliamentary seats and made every constituency of uniform importance. The voting population was now at 5.5 million, though 40% of males remained disenfranchised and only a fraction of the other 60% actually could vote, due to existing property legislation. These reforms were put to the test in the General Election of 1885, where the Liberals won a slim majority, but the agitation for Home Rule split the party, which led to another General Election in 1886.

World War One put an end to the restrictions on voting (with the exception of women younger than 30) when politicians pushed through the Representation of the People Act 1918 when they realized it was unconscionable to deny the right to vote to the millions of men who fought for the country:

1. All adult males gain the vote, as long as they are over 21 years old and are resident householders
2. Women over 30 years old receive the vote but they have to be either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register
3. Some seats redistributed to industrial towns
4. Elections to be held on a decided day each year

This Act tripled the number of eligible voters from 7.7 million in 1912 to 21.4 million by the end of 1918, and women now accounted for about 43% of the electorate. The Equal Suffrage Act was passed ten years later, by which women were given equal voting rights with men.

The militant suffrage movement in Great Britain began as a Pankhurst family enterprise that, from 1903 to 1905 remained focused around Manchester, until the general election of 1905 brought matters to a head. Prior to the Pankhursts, the fight for women’s suffrage in Britain was a relatively tame one. In the mid 1860s, a group of women, all pursuing a career in either medicine or education, formed a discussion group dubbed the “Kensington Society”. Their initial reasons for forming the group had little to do with suffrage; the seven founding ladies merely wished for a society of like-minded women of independent means and an interest in fields not normally associated with the female sex. It wasn’t until the topic of suffrage was raised that the Kensington Society discovered their mutual dismay. In reaction, they drafted a petition asking parliament to extend to vote to women. Presenting the petition to Henry Fawcett and John Stuart Mill, a pair of MPs known for their sympathy towards women’s suffrage, the Kensington Society saw their petition almost immediately shot down in Parliament. Vastly disappointed with the action, they formed the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. Soon thereafter, many cities in Britain found themselves hosts to similar societies.In 1887, seventeen of these groups formed the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, or NUWSS. Under the presidencies of Lydia Becker and Millicent Fawcett, the society raised awareness of the cause by holding meetings, holding marches, printing pamphlets and newsletters, and writing politicians and petitions. NUWSS also lent support to Josephine Butler’s campaign against white slavery as well as Clementia Black’s attempts to force the government to protect low-paid women workers. Inoffensive, efficient and ladylike, NUWSS attracted support from all walks of like—including a good number of men.The cause chugged along in this manner until the Manchester group splintered, and the women, led by Christabel Pankhurst, grew fed up with the constitutional methods NUWSS favored.

The Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU) was born.

A far cry from the genteel group from whence they came, the WSPU immediately showed its difference in the fact that it attracted women from the working and middle-classes—women who were less inhibited by the traditional trappings of “ladyhood”. Though at first fearing the stance the WSPU took would harm the cause, the NUWSS admired their courage and refused to speak out against them.

By 1905 public interest in women’s suffrage had waned, and the WSPU made a decision that would forever change the face of the suffragist movement. Traveling to London to hear a speech by Sir Edward Grey, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenny threw down the gauntlet by interrupting Sir Edward’s speech with the cry of “Will the Liberal Government give votes to women?“.

The women were soon after charged with assault and arrested. Christabel and Annie then proceeded to shock the world when, after refusing to pay the five shilling fine, they were thrown in jail. Never before had English suffragists resorted to violence to support the cause and newspapers were quick to pounce on this new movement, nicknaming the followers of militancy “suffragettes“. Far from decrying this derogatory term, the WSPU adopted it with pleasure, the term separating them from the civil actions of the NUWSS.

Moving their headquarters from Manchester to London, by 1908 the suffragettes had launched an all-out war for the cause, targeting those MPs notoriously anti-suffrage like Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and Winston Churchill. The suffragettes marched through London, interrupted speeches, assaulted policemen attempting to arrest them, chained themselves to fences, sent letter bombs and damaged property–the most infamous being their destruction of the windows of department stores and shops in Bond Street. Viewed as unfeminine due to many of the women being unmarried and involved in careers instead of housework, the Establishment were at a loss as to how to deal with suffragettes. They baffled the common perceptions of Victorian womanhood and once released from jail, merely went out and repeated the same misdemeanors. Using this loophole in the justice system, the suffragettes increased their militant campaigns, including a devastating arson campaign during which attempts were made to burn the houses of anti-suffrage MPs, railway stations, golf courses, cricket fields and racecourse stands.

When the jailed suffragettes went on hunger-strikes while incarcerated, the government passed the “Cat and Mouse Act”: if a suffragette went on a hunger strike, once ill she would be released from prison and re-arrested when well again. However, by the summer of 1914, the militant campaign was exhausted by the imprisonment, exile or poor health of the WSPU’s leading members (Christabel had fled to Paris in 1912 to escape arrest) and the number of active members able to continue the violence was now very small. Naturally, WWI put a damper on the suffrage campaign, and both the WSPU and NUWSS focused their energies on the war effort, using their platforms to drum up support for the troops. But ever antagonistic to the end, the WSPU took patriotism to their breast as much as they did suffrage, using their newspaper to attack those in power they saw as pacifists or communists.

In then end, all women over the age of 30 were granted the vote in 1918, and ten years later the vote was given on equal terms as men (age 21).

Further Reading:
Caffrey, Kate. 1900s Lady
Crow, Duncan. The Edwardian Woman
Mackenzie, Madge. Shoulder to shoulder : a documentary
Nowell-Smith, Simon. Edwardian England, 1901-1914
Pankhurst, Sylvia. The suffragette : the history of the women’s militant suffrage movement, 1905-1910
Shaw, Frederick John. The Case for Women’s Suffrage