Why did women get the vote?

The Suffragettes

At the time, the Suffragettes caused a lot of anger and it has been argued that they lost support for the cause. Certainly, women had not been given the vote by 1914, even after a lot of Suffragette violence. However, some historians argue that, although they could not be seen to give in to Suffragette violence, politicians could not face a return to Suffragette violence after the war, and that is why they gave women the vote.

The War

During the war, women served the nation and did men's work in many ways. When they were given the vote in 1918, almost every person who supported the motion in Parliament said that they deserved it because of their conduct during the war - they had proved that they could go to war' with the men. The problem with this argument is that only women who were householders over the age of 30 (6 million women) got the vote in 1918; women over 21 did not get the vote until 1928. Yet the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave the vote to all men over the age of 21 so the war did not bring women equality.

Sylvia Pankhurst

In June 1914, she famously took a delegation of working class women to lobby Prime Minister Asquith who did not think that working class women were intelligent enough to have the vote. This proved to Asquith that working class women were intelligent enough to vote.

The Suffragists

Some historians argue that the long-term persuasion of the Suffragists won the vote. In 1916, Lloyd George, who supported women's suffrage, replaced Asquith as prime minister, and many pro-suffrage MPs who had been young men before 1914 now held influential places in the government. So the women won by patient persuasion, after all.