Representation of the People Act 1918: British Women Win the Vote

The Representation of the People Act 1918 was the British law that, for the first time, allowed women to vote in parliamentary elections and gave the vote to almost every adult man. It received Royal Assent on 6 February 1918, in the final year of the First World War, and nearly tripled the size of the electorate. It is remembered above all as the moment British women won the parliamentary vote, after more than half a century of campaigning.

Background: a limited franchise

Before 1918 the right to vote in Britain depended on property and residence, not simply on citizenship. The Great Reform Act of 1832 had widened the franchise but defined voters as “male persons”, formally excluding women for the first time. Later Reform Acts in 1867 and 1884 extended the vote to many working men, yet on the eve of the war only about 60 per cent of adult men were entitled to vote, and no women could vote for Parliament.

Women were not entirely shut out of politics. From the 1860s and 1870s many single women and widows who paid rates could vote in local elections, sit on school boards and serve as poor law guardians. These local roles gave campaigners an argument: if women could govern parishes and towns, why not vote for the nation?

The campaign for votes for women

Organised campaigning began in the 1860s, when petitions were presented to Parliament and John Stuart Mill proposed an amendment to the 1867 Reform Bill to include women; it was defeated. In 1897 local societies united as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led for many years by Millicent Fawcett. The NUWSS used lawful methods: petitions, public meetings, lobbying and large peaceful processions such as the “Mud March” through London in February 1907 and the Women’s Pilgrimage of 1913.

In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester, under the slogan “Deeds not words”. Its members, nicknamed “suffragettes” by the Daily Mail in 1906, heckled ministers, chained themselves to railings, smashed windows and from 1912 carried out arson attacks on empty buildings. Imprisoned suffragettes went on hunger strike and were force-fed; the government responded with the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act”, which released weakened prisoners and re-arrested them once they recovered. In June 1913 Emily Wilding Davison died after stepping in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

Several attempts at legislation failed. Between 1910 and 1912 cross-party “Conciliation Bills” that would have given the vote to a limited number of propertied women were defeated or abandoned, and the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith remained opposed to women’s suffrage.

The war and the Speaker’s Conference

When war broke out in August 1914 the WSPU suspended militancy and threw itself into patriotic work, while the NUWSS turned largely to relief and war work, keeping its organisation intact. The war then created a practical problem. Because the franchise depended on residence, millions of servicemen and munitions workers who had moved away from home were in danger of losing their votes, and an election would be due when peace came.

In 1916 a cross-party Speaker’s Conference was set up under the Speaker of the House of Commons, James Lowther, to propose a new electoral system. Reporting in January 1917, it recommended votes for nearly all men and, by a majority, a limited franchise for women at a higher age. Asquith, who had been replaced as Prime Minister by David Lloyd George in December 1916, publicly withdrew his opposition, citing women’s wartime service.

Passing the Act

The Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, introduced the bill in 1917. In June 1917 the House of Commons approved the women’s suffrage clause by 385 votes to 55. The House of Lords, where opposition had been strongest, accepted it in January 1918 by 134 votes to 71; Lord Curzon, president of the anti-suffrage league, notably declined to lead resistance. The Act received Royal Assent on 6 February 1918.

The main terms were:

• Men aged 21 or over could vote on the basis of six months’ residence, removing most property qualifications. Men who had served in the war could vote from age 19.
• Women aged 30 or over could vote if they were local government electors (or married to one), occupied property of a set minimum value, or were graduates voting in university constituencies.
• Polling at a general election was to take place on a single day, plural voting was limited to two votes, and candidates had to pay a £150 deposit.
• Conscientious objectors were disqualified from voting for five years after the war.

In November 1918 a separate short law, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, allowed women aged 21 or over to stand for the House of Commons, oddly younger than the age at which most could vote.

By the numbers

Consequences

The first general election under the new law was held on 14 December 1918, a month after the Armistice of 11 November 1918. Lloyd George’s coalition won a large majority. Seventeen women stood as candidates; only one, Constance Markievicz of Sinn Féin, was elected, and she refused to take her seat at Westminster. In 1919 Nancy Astor won a by-election in Plymouth Sutton and became the first woman to sit in the Commons.

The age limit of 30 was a deliberate compromise. Because of wartime deaths, an equal franchise would have created a female majority in the electorate, which many MPs were unwilling to accept. The result was that many of the young women who had worked in munitions factories and other war industries were still excluded. Campaigning continued, and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 finally gave women the vote at 21 on the same terms as men.

Myths and facts

Myth: women were given the vote as a reward for war work. War service was widely cited in 1917, and it gave politicians such as Asquith a face-saving reason to change their minds. But the Act’s age limit excluded most young female war workers, and the key decisions flowed from the need to reform the franchise for men and from the strength of the pre-war movement.

Myth: the suffragettes alone won the vote. The militant WSPU drew enormous attention, but the larger, law-abiding NUWSS did much of the patient lobbying that shaped the 1917 settlement. Historians continue to debate whether militancy helped or hindered the cause in the years just before 1914.

Myth: 1918 introduced full democracy. Plural voting for business owners and university graduates survived until 1948, and women did not vote on equal terms until 1928.

Legacy

The 1918 Act was the largest single expansion of the vote in British history and laid the foundations of mass democracy in the United Kingdom. It also changed party politics, helping the Labour Party grow into a party of government in the 1920s. The centenary in 2018 was marked by the unveiling of a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, the first statue of a woman there.

Britain was part of a wider wave: women in several other countries won the vote around the end of the war, and in the United States the Nineteenth Amendment followed in 1920.

Timeline

• 1867, May: John Stuart Mill’s amendment to give women the vote is defeated in the Commons.
• 1897: Local societies unite as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.
• 1903, October: Emmeline Pankhurst founds the Women’s Social and Political Union in Manchester.
• 1913, June: Emily Wilding Davison is fatally injured at the Epsom Derby.
• 1914, August: The WSPU suspends militant action on the outbreak of war.
• 1917, January: The Speaker’s Conference recommends a limited vote for women.
• 1917, June: The Commons approves the women’s suffrage clause by 385 votes to 55.
• 1918, 6 February: The Representation of the People Act receives Royal Assent.
• 1918, 14 December: Women vote in a general election for the first time.
• 1928, July: The Equal Franchise Act gives women the vote at 21.

Why it matters

The Representation of the People Act 1918 turned Britain from a country where a minority of adults could vote into one approaching universal suffrage. It ended the absolute exclusion of women from parliamentary politics and showed how decades of campaigning, combined with the upheaval of total war, could transform a nation’s constitution.