Letters | 19 March 2011

On suffrage

Sir: In his article ‘Failure of the Feminists’ (12 March), Paul Johnson asserts that some women would have got the vote in Britain well before 1914 if ‘feminists’ had been willing to accept property qualifications. In fact the stated aim of the major suffrage societies was to achieve the vote on the same terms as men, which before 1918 meant with a property qualification. They had been quite happy in the 1890s to accept the municipal vote on these terms. It was the Liberal leadership (and, initially, the Labour party) that opposed women’s suffrage on the grounds that the class of women who would get the vote under equal franchise would be likely to vote Conservative. And of course in 1918, when all men finally got the vote, suffragists were happy to accept a measure involving not only a property qualification but a minimum age of 30 — which, incidentally, excluded a good many if not most of the young women who had volunteered for war work.