Britain's voting system in the early nineteenth century was a patchwork of ancient local rights. The Great Reform Act of 1832 widened the vote to many more middle-class men, but it also did something new: it specified that voters must be "male persons." Before 1832 a handful of women property holders had occasionally voted by local custom. After it, their exclusion was written into statute. When the Chartists of the late 1830s and 1840s demanded universal suffrage, they too meant universal male suffrage, although some Chartist women had argued for more.

Mill in Parliament

The first serious parliamentary push came from the philosopher John Stuart Mill, elected MP for Westminster in 1865 on a platform that openly included votes for women. In 1866 he presented a petition signed by about 1,500 women, organized by a circle that included Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett. The next year, when Parliament debated a second Reform Bill, Mill proposed that the word "man" be replaced with "person." The amendment failed by 196 votes to 73, but 73 was more than anyone had expected, and the debate made the cause respectable.

In 1869 Mill published The Subjection of Women, which drew on ideas he credited to his late wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. Its central claim was that the legal subordination of women was "wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement." Mill's most original point was about knowledge. Because women had never been free, nobody could know what their "nature" really was; what looked natural was the product of law and upbringing.

Societies and local votes

After 1867 suffrage societies formed in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and other cities. In Manchester, Lydia Becker became the movement's leading organizer and from 1870 edited the Women's Suffrage Journal. Campaigners pursued slow, lawful tactics: petitions, public meetings, pamphlets and private members' bills introduced year after year. Parliament debated such bills many times, and they were defeated, shelved or talked out every time.

Meanwhile women won footholds in local government. The Municipal Franchise Act of 1869 allowed unmarried women ratepayers to vote in town council elections. From 1870 women could vote for and sit on the new school boards, and later they served as Poor Law guardians, overseeing relief for the poor. These local roles gave thousands of women practical experience of public life and made it harder to claim that politics was beyond them. Married women were still largely shut out, because under coverture their property was legally their husbands'. The Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 began to change that.

The suffragists unite

In 1897 many local societies joined to form the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, or NUWSS, led for most of its life by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Its members were called suffragists. The NUWSS was committed to lawful, constitutional methods: lobbying, petitions, meetings and later huge peaceful processions. By 1914 it had tens of thousands of members and was much larger than the militant groups that grabbed the headlines. In 1912 it made a sharp strategic turn, creating an Election Fighting Fund to back Labour Party candidates, because Labour was the only party formally committed to women's suffrage while the Liberal government kept stalling.

Opposition was organized too. The Women's National Anti-Suffrage League was founded in 1908, with the popular novelist Mary Augusta Ward, who wrote as Mrs Humphry Ward, among its leading figures. Anti-suffragists argued that the parliamentary vote was bound up with running an empire and with duties women could not perform, such as military service. They said women could do more good through local work and personal influence than through party politics. Their petitions drew many signatures from women, a reminder that this was never simply a contest between the sexes.

Worked example: one word in a statute

Mill's amendment looked like a tiny change of one word, and that was its cleverness. It did not ask Parliament to build a new system or to state any grand principle. It asked members to explain why the word "man" should stay. Opponents found themselves defending a specific exclusion rather than an abstract tradition, and several gave weak answers, such as that women did not want the vote or that their influence at home was already enough.

After the amendment failed, campaigners tried the same idea in the courts. An 1850 law, Lord Brougham's Act, said that words importing the masculine gender in statutes should include women unless the contrary was stated. So the Reform Act of 1867, which said "man," arguably already covered women. In 1868 more than five thousand women in Manchester asked to be put on the register, and the question reached the Court of Common Pleas in Chorlton v. Lings. The judges ruled against them, holding that women had always been legally incapable of voting for Parliament. The lesson campaigners drew was that clever wording would not be enough; they would need to change the minds of the men who made the laws, or change the law outright.