Notes

The suffragette movement had been plagued by the The movement for women to have the vote had initially started in 1897 when Millicent Fawcett founded the National Union of Women's Suffrage. Fawcett's converted many of the members of the Labour Representation Committee (later known as the Labour Party) however most men in Parliament believed that women just would not understand how Parliament worked and therefore should not take part in the electoral process. This may be because the attitude of Victorian Britain was that women should stay at home and look after their husbands. Frederick Rylands speech supports this, in 1896, he exclaimed that “Political power in many large cities would chiefly be in the hands of young, ill-educated, giddy, and often ill-conducted (badly behaved) girls." This speech is also telling us that (WRITE SOMETHING HERE) Many men felt that allowing women to vote would be potentially very damaging for Britain like in the source above. This left many women angry and in 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (better known as the Suffragettes) was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. The suffragettes were prepared to use violence to get what they wanted, they realised that peaceful protest wasn’t effective. However this was more challenging than it looked since a widely common view around this time was that women were to be subordinate, make a man’s home delightful and to look after the children, everything domestic. The WSPU began their violence in 1903 with vandalism and harassment and even self-abuse. The most famous being the martyrdom of Emily Wilding Davison when she threw herself under the King’s horse in June 1913.