The suffragettes & suffragists

The campaign for votes for women is often remembered through a single vivid image: a militant in a sash chaining herself to railings or smashing a window. But the struggle was broader and longer than that picture suggests. It involved two distinct kinds of campaigner — the patient, law-abiding suffragists and the militant suffragettes — and stretched over more than half a century before women finally voted on equal terms with men. Understanding both wings, and how they interacted, is the key to understanding how the vote was won.

Two movements, two methods

The word looks similar, but the difference matters. Suffragists were constitutional campaigners who believed the vote could be won through lawful, peaceful means: petitions, public meetings, lobbying sympathetic MPs and patient argument. Their largest organisation was the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), founded in 1897 and led for decades by Millicent Fawcett. The NUWSS was committed to non-violence throughout, and built a broad, respectable base of support.

The suffragettes took a different path. In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester, frustrated by decades of polite campaigning that had produced no vote. Their motto was “Deeds, not words.” The term “suffragette” began as a slightly mocking label coined by the press, but the militants adopted it with pride. The two wings shared a goal but disagreed sharply over how to reach it.

Escalating militancy

The WSPU’s tactics grew steadily bolder. Members heckled politicians at meetings, chained themselves to railings, refused to pay taxes, and smashed shop windows. As the government continued to refuse votes for women, some moved to arson and attacks on property. The aim throughout was to make the issue impossible for politicians and newspapers to ignore.

When suffragettes were imprisoned, many went on hunger strike. The authorities responded with force-feeding, a brutal procedure that caused public revulsion. In 1913 the government tried a new approach with the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, quickly nicknamed the “Cat and Mouse Act”: hunger-striking prisoners could be released when dangerously weak and then re-arrested once they had recovered, sparing the government the political damage of a death in custody. That same year, the activist Emily Wilding Davison stepped in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby and died of her injuries, becoming the movement’s most famous martyr — though historians still debate exactly what she intended.

Did militancy help?

This is one of the central debates of the period, and it is genuinely contested. Supporters of the suffragettes argue that militancy forced women’s suffrage onto the national agenda, kept it in the headlines, and demonstrated a seriousness that polite petitioning never could. Critics counter that the violence alienated moderate opinion, hardened the resolve of opponents in Parliament, and may have delayed reform; on this view the steady constitutional work of the NUWSS, which kept building mainstream support, mattered more in the end. A fair assessment recognises that both wings contributed — the militants generating urgency and attention, the constitutionalists holding the broad coalition together — and that neither alone tells the whole story.

The war and the vote

The First World War changed the picture. When war broke out in 1914 the WSPU suspended its militant campaign, and many suffrage campaigners threw themselves into the war effort. Women took on work on a vast scale — in munitions factories, on the land, in transport and offices — doing jobs previously reserved for men. This visible contribution strengthened the argument that women had earned a political voice, and made reform far easier to justify politically. Historians debate how decisive the war was, but it clearly helped shift the climate.

Winning the vote

Reform came in two stages. The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote to women over 30 who met a property qualification, and at the same time to almost all men over 21. It enfranchised around 8.4 million women — a huge advance, but a partial one: the age and property limits meant women still did not vote on equal terms with men, a deliberate caution by a Parliament wary of women suddenly outnumbering male voters.

Full equality came a decade later. The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 lowered the voting age for women to 21 and removed the property qualification, giving women the vote on exactly the same terms as men. With that, the long campaign that had run from the Victorian era — through the patient lobbying of the suffragists and the dramatic confrontations of the suffragettes, and through the upheaval of a world war — finally reached its goal.