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signed by 11,000 women of England – among them some illustrious names – thanking me for my services in attempting to abolish the anomaly that the Parliamentary franchise attached to a household or property qualification, when possessed by a woman, should not be exercised, though in all matters of local government when similarly qualified she exercises this right. As I believe this anomaly to be injurious to the best interests of the country, I trust to see it removed by the wisdom of Parliament. – Yours sincerely,

"B. Disraeli."

      This was written in 1873 in immediate prospect of the dissolution of Parliament, which took place in February 1874, and placed Mr. Disraeli in power for the first time.

      These were days of active propaganda for all the suffrage societies. A hundred meetings were held on the first six months of 1873, a large number for that time, though it would be considered nothing now. All the experienced political men who supported women's suffrage told us that when the 1874 Parliament came to an end a change of Government was highly probable, a new Liberal Government would be in power, and would certainly deal with the question of representation – that then would be the great opportunity, the psychological moment, for the enfranchisement of women. The agricultural labourers were about to be enfranchised and the claim of women to share in the benefits of representative government was at least as good, and would certainly be listened to. With these hopes we approached the election of 1880.

      CHAPTER III

      THROWING THE WOMEN OVERBOARD IN 1884

      "We have filled the well-fed with good things, and the hungry we have sent empty away." – From the Politician's Magnificat.

      The year 1880 opened cheerfully for suffragists. There was a series of great demonstrations of women only, beginning with one in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in February. The first little bit of practical success too within the United Kingdom came this year, for suffrage was extended to women in the Isle of Man. At first it was given only to women freeholders, but after a few years' experience of its entirely successful operation all feeling of opposition to it died away, and it was extended to women householders. The representative system of the Isle of Man is one of the oldest in the world, and the House of Keys is of even greater antiquity than the House of Commons.

      The general election took place in March and April 1880, and the Liberals were returned to power with a large majority. Mr. Gladstone became Prime Minister, and it was well known that the extension of Household Suffrage in the counties would be an important feature in the programme of the new Government. Mr. Goschen declined to join Mr. Gladstone's Government, because he was opposed to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise to the agricultural labourers. It is strange how the whirligig of time brings about its revenges. Mr. Goschen held out to the last against the enfranchisement of the agricultural labourers, but after the election of 1906 he publicly congratulated a meeting of Unionist Free Traders on "the magnificent stand the agricultural labourers had made for Free Trade!" If his counsels had prevailed in 1880, not one of these men would have had a vote and could have made a stand for Free Trade or anything else. But in politics memories are short, and no one reminded Lord Goschen, as he had then became, of his stand against the labourers' vote a few years earlier.

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      1

      Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792.

      2

      See Le vote des Femmes, pp. 16-22, par Ferdinand Buisson, Député de la Seine et Président de la Commission du Suffrage Universe

1

Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792.

2

See Le vote des Femmes, pp. 16-22, par Ferdinand Buisson, Député de la Seine et Président de la Commission du Suffrage Universelle. Condorcet had a predecessor in Mademoiselle Jars de Gournay, the friend of Montaigne. See Miss E. Sichel's Michel de Montaigne, p. 137.

3

Helen Blackburn's Record of Women's Suffrage, also Women in English Life, by Miss Georgina Hill. Mrs. Wheeler's daughter Rosina, married Mr. Lytton Bulwer, afterwards the first Lord Lytton. The present Earl of Lytton is thus the great-grandson of the lady who prompted the reply to James Mill's article referred to in the text.

4

This view has also been supported in France, see Le vote des Femmes, by Ferdinand Buisson, for evidence of women having in ancient times voted and sat in the Parlements of France. Taine also mentions the Countess of Perigord sitting in the États of her province prior to the Revolution (Les Origines de la France Contemporaire, par H. Taine, vol. i. p. 104).

5

Annals of a Yorkshire House, vol. ii. p. 319.

6

Report of the Manchester National Society for Women's Suffrage, 1869.

7

The Life of Mrs. Norton, by Miss Jane Gray Perkins (John Murray).

8

The date of this speech is given in Miss Blackburn's Record of Woman's Suffrage as 1866, the only mistake I have found in her careful and faithful history.

9

See the interesting picture in the staircase of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

10

Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. i. p. 571.

11

James Mill: a Biography, by Alexander Bain, LL.D., p. 215.

12

Representative Government, by J. S. Mill, pp. 175-180.

13

Dissertations and Discussions, by J. S. Mill, vol. ii. p. 417.

14

Autobiography, p. 241.

15

The census of 1911 shows that the excess of women over men is in the proportion of 1068 women to 1000 men, and that this proportion has changed but little during the last hundred and ten years.

16

Record of Women's Suffrage, by Helen Blackburn, pp. 53, 54, 55.

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