Memorandum.
[WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE]. A MEMORANDUM Showing cause why women should take part in the election of the parliament which is to deal with problems of reconstruction arising out of the war. London: Issued by the National Union of women’s Suffrage Societies, 14 great Smith street, Westminster, S.W. November, 1916.
Folio, pp. 34; original brown wrappers; resewn.
The Memorandum contains a synthesis of the NUWSS case as it stood in the uncertain weeks prior to the collapse in December 1916 of the Second Asquith Ministry.
The NUWSS, then under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett, had a membership principally drawn from the middle-classes who hoped to gain the vote by non-violent means. Colloquially know as Suffragists they had stance at variance to their sisters the Suffragettes.
Knowing that Asquith’s majority Liberal coalition government was treading on thin ice they probably hoped to persuade them to act on giving women the franchise. To this purpose the work gathers together all key issues and tabulates these in a series of five schedules and associated comments:
I. Women in Industry
II. Statements of Opinion on Women’s War work by Employers and Others.
III.Statements of opinions in favour of Women Suffrage by Cabinet Ministers, Members of Parliament, and Others.
IV.Statements of Opinion in the Press in favour of Women Suffrage.
V. Women’s Suffrage in Practice; and Parliamentary History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Great Britain.
The introduction includes a veiled threat on the continuing vacillation of that the Liberal majority ‘Women have always shown themselves ready to make all reasonable sacrifice - and often to make sacrifices which were not reasonable - for their men. But with their quickened and deepened sense of citizenship they are not willing that their interests should be bargained away by a Parliament over which they have no control, or that they should be treated as a football in a game between Capital and labour, with the Government acting as Umpire’
A new a coalition government, now having a Tory majority under Lloyd George being formed on the collapse of Second Asquith Ministry, precluded any notion of extending the franchise to women until the end of the war.
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