Women and men opposed the suffrage movement for a variety of reasons and by various means. Numerous opinion polls throughout the suffrage campaign continued to find the majority of women not wanting a vote. Some women’s commitment to this belief led to their active involvement in anti-suffrage campaigning, though others were hampered by their very belief in women’s separate sphere of influence from a direct involvement in a political campaign and therefore relative passivity in support of their cause. ‘Antis’ tended to see women’s role as concentrating on womanly duty, a maternal role and the exercise influence and reform through other means – through the example of her behaviour, service and gentle influence on men for the good. Prominent anti-suffragist writers included the novelists Mary Ward and Ouida and the traveller and diplomatist Gertrude Bell and even women committed to the extension of women’s rights in other areas like Elizabeth Wordsworth, Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, the Oxford women’s college or Florence Bell, playwright and friend and collaborator with suffragist and social campaigner Elizabeth Robins. Often anti-suffrage campaigners combined an involvement in social action with their anti-suffrage views, their actions based on a belief in women’s distinctive role in doing good works and helping the disadvantaged.
Despite this reluctance to involve themselves in politics the anti-suffragists did become organised.
Key dates include:
1889: Launch of the ‘Appeal Against Female Suffrage’ with 104 signatories, led by Mary Ward, which when published in Nineteenth Century gathered 2,000 more signatures to ‘Female Suffrage: A Women’s Protest’
1908 Launch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Over the next ten years, establishment of over 100 branches
1910 Merger with the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage
The movement launched the Anti-Suffrage Review which denounced the behaviour of the suffragettes for their unfemininity, violence, sexual deviance, hysteria, unnaturalness and threat to other women she represented as exposing women to ridicule and insult.
See Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain by Julia Bush
The contradictions of the anti-suffrage argument become the grounds of comedy in pro-suffrage writing. Many Actresses Franchise League sketches and short plays such as Cicely Hamilton and Chris St John’s The Pot and the Kettle where an anti-suffrage is mortified to find herself under arrest when her anti-suffrage passions drive her to attack a suffragette, A Chat with Mrs Chicky by Evelyn Glover where Mrs Holbrook is bested by the charwoman she tries to convert to the anti-suffrage cause or Lady Geraldine’s Speech by Beatrice Harraden where an anti-suffragist turns to an old friend in composing a speech but is gradually converted by her and her intelligent women friends to pro-suffragism.