Suffragette

A suffragette was a member or supporter of the British Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an activist women's group agitating for votes for women, which in the early 20th century broke away from the much larger, peaceful and longer lasting National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), whose supporters were known as suffragists. Both organisations campaigned for the right to vote in public elections in the United Kingdom. However, the Women's Social and Political Union, a women-only movement founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, engaged in direct action and civil disobedience as a result of what they saw as slow progress towards universal suffrage. In 1906, a journalist writing in the Daily Mail coined the term suffragette for the WSPU, derived from suffragist^α (any person advocating for voting rights), reportedly to 'indicate that special revolutionary quality of impatience which marked the new variety of suffragist', although Elizabeth Crawford, a researcher and author on the women's suffrage movement, has suggested it was to 'belittle and to show that they were less than the proper kind of suffrage worker'. Whatever the truth was, the militants embraced the new name, even adopting it for use as the title of the newspaper published by the WSPU.

Women had won the right to vote in several countries by the end of the 19th century; in 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant the vote to all women over the age of 21. When by 1903 women in Britain had not been enfranchised, Pankhurst decided that women had to "do the work ourselves"; the WSPU motto became "deeds, not words". The suffragettes heckled, attacked and injured politicians, tried to storm parliament, were attacked themselves in turn, and sometimes sexually assaulted, during battles with the police, chained themselves to railings, smashed windows, carried out a nationwide bombing and arson campaign, and faced anger from large parts the British public, and ridicule in the media. When imprisoned they went on hunger strike, not eating for days or even a week, to which the government responded by force-feeding them. The first suffragette to be force fed was Evaline Hilda Burkitt. The death of one suffragette, Emily Wilding Davison, when she ran in front of King George V's horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, made headlines around the world along with 17 other women. The WSPU campaign had varying levels of support from within the suffragette movement; breakaway groups formed, and within the WSPU itself not all members supported the direct action.

The suffragette campaign was suspended when World War I broke out in 1914, when the WSPU ceased all agitation for women’s suffrage and supported the White Feather Campaign but the work of the NUWSS continued and immediately after the war, the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote to some women, but because so many men had died in the war, and to avoid an immediate female voting majority, it was initially only for women over the age of 30 who met certain property qualifications. Ten years later, women gained electoral equality with men when the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 gave all women the right to vote at age 21.