ABSTRACT
The government attempted to acknowledge the necessity of compromise by appointing a Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform in the summer of 1916. The New Statesman also joined in, suggesting in November 1916, that ‘public consciousness during the war has come to recognise that the obligations of citizenship ought of themselves to carry with them the right to vote’. The leader continued: But this is no new claim, it is the oldest and primal claim upon which the case for woman’s suffrage has always rested - the claim that woman is a citizen of the State and has therefore a right to a voice in the ordering of the State. The Conference’s suggestion of an age limit meant that the ensuing debate revolved around the measures which would prevent women being enfranchised on the same terms as men. The 1918 Reform Act enfranchised women over thirty who were themselves, or were married to those entitled to vote in local government elections.
