ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Mary Wollstonecraft proposed giving some women the vote in the period of the French Revolution, and how some utopian socialists and early Chartists supported the idea. In 1851 the Sheffield Female Political Association drafted the first women’s suffrage petition to the House of Lords, but in the mid-nineteenth century the vote was just one among many single-issue feminist causes. Historical discussions of suffrage tactics tend to emphasise the different approaches taken by the two main wings of the movement in the Edwardian period. On the one hand were the ‘militants’, who dominate traditional accounts of women’s suffrage. On the other were the ‘constitutionalists’, the majority of suffragists who sought to work peacefully within the political system. Militancy was successful at generating publicity for the movement, but the key people that the suffragists needed to persuade were the MPs who would vote on the issue in the House of Commons.
