ABSTRACT
Sporadic calls for the enfranchisement of women were made from the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, when women were for the first time expressly excluded from this right. But no large-scale, organized demand arose until 1865, when a new Reform Bill was anticipated, and when John Stuart Mill, the political philosopher, was elected to Parliament on a programme that included women’s suffrage.1 By this time a women’s movement was in existence, and the vote was only one of a broad range of rights sought in the following decades.2
