Ramsay MacDonald blamed the conservatism of the Old Gang for failure to come to grips with the problem of women's rights.• In the mid-1890, the Society attempted to produce a tract stating the claims of all women to share the civil and political rights then enjoyed by men 2 but abandoned the project in despair. Beatrice Webb and Shaw salvaged something by writing Women and the Factory Acts and Women as Councillors. 3 Fabians repeatedly agreed that equal citizenship would be a good idea, then hastily let the matter drop. During the Wells controversy Maud Pember Reeeves, with the antipodean forthrightness natural to the wife of the New Zealand government's former representative in London, virtually blackmailed the Executive into including equal citizenship for women in the aims of the Basis, hoping that male members would then feel compelled to press for women's suffrage. Large numbers of women now joined the Society, but nothing really changed. Admittedly Sidney Olivier once persuaded a members' meeting in November 1906 to congratulate the Women's Political and Social Union, in particular those in gaol, on its success in drawing attention to women's citizenship claims. 4 Though many Fabian women were members of other organizations in the suffrage movement, the Society as a whole continued to ignore it.