I read somewhere that in the early 1900s woman didn't want the right to vote. Is this true?

pinjooo · 2020-07-21T15:03:36+00:00

History teacher here:

Yep in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s some groups of women wanted the vote (suffragists and suffragettes), some didn't care, and some women activey opposed women's suffrage and right to vote (anti-suffrage) because they preferred that male relatives speak for them and believed politics was of no concern to them.

2020-07-21T14:15:28+00:00

Yes this is true feminism wrote history to make it seem as though women were oppressed throughout history

Suck-Less · 2020-07-22T09:26:07+00:00

An obligation that came with voting at the time was an active draft. This draft was just post WWI. Where men were forced by governments to fight in front lines saturated with mustard gas. American women were terrified of having to go through what men went through.

Part of the 19th amendment was that women got a pussypass with this requirement.

DubsPackage · 2020-07-21T14:52:32+00:00

Hell majority of people even today don't vote.

Democracy in alot of ways is a scam.

caem123 · 2020-07-21T18:08:29+00:00

Ireland would have been freed recently from the UK after 300 years of turmoil if only men voted there. Women votes tipped the decision to stay subjugated to UK.

problem_redditor · 2020-07-21T16:26:45+00:00

1/2

Yes, a huge amount of women disagreed with women's suffrage. Gladstone wrote in 1892 regarding the matter of women's suffrage that "there is on the part of large numbers of women who have considered the matter for themselves, the most positive objection and strong disapprobation. Is it not clear to every unbiased mind that before forcing on them what they conceive to be a fundamental change in their whole social function, that is to say in their Providential calling, at least it should be ascertained that the womanly mind of the country is… set upon securing it?"

The first big petition by women against women's suffrage in Britain put it in 1889 that "We protest against [women’s] admission to direct power in that State which rests upon force - the State in its administrative, military and financial aspects." In other words, they believed that women should be involved in politics relating to their own experience. This does seem somewhat similar to what women in the US were saying at that time, that since women were not required to enforce the government's will they should not have an equal say in these matters. More on this later.

There were also other reasons as to why women would oppose the parliamentary vote for women, though. Some distrusted and disliked party politics; some felt that women would end up being manipulated by male politicians; others that women were so bound up with their real and fundamental work in the family that they didn’t have the expertise to vote properly on imperial matters; many felt that women had their proper and vital areas of expertise in the domestic sphere from which party politics would be a damaging distraction.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/did-most-women-want-the-vote-

Julia Bush notes in her book "Women Against The Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain" that women, not men, constituted the bulk of Britain's anti-suffrage movement. "Women's roles in the British anti-suffrage movement were important, and in some ways distinctive. Women provided a good deal of the initiative and most of the hard work behind the organized opposition, as well as the majority of its declared supporters.".

She goes on to note:

"In 1913 more than two-thirds of the direct subscribers to the anti-suffragist central office were women; at branch level the proportion of women subscribers rose to more than five out of every six.". She also notes that women made up, and collected, nearly half a million anti-suffrage petition signatures against votes for women just before the first world war.

From the 1870s up to the moment of enfranchisement, both male and female anti-suffragists claimed empathically that the majority of British women did not want the parliamentary vote, and this claim actually seems very plausible.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Women_Against_the_Vote.html?id=FeMTDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

So many women objected to the franchise being imposed on them that in the mere 18 months leading up to a 1910 parliamentary debate on women's suffrage, anti-suffragettes had managed to collect 300,000 signatures from women who objected to the parliamentary franchise being imposed on them. Meanwhile, in the 16 years leading up to that debate, suffragettes only managed to collect 193,000 signatures of women who wanted the vote.

A segment from the transcript of the debate:

"Still, for what it is worth, one finds that from 1890–1906 only 193,000 women signed Petitions to this House in favour of female suffrage, and that during the last eighteen months, a period in which a strong anti-suffrage association has been in existence, 300,000 women, some of them eminent women, have signed petitions against it, and to the effect that these proposals shall not be forced upon them."

"A rather interesting illustration was furnished by an inquiry which was instituted by "The Sheffield Independent," a newspaper which I think itself is sympathetic with these proposals. This inquiry was addressed to the women householders of Sheffield. Twenty-three thousand papers were sent out, and of the replies 9,000 were in favour of woman suffrage and 14,000 were against it. The representatives of this paper reported that in many cases their emissaries were chased with violence from the houses by the female inhabitants under the impression that they were collecting statistical matter as the emissaries of the suffragist party."

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1910/jul/11/parliamentary-franchise-women-bill

The second half of my comment is in a reply to this one.

feminismIsMisandry0 · 2020-07-21T15:11:53+00:00

I am sure that the social model of a few centuries ago was a reasoned model based on thousands of years of learning and understanding. Many women are realists and recognize their nature to always demand more at the expense of others while men do the opposite.

If one could have the opinion of women of that time, they would have said that they were very well off, safe from everything and never having to suffer like men.

So some people make clichés like ironing a shirt or cooking food as a form of slavery but the fact is that it was more like a kind of gift / comfort offered to the man after his long 12 hour days in the mud fighting for his family. It really wasn't much and yet today they managed to invent a story of submission based on these little gestures.

So yes, it would not surprise me if some of them realized the risk this would pose to women and the suffering it would cause if they lost their role of privileging and protecting.

oafsalot · 2020-07-21T16:32:01+00:00

Look up when men, generally, got the right to vote and then compare it to when women got it... In most cases it's not that long after.

Title	I read somewhere that in the early 1900s woman didn't want the right to vote. Is this true?
Author	RagnaroFirelord
Upvotes	16
Comments	22
Date	July 21, 2020 2:06 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/hv7xah/i_read_somewhere_that_in_the_early_1900s_woman/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/i-read-somewhere-that-in-the-early-1900s-woman.847311 https://theredarchive.com/post/847311

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