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What methods did the suffragettes use, and how effective were these in gaining the vote for women?
research. The turn from peaceful methods in 1860 to violence in 1914 had dominated many texts upon the subject of female suffrage. However, the violent methods did not replace constitutional ones so much as supplement them. Both the suffragists and suffragettes continued to use petitioning Parliament, lobbying MPs, and demonstrations, as well as supporting the two Conciliation Bills. Through the failure of these many NUWSS women resigned form the Liberal Party, whereas the WSPU
reverted to violence. There is no doubt that the leaders of the NUWSS grew irritated by increasingly violent tactics of the WSPU as over the year they had tried to prove that women were calm, sensible and rational human beings, and so they put forward measured arguments and used democratic methods to get their message across. The NUWSS feared that the use of violence discredited the suffrage movement and undermined efforts of the suffragists to be seen as mature women who could be trusted with the vote. The NUWSS felt that the WSPU virtually made any of the efforts that they had gone to completely ineffective and a waste of time. The NUWSS were however reluctant to criticise openly and publicly so as not to add fuel to the Government. It is sometimes argued that the violence of the WSPU lost them sympathy and support of the country at large and provided the Liberal Government with the ideal excuse to deny women the vote. The WSPU leaders denied causations of ineffective and counter-productive measures. To the WSPU persuasive tactics not militant methods were ineffective as peaceful methods had brought the vote no further forward in 1905 than fifty years before.
So, according to the WSPU the methods of the NUWSS were ineffective, and in the mind of the NUWSS the violent methods used by the WSPU discredited all of their work and damaged the case for female suffrage only proving the government right. If
both organisations deem each others methods as ineffective then how did women get the vote in 1918? The answer I do believe lies not only in the peaceful and violent methods of female organisations, but in the break out of war in 1914 and the attitude of women to this, more importantly, the attitude of working class women to this, who had little involvement in the NUWSS and even less in the WSPU. That however is a completely different essay. To answer my question as to how effective the methods were in gaining the vote for women, I would say in the case of the NUWSS that their methods were highly ineffective, but perhaps this was due to the discredit of their work by the WSPU. In relevance to the WSPU I believe their methods to have been of greater effect when they were of a less violent nature, such as the window breaking, but when missiles being thrown at politicians [next page]