It is a curious fact of history that the UK’s Representation of the People Act 1918 is remembered for being giving universal suffrage to women. What is less known is that it also gave universal suffrage to men! Before 1918, and what is known as the fourth reform act, men were only entitled to vote if they had some form of property entitlement – either a freehold of sufficient value or a leasehold of sufficient value. This meant that around 40% of men had no vote at all, although the suspicion is that for various other reasons many of the 60% could not in fact vote.
This in effect meant that only rich women were disenfranchised – poor women were disenfranchised for being poor in the same way that poor men were.
Whilst the 1918 did not make the right to vote equal between the sexes, the real answer to the question “how long did it take for women to get the vote after men did” is somewhere between 0 and 10 years for the UK. Women aged 21-29 had to wait until 1928 to get the vote.
Even more curiously, before the much needed Reform Act of 1832 (which amongst other things abolished rotten boroughs with ridiculously small numbers of voters), there was actually no legal impediment to women voting. It was probably exceptionally rare that any women did vote except possibly in towns where the electorate was restricted to the membership of certain guilds (women could and sometimes were members of mediæval guilds), but in theory it could happen. The Reform Act of 1832 was the first act which explicitly restricted the right to vote, to male property owners.
So in effect it was only for less than a 100 years that women were denied the vote in this country; before 1832 the overwhelming majority were denied the vote for being poor.
Added: It turns out that there were some women who could vote before 1832. See http://www.historyofwomen.org/suffrage.html
Added2: It appears that an anti-feminist blog entry is pointing at this site as evidence. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of course, but this blog post was not intended to be anti-feminist. It was intended to make two points :-
- The time difference between universal suffrage for men and universal suffrage for women in the UK was a lot less than is commonly believed.
- And that before 1832, it was possible that women could (and according to the first amendment to this post, did) vote although it was probably very rare.
Through The Doorway