Women's Franchise League

The Women's Franchise League was a British organisation created by the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst together with her husband Richard and others in 1889, fourteen years before the creation of the Women's Social and Political Union in 1903.[1] The President of the organisation in 1889 was Harriet McIlquham.[2][3] In 1895 the committee who met in Aberystwyth were Ursula Mellor Bright, Mrs Behrens, Esther? Bright, Herbert Burrows, Dr Clark MP, Mrs Hunter of Matlock Bank, Jane Brownlow, Mrs E. James (who lived locally), H.N.Mozley, Alice Cliff Scatcherd, Countess Gertrude Guillaume-Schack, Jane Cobden Unwin and Dr and Mrs Pankhurst.[4]

The organization's main achievement was to secure the vote for some married women in local elections after the campaigning of its members, whereas up to the 1894 Local Government Act voting in municipal elections was only available to some single women.[5]

The league broke up in 1903, five years after the death of Richard.[6]

  1. ^ Burton, S: "Relatively Famous: Richard Pankhurst, The Red Doctor", BBC History Magazine, February 2007, 8:2, page 22.
  2. ^ Susan Hamilton, Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism (Springer 2006): 83. ISBN 9780230626478
  3. ^ Maureen Wright, Elizabeth Wolstoneholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement: The Biography of an Insurgent Woman (Oxford University Press 2014): 246. ISBN 9780719091353
  4. ^ Elizabeth Crawford (2 September 2003). The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928. Routledge. p. 1615. ISBN 1-135-43401-8.
  5. ^ Mayhall, Laura E. Nym (2003). The militant suffrage movement : citizenship and resistance in Britain, 1860-1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 24. ISBN 9780195347838. OCLC 57144473.
  6. ^ "Women's Franchise League (1889-1903) | Towards Emancipation?". hist259.web.unc.edu.