Votes for women before and after 1832

Continuing our series on the practical workings of the UK’s historic voting system, Philip Salmon of our House of Commons, 1832-1868 project re-examines when and how some women could vote long before they secured equal electoral rights with men.

Women’s participation in politics before 1918, when they acquired the parliamentary vote, is now well documented. After decades of neglect in older narratives, a wide range of studies have shed light on their activities as political hostesses, electoral patrons, canvassers, petitioners, radical activists, suffrage campaigners and of course as ‘non-electors’. In the public voting system that existed before 1872, the influence of the unenfranchised over those with a vote could be considerable. As wives, mothers, sisters, mistresses, landladies and employers, women were especially well-placed to direct and even manage votes. As Disraeli declared: ‘if the men have the votes, the women have the influence’. Reams of comments in election canvassing books along the lines of ‘wife says he will vote’ or ‘wife promised’ testify to their importance. It was certainly not unusual for some women to even frog-march their men-folk to the public poll, much to everyone’s amusement. When the Radical MP J. S. Mill unsuccessfully proposed to enfranchise women in 1867, one of the central Tory arguments against him was that they already possessed it, albeit indirectly. ‘Everyone acquainted with elections was aware of the influence which was exercised by women’, protested the Tory MP Viscount Galloway.

The ways in which women could actually vote in their own right, by contrast, remains a more murky topic. During my research for Electoral Reform at Work (2001), I discovered a number of polling records for local rather than parliamentary elections that included female voters. The backgrounds of women like Grace Brown of Sandford Street, listed as voting in an 1843 Lichfield parish election held in St Chad’s parish, were later investigated by Sarah Richardson in her Political Worlds of Women (2013) and formed the basis of a Radio 4 documentary (listen here).

A section of a parish poll. roughly handwritten records showing the names and ages of recorded individuals including both men and women. — Extract from 1843 parish poll showing female voters. Image courtesy of Lichfield Joint RO, D15/4/11/0

Polling evidence like this remains rare, although more examples are emerging from our 1832-68 project. What is clear is that under certain circumstances, women could and did vote in some local polls, even after the municipal franchise became restricted to ‘male persons’ by the 1835 Municipal Reform Act. This restriction followed the more widely noted clauses in the famous 1832 Reform Act, which officially defined a parliamentary voter as ‘male’ for the first time. This of course leads to an obvious question. Could women vote in parliamentary elections before 1832?

Women parliamentary voters before 1832:

Although rare, evidence of female polling in parliamentary elections before 1832 does exist. Some of the earliest examples date back over 600 years, well before the appearance of pollbooks. In his research for the 1422-61 House of Commons project, Dr Hannes Kleineke discovered election indentures from 1422-37 listing women voters in seven Yorkshire elections. They included Joan Beaufort (countess of Westmorland), Maud Clifford (countess of Cambridge), Maud Neville (Lady Mauley), Elizabeth Pigot, Lady Elizabeth Roos and Margaret Vavasour. All were the wealthy widows of local magnates and were represented by an attorney at the county sheriff’s court, where the indentures were drawn up.

A picture of a document medieval document written in caligraphy. — Yorkshire election indenture, 17 Dec. 1436. Image courtesy of National Archives, C219/15/1

A section of a medieval document written in caligraphy. Four names of females are circled digitally in red. — Extract from 1436 indenture showing women voters. Image courtesy of National Archives, C219/15/1

Another indenture from 1640 unearthed by Dr Vivienne Larminie listed two women polling in a Heytesbury election. Again both were single wealthy widows and owners of property. (Note that until 1882 most married women could not own property in their own right). Attempts by lower status single women to poll tended to be less successful. Derek Hirst (1975) has described how women failed to be recognised as electors in Westminster (1621), Knaresborough (1628) and Worcestershire (1640), despite meeting local franchise requirements.

The issue at stake here, as Elaine Chalus has noted, was not necessarily a woman’s legal entitlement. In theory anyone possessing the requisite property qualification, regardless of gender, could claim to vote before 1832. In the counties the franchise was vested in all those owning freehold property worth 40 shillings or more, a qualification dating back to 1429. In the boroughs electing MPs, a plethora of different franchises existed, based around local customs, the payment of rates, freeman qualifications, residency rules or the ownership of special properties or ‘burgages’.

Rather than being prevented from voting for legal reasons, single propertied women increasingly found themselves excluded from parliamentary elections on grounds of propriety and social convention, or what was sometimes termed ‘decency’ and ‘nature’. This is well illustrated by two examples. In the Suffolk election of 1640, a number of widows were stopped from voting by the sheriff, although he admitted that ‘they might in law have been allowed’. He forbade them to poll, he explained, ‘conceiving it a matter verie unworthie of any gentleman’ and ‘most dishonourable’ for ‘an election to make use of their voices’. In the borough of Richmond in 1679, similar scruples led to the female owners of qualifying burgage properties being refused the vote. It was agreed that ‘no widow should vote, it being against common right; but that widows should have power to assign their right to other persons’. On this basis a Mr Wharton acquired no less than ‘30 assignments’ and ‘did then and there vote’. Proxy voting, as this example suggests, became customary in some constituencies before 1832, with men or attorneys exercising the franchise on behalf of qualifying females. It is the names of these men, of course, who appear in surviving printed pollbooks.

Women parliamentary voters after 1832:

The 1832 Reform Act is often viewed as a first step on the UK’s road to democracy. As I’ve shown elsewhere though, it not only disfranchised tens of thousands of former voters, but also removed the legal entitlement of any woman to vote, even by proxy. The complex registration system introduced in 1832, however, created scope for confusion. Local, often poorly educated officials struggled to cope with drawing up all the lists of voters and ratepayers needed each year. Unusual names or those for both genders, like Alex, Evelyn, Glen and Hillary, plus the fact that spelling had yet to become standardised, added to the potential for error. Coupled with this, women played a significant and noisy role in the annual registration courts, where claims to vote and objections to voters were settled by revising barristers. With men at work, it was often women who attended these courts on a voter’s behalf. In Salford, for example, a local paper noted how dozens of wives came ‘to support the claims of their husbands to vote … bringing infants with them’.

Instances of women appearing on the voting registers after 1832, usually accidentally, were therefore not that unusual. Being registered, however, was not the same as actually being allowed to vote. Examples of women polling in parliamentary elections after 1832 are extremely rare. The first female known to have slipped through the net was Lily Maxwell, who polled at a Manchester by-election in 1867. Registered by a clerical error, her cause was taken up by the local branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and the Liberal candidate Jacob Bright, for whom she was allowed to cast her vote by a bemused polling clerk. This well-publicised case inspired many more Manchester women to try and register their claims. A few even managed to poll at the ensuing 1868 general election before the voting entitlement of women was deemed invalid by a judicial ruling.

A half-length photographic black and white portrait of Lily Maxwell. Dressed in all black with a black skirt blouse, skirt, shawl and gloves, she is wearing a black bonnet with white material either side over her shoulders. She has grey hair. — Lily Maxwell: image courtesy of Manchester Libraries

Female voting in local elections:

One of the reasons why single propertied women like Lily sometimes became registered by mistake was the confusing array of other elections at the local level in which women could continue to vote after 1832. These included some parish and vestry elections, some poor law union and board of guardians’ elections, coroners’ elections and certain town or improvement commissioners’ elections. The nature of the franchises varied, according to custom or local acts, but the payment of rates or possession of property was invariably a key factor. Local officials needed to draw up lists for these polls as well, including any qualifying women. Interestingly some of the females who polled in the 1843 election for an assistant overseer in St Chad’s parish, Lichfield, possessed more than one vote. This was owing to wealthier ratepayers being allocated additional votes under the terms of the 1818 Sturges Bourne Act. Brighton’s town commission had a similar arrangement. Here single women accounted for a fifth of the ratepayers but owned a quarter of the town’s property, enabling some 1,200 females to vote each year.

When a campaign was launched in the 1850s to replace Brighton’s town commission with a more democratically elected town council, it created a major political controversy. By becoming a council under the terms of the 1835 Municipal Reform Act, only ‘male persons’ would be allowed to poll. The old town commission, by contrast, allowed wealthy females multiple votes, but excluded many poorer working men from voting. The ensuing battle became polarised between local activists determined to defend the rights of ‘unprotected females’ and those wanting a broader male franchise who ‘did not think a polling booth was the proper place for a woman’. Even the local vicar got involved. Objecting to any change, he warned against giving the vote to men ‘in humbler walks of life’ who were ‘illiterate and possessing none of the intelligence of the ladies’.

Polling records like that for St Chad’s are rare, but these sorts of local controversies help provide additional insights into the way single propertied women continued to vote in certain types of election after 1832. Similar evidence has emerged from Cheltenham, governed by an improvement commission until the 1870s, Whitehaven, where an elected board of town and harbour trustees ran local affairs, and many other non-municipal towns, such as Southport.

The biggest change to women’s involvement in local elections occurred in 1869, when all women ratepayers were admitted to the municipal council elections from which they had been excluded in 1835, although participation was later restricted to unmarried women only. This landmark reform opened the way for the inclusion of single propertied women in elections for a plethora of newly established local authorities, including school boards (1870), county and borough councils (1888), and parish and district councils (1894), when married women were also added. By 1900 almost 14% of the local government electorate was female.

An extract from a poll book from the 19th century. Typed out, it lists the names, what type of accomodation they live and where. There are both male and female names included in the list. — Extract from Basingstoke council poll book 1869. Image courtesy Hampshire RO, 8M62/186

Surviving poll books for municipal elections held before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 testify to the significance of these women and the novelty of their inclusion after 1869. One pollbook for Basingstoke Council began by listing the votes cast by women separately, after men, only to then start mixing them up. Of the 727 electors eligible to vote, 95 (13%) were female. Interestingly, the polling record reveals differences between the behaviour of men and women. While the turnout rate for men was 56%, it was only 28% for women. Accounts of working men attacking voters and ‘pelting even ladies with soot and flour’ may have been a factor here. (Hampshire Advertiser, 6 Nov. 1869)

By far the most striking difference, however, was political. Whereas 68% of the male voters supported the re-election of all four long-serving councillors (including one officially endorsed replacement), only 26% of the females did so. Instead over half of them declined to support two of the ‘status quo’ candidates, a Mr Moody and Mr Knight, either by opting not to use all four of their votes (‘plumping’) or by backing newcomers. This meant that the level of ‘plumping’ by women (44%) was significantly higher than among the men (12%).

An extract from a poll book showing plumper voters from the 19th century. Typed out, it lists the names, what type of accomodation they live and where. There are both male and female names included in the list. — Extract showing women ‘plumper’ voters, 1869 Basingstoke council poll. Image courtesy Hampshire RO, 8M62/186

Summary:

Although prevented from voting in parliamentary elections by the 1832 Reform Act, some women clearly continued to participate in local elections well before their admission to the local government franchises of the later Victorian era. As more continues to be discovered about women’s involvement in Victorian politics, the disparity between their engagement in local electoral life and their exclusion from national polls becomes ever more striking.

The History of Parliament