Throughout the suffragists’ pre-war campaigns, although public opinion was slowly changing in their favour, Parliament rejected votes-for-women bills. The Liberal Prime Minister Asquith even suggested they were too ignorant to vote.
A lot of the arguments against it seem laughable today (although, for many, they even seemed laughable at the time, too). Lord Curzon, the controversial Conservative politician who became President of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in 1912 (which, perhaps surprisingly, included many women), wrote in a pamphlet: ‘Women have not, as a sex or a class, the calmness of temperament or the balance of mind, nor have they the training necessary to qualify them to exercise the weighty judgment in political affairs’. But many were offended by his attitude, with one man writing to him to…
