On this day in 1918 the Representation of the People Act of 1918 passed into law.
Representation of the People Act, 1918AN ACT TO
Amend the Law with respect to Parliamentary and Local Government Franchises, and the Registration of Parliamentary and Local Government Electors, and the conduct of elections, and to provide for the Redistribution of Seats at Parliamentary Elections, and for other purposes connected therewith.(1) A woman shall be entitled to be registered as a parliamentary elector for a constituency (other than a university constituency) if she –(a) has attained the age of thirty years; and
(b) is not subject to any legal incapacity; and
(c) is entitled to be registered as a local government elector in respect of the occupation in that constituency of land or premises (not being a dwelling-house) of a yearly value of not less than five pounds or of a dwelling-house, or is the wife of a husband entitled to be so registered.
2) A woman shall be entitled to be registered as a parliamentary elector for a university constituency if she has attained the age of thirty years and either would be entitled to be so registered if she were a man, or has been admitted to and passed the final examination, and kept under the conditions required of women by the university the period of residence, necessary for a man to obtain a degree at any university forming, or forming part of, a university constituency which did not at the time the examination was passed admit women to degrees.
3) A woman shall be entitled to be registered as a local government elector for any localgovernment electoral area-(a) where she would be entitled to be so registered if she were a man; and
(b) where she is the wife of a man who is entitled to be so registered in respect of premises in which they both reside, and she has attained the age of thirty years and is not subject to any legal incapacity. or the purpose of this provision, a naval or military voter who is registered in respect of a residence qualification which he would have had but for his service, shall be deemed to be resident in accordance with the qualification.
And so all British men upon reaching age 21, and soldiers who had obtained age 19, were fully extended the franchise (that part of the text is omitted). That was an expansion of the franchise in and of itself. And British women, upon reaching age 30 obtained the franchise if they were married, married to a member of the Local Government Register, a property owner, or a graduate voting in a University constituency.
No doubt to modern readers this seems more than a bit odd, but it wasn't until World War One that all British men were extended the vote. The UK had a parliament, of course, and had for centuries, but it had never been the case that 100% of men had the vote. With this act, they did, upon reaching age 21. They even did if they were 19 and in the service.
The voting age in the UK now is 18 for legally binding votes, although in the recent Scottish referendum the vote was dropped down to 16 years of age, a pretty amazing fact if you have 16 year olds in your household.
Most of the "we recall" type posts about this today will be about women obtaining the vote and the more informed commentary will note that this was restricted. Still, while restrictions were in place, they door had been opened, and this was a massive change in what had been the case before.
While this day would have come, the connection of the event to World War One is fairly obvious. The nation's manhood was at war and down to the desperate levels in terms of replacements by this point in the war. . .extending the vote to all of them was only fair. And women were manning the home front and the factory floor, so the same was true of them.
2 comments:
This post is fascinating. It's really interesting that when women got the right to vote in Britain that they needed to be much older than men.
That is really odd, isn't it? There must have been some unspoken assumptions behind it.
The one that I'm tempted to readily conclude is that they believed that women weren't mature enough to vote until that age, which would be highly sexists of course as well as odd. That probably was part of it.
But I also wonder if they figured that by age 30 women had married or had become fixed in a some sort of permanent situation that freed them from the influence of their homes. Generally, most women and men did in fact live at home until they married in that era, although at least in the United States men moving out and moving into boarding houses while they worked was also pretty common. Indeed, World War One was proving to be a temporary exception to the rule as a lot of women in the UK moved in order to take up jobs in industry vacated by males, but that would prove to be temporary, and was probably expected to be as well. Anyhow, an expressed fear of those opposing female suffrage always was that women were just going to vote the way their husbands or fathers did, and perhaps that view was reflected in this measure.
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