FeaturesUse your Vote A group of organisations from across britain are coming together to mark the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Here’s how you can take part…… he ‘: Women and the Vote’ campaign will be putting pressure on the government to put equality back at the top of the agenda, as part of a year long initiative to highlight both the progress and the barriers that still face women in politics.  Fawcett in hyde park Alliance partners will be promoting new research on women’s progress at Westminster and beyond. 
Protest: Millicent Email beatrice.barleon@electoral-reform.org.uk or call 020 7202 8600 for further information. Sign up to the campaign or to register for regular campaign updates email info@womenandthevote.com. PARTNERS Centre for Women and Democracy Electoral Reform Society Engender The Fawcett Society The Hansard Society Unlock Democracy Women’s Parliamentary Radio WHEN WOMEN GOT THE VOTEWHEN WOMEN
GOT THE VOTE WOMEN AND THE VOTE* 2008 marks 90 years since the Representation of the People Act finally gave some women the right to vote. It is also 80 years since women won the right to vote on equal terms with men, and the start of democratic representation as we know it today. * In 2006, Kuwaiti women got the vote for first time. The 28,000 eligible voters, 60% of whom are women, voted in segregated polling booths, a condition demanded by Islamist and tribal MPs. Women voted in full legislative polls in 2007. * In 1918 Countess Constance Markiewicz was the first woman to be elected as a Member of Parliament. She was in Holloway Prison at the time and never took her seat. * The Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, formed in 1908, had about 42,000 members before it joined, two years later, the predominantly male National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. The merger created tensions, especially for leading female figures who jostled for position with men such as Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon. When the First World War broke out and a large number of women took up war work, the anti-suffrage cause was fatally weakened. After certain categories of women over the age of 30 were granted the parliamentary vote in 1918, the National League approved its own demise. * The most famous act associated with the Suffragettes was when Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under the King’s horse, Anmer, as it rounded Tattenham Corner on June 1913 Derby. * In Santa Maria Quiegolani, Mexico, women high in the pine-clad mountains of Oaxaca rise each morning at 4 a.m. to gather firewood, grind corn, prepare the day’s food, care for the children and clean the house. But they aren’t allowed to vote in local elections, because the men say “they don’t do enough work.” * Britain has 126 female MPs in a Parliament of 646. |
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