Electoral Participation

Abstract

At the start of the twentieth century, women organized protest movements demanding the right to vote. The suffragettes originally hoped the suffrage would bring not only political power but higher status for women and greater economic equality with men.¹ Annie Kenney, a worker in a Lancashire textile factory and one of the early leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, expected that a systemic transformation would result from women’s enfranchisement: ‘Poverty would be practically swept away; washing would be done by municipal machinery! In fact, Paradise would be there once the vote was won!’²