Context is always very important in history. Before industrialisation, very few people were educated. Most people lived in rural villages and worked on the land, and the family was seen as a working unit – men, women and children working on both the landlords’ land and their own strips of land together. You may well have looked at this if you studied medieval England. Well, the basis of the system continued into the nineteenth century and the process of industrialisation.
However, with industrialisation, a process that was well under way by the mid-nineteenth century (1850), workers began to move to the towns and into the factories where they would be treated as individuals (we could accurately say, ‘mistreated’). You may well have studied this too. And as individuals, women of all classes had far fewer rights than men. Their husbands would make all key decisions, including those regarding their children. For example, everything a woman owned passed on to her husband when she married but women could not claim maintenance money should they divorce, no matter the reason for that divorce.
But with industrialisation and urbanisation, society, as was inevitable, was forced to change, if only slowly. Workers needed to be educated, at least to an elementary level, and this included women too. Women were needed to fill jobs, and not just in the factories: shopworkers, secretaries and clerks, nurses and teachers, for example. And a few middle-class women went to university. Some of these women became doctors.
Women, then, were slowly being recognised as being capable of playing an important role in society. And this, again slowly, began to be recognised by the law. For example, laws passed in 1870 and 1882 allowed women to keep their own property after they married (something, of course, that only helped women with property). But progress regarding women’s rights would always be slow so long as women had to rely on an all-male parliament elected by an all-male electorate.
Before industrialisation, Britain was governed by the aristocratic landed elite. Reform in 1832 extended the vote to the lower middle class and to the new and fast-growing towns – a recognition that manufacturing and commerce were as important as owning land. So, the likes of smaller landowners and farmers, and in the towns, shopkeepers and wealthy householders now had the right to vote. It was a vote based on property ownership and you could say it was also based on class. It was thought that only respectable and responsible people would own property, and so it was safe to extend the vote to them; and the Act of 1832 also made clear that all voters would be male.
Then, in 1867, the vote was extended to urban householders and so, many of the working class, and in 1884 the same terms were applied to rural communities and so, very small land owners and farmers were enfranchised. However, as much as 40% of adult men were still without the vote and women were not a part of the process except when it came to local elections for which a series of Acts passed between 1869 and 1894 gradually gave women the right to vote and stand in local elections on much the same terms as men.
This, then, was the picture as the twentieth century began and as women began to organise and fight for their rights.