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The National Union of Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), also known as the suffragists (not to be confused with the suffragettes) was an organisation founded in 1897 of women's suffrage societies around the United Kingdom. In 1919 it was renamed the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship.
The team was founded in 1897 by the merger of the National Central Society for Women's Suffrage and the Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, the groups having originally split in 1888.
The groups united under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett, who was the president of the society for more than twenty years. [1] The organisation was democratic and non-militant, aiming to achieve women's suffrage through peaceful and legal means, in particular by introducing Parliamentary Bills and holding meetings to explain and promote their aims.
In 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU, the "suffragettes"), who wished to undertake more militant action, split from the NUWSS. Nevertheless, the NUWSS continued to grow, and by 1914 it had in excess of 500 branches throughout the country, with more than 100,000 members. By February of the previous year, it had already spent £60,000 on meetings and propaganda. [2]
Many, but by no means all, of the members were middle class, and some were working class.
For the 1906 general election, the group formed committees in each constituency to persuade local parties to select pro-suffrage candidates.
The NUWSS organized its first large, open-air procession which came to be known as the Mud March on 9 February 1907.
Mrs Fawcett said in a speech in 1911 that their movement was "like a glacier; slow moving but unstoppable".
Up to 17 July 1912 the NUWSS was not allied with any party, but campaigned in support of individual election candidates who supported votes for women. In parliament, the Conciliation Bill of 1911 helped to change this position. The bill had majority support but was frustrated by insufficient time being given to pass it. The Liberal government relied on the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party for a majority and was insistent that time was given instead to the passage of another Irish Home Rule bill and the Unionist Speaker, Sir James Lowther, opposed votes for women. [3] Consequently, it did not become law.
Labour from 1903 was tied into an alliance with the Liberals and its leadership was divided on the issue of female emancipation. However, the 1913 party conference agreed to oppose any franchise bill that did not include extension of the franchise for women after a suffragist campaign in the north west of England effectively changed party opinion. The party consistently supported women's suffrage in the years before the war.
Fawcett, a Liberal, became infuriated with that party's delaying tactics and helped Labour candidates against Liberals at election time. In 1912 the NUWSS established the Election Fighting Fund committee (EFF) headed by Catherine Marshall. [4] The committee backed Labour and in 1913–14 the EFF intervened in four by-elections and although Labour won none, the Liberals lost two.
The NUWSS, by allying itself with Labour, attempted to put pressure on the Liberals, because the Liberals' political future depended on Labour remaining weak.
The NUWSS was split between the majority that supported war and the minority that opposed it. During the war. the group set up an employment register so that the jobs of those who were serving could be filled. The NUWSS financed women's hospital units, employing only female doctors and nurses, which served during World War I in France, such as the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service (SWH).
The NUWSS supported the women's suffrage bill agreed by a Speaker's Conference even though it did not grant the equal suffrage for which the organisation had campaigned.
In 1919, the NUWSS renamed itself as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship and continued under the leadership of Eleanor Rathbone. It focused on a campaign to equalise suffrage, which was achieved in 1928. [5] It then split into two groups, the National Council for Equal Citizenship, a short-lived group which focused on other equal rights campaigns, and the Union of Townswomen's Guilds, which focused on educational and welfare provision for women. [6]
The archives of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies are held at The Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics, ref 2NWS A collection of NUWSS material is also held by the John Rylands Library, Manchester, ref. NUWS.
In 2022 English Heritage announced that the NUWSS would be commemorated with a blue plaque at site of their headquarters in Westminster during the years immediately before the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1918. [7]
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett was an English political activist and writer. She campaigned for women's suffrage by legal change and in 1897–1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), explaining, "I cannot say I became a suffragist. I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government." She tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, as a governor of Bedford College, London and co-founding Newnham College, Cambridge in 1875. In 2018, a century after the Representation of the People Act, she was the first woman honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.
Eleanor Florence Rathbone was an independent British Member of Parliament (MP) and long-term campaigner for family allowance and for women's rights. She was a member of the noted Rathbone family of Liverpool.
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The United Procession of Women, or Mud March as it became known, was a peaceful demonstration in London on 9 February 1907 organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), in which more than three thousand women marched from Hyde Park Corner to the Strand in support of women's suffrage. Women from all classes participated in what was the largest public demonstration supporting women's suffrage seen up to that date. It acquired the name "Mud March" from the day's weather, when incessant heavy rain left the marchers drenched and mud-spattered.
A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era. Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the Reform Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. In 1872 the fight for women's suffrage became a national movement with the formation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and later the more influential National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). As well as in England, women's suffrage movements in Wales, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom gained momentum. The movements shifted sentiments in favour of woman suffrage by 1906. It was at this point that the militant campaign began with the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Mary Danvers Stocks, Baroness Stocks was a British writer. She was closely associated with the Strachey, the Wedgwood and the Ricardo families. Her family was deeply involved in changes in the Victorian Era and Stocks herself was deeply involved in women's suffrage, the welfare state, and other aspects of social work.
Dame Margery Irene Corbett Ashby, was a British suffragist, Liberal politician, feminist and internationalist.
The 1912 Bow and Bromley by-election was a by-election held on 26 November 1912 for the British House of Commons constituency of Bow and Bromley. It was triggered when the Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP), George Lansbury, accepted the post of Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds as a technical measure enabling him to leave Parliament.
The Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association (CUWFA) was a British women's suffrage organisation open to members of the Conservative and Unionist Party. Formed in 1908 by members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, CUWFA was the third-largest suffrage organisation in Britain before the First World War.
The Open Christmas Letter was a public message for peace addressed "To the Women of Germany and Austria", signed by a group of 101 British suffragists at the end of 1914 as the first Christmas of the First World War approached. The Open Christmas Letter was written in acknowledgment of the mounting horror of modern war and as a direct response to letters written to American feminist Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), by a small group of German women's rights activists. Published in January 1915 in Jus Suffragii, the journal of the IWSA, the Open Christmas Letter was answered two months later by a group of 155 prominent German and Austrian women who were pacifists. The exchange of letters between women of nations at war helped promote the aims of peace, and helped prevent the fracturing of the unity which lay in the common goal they shared, suffrage for women.
Ray Strachey was a British feminist politician, artist and writer.
Lady Frances Balfour was a British aristocrat, author, and suffragist. She was one of the highest-ranking members of the British aristocracy to assume a leadership role in the Women's suffrage campaign in the United Kingdom. Balfour was a member of the executive committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage from 1896 to 1919. As a non-violent suffragist, she was opposed to the militant actions of the Women's Social and Political Union, whose members were called the suffragettes.
Clara Dorothea Rackham née Tabor was an English feminist and politician active in the women's suffrage movement, the Women's Co-operative Guild, the peace movement, adult education, family planning and the labour movement. She was a pioneering magistrate, Poor Law Guardian, educator, anti-poverty campaigner and penal reformer in Cambridge where she was a long-serving city and county councillor. Rackham was vice-chairman of Cambridgeshire County Council from 1956 to 1958 and chairman of the Cambridgeshire County Council Education Committee from 1945 to 1957. She first came to prominence through her leading role in the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and later became a significant national figure in the labour movement, acquiring a national reputation for her expertise on factory conditions, workers' rights, equal pay, and national insurance.
Helen Miller Fraser, later Moyes, was a Scottish suffragist, feminist, educationalist and Liberal Party politician who later emigrated to Australia.
Nessie Stewart-Brown JP was a British suffragist and Liberal Party politician. Her name and picture is on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square.
The Liverpool Women's Suffrage Society was set up in 1894 by Edith Bright, Lydia Allen Booth and Nessie Stewart-Brown to promote the enfranchisement of women. The society held its first meeting in a Liverpool temperance hall, with Millicent Fawcett, head of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), as its guest speaker. The society set up headquarters in Lord Street. The group became affiliated with the NUWSS in 1898, it held meetings in cafés which included talks, poetry and dance recitals. Members were recruited from prominent members of society and they distanced themselves from working class suffrage societies such as Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Women's suffrage in Wales has historically been marginalised due to the prominence of societies and political groups in England which led the reform for women throughout the United Kingdom. Due to differing social structures and a heavily industrialised working-class society, the growth of a national movement in Wales grew but then stuttered in the late nineteenth century in comparison with that of England. Nevertheless, distinct Welsh groups and individuals rose to prominence and were vocal in the rise of suffrage in Wales and the rest of Great Britain.
Catherine Osler or Catherine Courtauld Osler; Catherine Courtauld Taylor was a British social reformer and suffragist.
The statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, honours the British suffragist leader and social campaigner Dame Millicent Fawcett. It was made in 2018 by Gillian Wearing. Following a campaign and petition by the activist Caroline Criado Perez, the statue's creation was endorsed by both the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. The statue, Parliament Square's first monument to a woman and also its first sculpture by a woman, was funded through the government's Centenary Fund, which marks 100 years since some women won the right to vote. The memorial was unveiled on 24 April 2018.
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