The Man's Case Against Giving a Million Votes to Women. Edited from the speeches delivered in the House of Commons on the Second Reading of the Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill.

CHURCHILL, Winston S. (contrib.).

Edité par London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910

A propos de cet article

First edition of this rare collection of parliamentary speeches arguing against the proposed bill in 1910 to extend Parliamentary suffrage to female property owners, which includes Winston Churchill's speech, "The Undemocratic Nature of the Bill to Give a Million Votes to Women" (pp. 77-85), unrecorded in Cohen's bibliography of Churchill. The "Conciliation bill" of 1910 planned to extend the vote to just over a million property owning women. Though it passed the Commons, the 1910 election ended the process, and further bills to the same effect in 1911 and 1912 also failed. In his contribution, Churchill claims support for a limited franchise of capable women who meet thresholds of education, or property, or wage earning (so as not to exclude capable working class women), and "the state would be the gainer if they had the vote". However, to give blindly the vote to such a large number of women based only on property is opposed: "I do not believe that the great mass of women want a vote. I think they have made singularly little use of the immense opportunities of local and municipal government which have been thrown open to them. I also see a grave danger in creating without great consideration a vast body of privileged and dependent voters, who might be manipulated and manoeuvred in this direction or that". Churchill raises the injustice of property owning rather than working women being awarded the vote - "It is not merely an undemocratic Bill; it is worse. It is an anti-democratic bill. It gives an entirely unfair representation to property, as against persons". Churchill proposed either to maintain the current system or adopt full adult suffrage over the age of 25. Churchill - then Home Secretary in the Liberal Party - had a complicated relationship with female suffrage. He expressed support in principle, and in 1904 he voted in favour of extending female franchise rights, but his support was eroded by the suffragettes, who disrupted his election meetings, and whose tactics he denounced. So too he shared the common Liberal concern that enfranchising property owning women would benefit the Conservative Party. The other contributions in the publication, evidently issued to garner opposition to the bill, include speeches by F. E. Smith, Walter Long, Hilaire Belloc, J. Annan Bryce, Edmund Haviland-Burke, Walter Guinness, C. H. Lyell, S. H. Butcher, H. H. Asquith, Arnold Ward, and "A final denunciation" by Austen Chamberlain. WorldCat and Library Hub locate copies in only six institutions: four in the UK (BL, NLS, Oxford, Cambridge) and two in Canada (Library of Parliament, Toronto Public Library). We could not trace any mention of the publication in the literature on Churchill, though his speech itself is often cited. Octavo. Original grey, pink, and white-striped printed wrappers. Housed in a burgundy cloth flat-back box by the Chelsea Bindery. Wrappers worn and soiled, loss at spine ends and above pricing sticker of "1/." at foot, and to lower corner of rear cover; short closed tear to half-title neatly repaired, contents browned, occasional short closed tears and chips, otherwise clean. A well-preserved copy of a fragile publication.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Man's Case Against Giving a Million Votes to Women. Edited from the speeches delivered in the House of Commons on the Second Reading of the Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill.
• Éditeur: London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910
• Édition: Edition originale