Lesson 12: Social Reform and Democracy

Victorian Britain was rich, but its politics belonged to property. Between 1838 and 1928 the excluded organised themselves — in mass movements, unions, parties and finally a hunger-striking suffragette campaign — and forced the constitution open. This lesson follows that long campaign for democracy and social reform, from the Chartists to the Liberal welfare reforms and votes for women, and practises the 16-mark judgement question on the suffragette debate that examiners love.

Timeline and key terms

Chartism — the first mass working-class political movement, demanding the Charter’s six points. Suffragists — the constitutional campaigners of the NUWSS (Millicent Fawcett). Suffragettes — the militant WSPU (the Pankhursts), “deeds not words”.

Chartism and the unions

The People’s Charter (1838) demanded six reforms: votes for all men, the secret ballot, equal constituencies, payment of MPs, no property qualification for MPs, and annual parliaments. Chartism’s great petitions — 1839, 1842 (with over 3 million signatures claimed) and 1848 — were all rejected, and the movement faded after its Kennington Common meeting of April 1848 dissolved in rain and ridicule. Yet Chartism matters twice over: it taught working people organisation, newspapers and national campaigning; and five of its six points later became law — everything except annual parliaments. Its failure owed something to its leaders’ split between “moral force” and “physical force” strategies, something to reviving prosperity after 1850, and much to the 1867 reform that gave skilled workers a stake in the system.

Organisation continued in the workplace. The Tolpuddle Martyrs (1834) — six Dorset labourers transported to Australia for swearing a union oath — became labour’s founding myth; their pardon followed mass protest. The TUC (1868) coordinated the unions; the “new unionism” of 1889 organised the unskilled (the London dock strike won the “dockers’ tanner”); and when the Taff Vale judgment (1901) made unions liable for strike costs, the unions’ political arm — the Labour Representation Committee (1900), built by Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party and the unions — put 29 Labour MPs into Parliament in 1906.

The Liberal reforms and the birth of the welfare state

The Liberal government of 1906–14, prodded by Labour, by Booth’s and Rowntree’s poverty surveys (Rowntree found nearly 28 per cent of York in poverty in 1899), and by fears after the Boer War that a third of volunteers were physically unfit, laid the first foundations of the welfare state: school meals (1906), school medical inspections (1907), old age pensions (1908) — five shillings a week at 70, means-tested, collected at the post office by crowds of the very old who had feared the workhouse — and labour exchanges (1909). Lloyd George’s People’s Budget (1909) funded it with graduated income tax and a tax on land; when the Lords rejected the budget, a constitutional crisis produced the Parliament Act (1911), ending the Lords’ veto over money bills and reducing their general veto to a two-year delay. The National Insurance Act (1911) added contributory health and unemployment insurance — “ninepence for fourpence”, in Lloyd George’s phrase. Coverage was patchy and benefits low, but the principle had flipped since 1834: poverty was now the state’s business.

Around these reforms stood the century’s other campaigns: factory and mines legislation shortening hours and ending child labour underground (1842), compulsory elementary education (1880), and rising literacy — from roughly 60 per cent in 1840 to over 95 per cent by 1900 — which made mass politics, cheap newspapers and eventually mass democracy possible.

Votes for women

The women’s campaign began constitutionally: John Stuart Mill’s petition of 1866, and Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS (1897), which by 1914 had some 50,000 members lobbying, marching and persuading. Frustration at repeated failure produced the breakaway WSPU (1903): Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia chose confrontation — heckling ministers, chaining themselves to railings, hunger strikes answered by forcible feeding, and from 1912 an arson and window-smashing campaign. Emily Davison’s death under the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby made her a martyr; the government replied with the Cat and Mouse Act (1913), releasing hunger strikers to recover and re-arresting them. In 1914 the WSPU suspended militancy for the war; women’s war work — munitions, nursing, transport — made the old “separate spheres” argument unsustainable, and the Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised women over 30 (with a property qualification), deliberately keeping women a minority of the electorate. Equal franchise at 21 came in 1928.

Working with sources — Source A

Source A is from Emmeline Pankhurst’s speech “Freedom or Death”, delivered at Hartford, Connecticut, USA, on 13 November 1913, while she was touring to raise money and support:

I am here as a soldier who has temporarily
left the field of battle in order to explain
what civil war is like when it is waged
by women. We are here, not because we are
law-breakers; we are here in our efforts
to become law-makers.

Model answer — “How useful is Source A for an enquiry into the suffragettes’ methods and message?” [8 marks]

Source A is very useful for the message: it shows how the WSPU wanted militancy understood — not as vandalism but as war waged by the voteless against a state that excluded them, with the famous reversal “law-breakers… law-makers” turning a charge into a slogan. Its provenance adds evidential value: this is the leader herself, speaking in 1913 at the campaign’s most militant moment, so it reliably represents the WSPU’s public justification. For methods, however, it is limited by its purpose: a fundraising speech to Americans stresses principle and omits the movement’s most contested deeds — arson, the bombing of Lloyd George’s house — which are exactly what a historian of methods needs to weigh. It also represents one wing only: Fawcett’s suffragists, who disapproved of militancy, spoke a different language. So Source A is first-rate for what the suffragettes said they were doing and why; for what they did, and what most campaigners thought, it must be set beside police records, newspapers and NUWSS material.

Why this reaches the top level: it separates message from methods — finding the source strong on one, weak on the other — and explains both judgements through purpose and audience.

Common mistakes

• Confusing suffragists and suffragettes. The NUWSS and WSPU were different organisations with different methods; naming the right one is basic accuracy.
• One-sided militancy essays. Top-band answers weigh militancy’s publicity against its alienation of MPs and public — with evidence on both sides.
• Assuming reform happened because it was right. Chartism’s points were “right” in 1838 and lost; explain timing — prosperity, organisation, party advantage — not just justice.

Exam Experience

Question — “Militancy was the main reason women gained the vote in 1918.” How far do you agree? [16 marks]

Model answer (extract):

Militancy unquestionably forced the question onto the agenda. Before 1905 the suffrage cause was respectable and ignored; the WSPU’s interruptions, processions, window-smashing and hunger strikes made it unignorable, filled newspapers, and turned leaders like the Pankhursts into national figures. Emily Davison’s death in 1913 and the grotesque cycle of forcible feeding and Cat-and-Mouse releases embarrassed the government before the world. No historian can write the campaign without militancy at its centre.

But forcing attention is not the same as winning votes. Militancy also hardened opposition: MPs who might have voted for a moderate bill cited arson as proof women were unfit for the franchise, and Asquith’s government dug in. The constitutional suffragists’ patient work — 50,000 NUWSS members, alliances with Labour, by-election campaigning — kept a parliamentary majority plausibly available, and it was war, not militancy, that changed the arithmetic: the old Speaker’s Conference of 1917 recommended women’s suffrage as part of a general reform, the pre-war militants themselves suspended their campaign, and women’s visible war service let politicians climb down without surrendering to violence. The age limit of 30 — set to keep women a minority of voters — shows how grudging the concession remained.

Overall, militancy was probably a necessary irritant but not the decisive cause: the vote came in 1918 because war rewrote the political context, on ground prepared by decades of constitutional campaigning — campaigning which militancy publicised and, at times, set back.

Marking notes:

• Level 1 (1–4 marks): simple statements for or against militancy.
• Level 2 (5–8 marks): developed points on one side, with detail (Davison, hunger strikes).
• Level 3 (9–12 marks): analysis of militancy and other factors — suffragists, war work — with a judgement.
• Level 4 (13–16 marks): sustained weighing, distinguishing attention from causation and qualifying the verdict (“necessary irritant, not decisive”), as the model does, with a convincing conclusion.

Going further — the Boer War’s shock and “national efficiency”

The Liberal reforms had a trigger that syllabuses sometimes underplay: humiliation in South Africa. During the Boer War (1899–1902), recruiting officers in the industrial towns rejected startling proportions of volunteers as physically unfit — in Manchester, of some 11,000 men who offered themselves, thousands were turned away for bad teeth, weak chests and stunted growth. A country that could not find healthy soldiers in its great cities had a strategic emergency, and the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904) set about diagnosing it: infant mortality in the worst districts still ran near 250 per 1,000 births, schoolchildren were hungry, and housing bred rickets and tuberculosis. “National efficiency” became the cross-party slogan — Liberals, tariff-reform Conservatives and Fabians competing to own it.

This is why the reforms of 1906–11 took the shape they did: school meals to make children teachable, medical inspections to catch defects early, pensions to lift the respectable old out of the workhouse, insurance to stabilise the worker’s household. Reading the reforms as the state’s answer to measured physical failure — rather than as abstract kindness — sharpens every essay on them: it explains their limits (they treated bodies, not wages), their popularity across classes (empire and industry needed fit men), and their timing (the shock of 1900–04, not the election of 1906 alone). Booth and Rowntree supplied the numbers; the Boer War supplied the panic; the Liberals supplied the bills.