GETTING THE MESSAGE ACROSS

Email, smart phones and televisions did not exist when women were campaigning for the vote. Instead they used the newspapers, national and local. Suffragettes and suffragists wrote to the press constantly. They wrote advertising meetings, explaining why women should have the vote, protesting brutal treatment of women, and often in reply to angry letters attacking them. Not a week went by without at least one letter from a suffrage campaigner in the Hastings and St Leonards Observer – and usually several. Local activists who flooded the press with passionate letters included Cecilia Tubbs, Jane Strickland and Isabel Giberne Sieveking.

AGAINST VOTES FOR WOMEN

“…our men are able and willing to represent us in Parliament, as they do our children…If we can trust our love and our lives into a man’s keeping, we may trust him to promote our interest and to stand between us and the harassing world of politics… The Maker of man and women knew how to fit her for …man’s “helpmeet” and “companion”…she is to be the mother of his children, and the joy of his heart…I appeal to men, who love us and value us, not to imperil our sacred mission by placing us in the arena of political strife…” Annabel, 15 April 1911

SUPPORTING VOTES FOR WOMEN

“We do not base our demand for the vote on the fact that a majority of women want it, but we do base it on the certainty that they need it, whether they are aware of it or not…Whether they like it or no, men must now face the painful ordeal of seeing us as we really are, neither goddesses, angels, fairies, nor witches, but human beings like themselves…bearing a burden that is peculiarly their own, not timidly and haltingly, but with courage and self-reliance…it is only by collective action on the part of men and women…and the due representation of each class and sex that our needs can be made known…” Mrs Darent Harrison, 25 March 1911 “Surely the time is ripe for women’s direct influence in politics!” Jane Strickland, 4 April 1912