Abstract
1917 had been a bad year for Mrs. Humphry Ward. Although her publishing career bounced back somewhat following Theodore Roosevelt’s request that she write a stirring propaganda pamphlet for the American market, not even the luxurious research trips to the French front, the courtly attention of Britain’s top generals, and the gala tours of munitions works could change the fact that the causes dearest to her heart, anti-suffrage and the career of her beloved son, Arnold, were faring badly in Parliament.1 Furthermore, both her townhouse in Grosvenor Square and her country estate in Hertfordshire were let to the American novelist Edith Wharton, whose literary star—and literary income— had risen just as Mrs. Ward’s was beginning to fall below the sum necessary to maintain her profligate family in genteel elegance.2
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Notes
See Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1923), pp. 269–287
John Sutherland, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), pp. 350–367.
Martin Pugh, The March of Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Womens Suffrage 1866–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), pp. 36–49.
Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Womens Suffrage in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 212–213.
For an excellent account of the fundamentally gendered basis of the franchise in Britain, see Anna Clark, “Gender, Class and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1822–1928,” in James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 230–253.
Quoted in David Mitchell, Women on the Warpath: The Story of the Women of the First World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 63.
For statistics on conscientious objection see John W. Graham, Conscription and Conscience: A History 1916–1919 (London: George Allen &c Unwin, 1922), pp. 348–350.
Times, October 25, 1917, quoted in John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military Service, 1916–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 219.
The Englishwoman, March 1917, p. 197, quoted in Wingerden, p. 170. “Adultist” suffragists vehemently opposed a female franchise that was not fully equal, but the main women’s suffrage organizations accepted the age bar as a compromise necessary to allay fears of a female majority, break down the sex barrier, and commit women’s groups to the fight for an equal franchise later on. Particularly hostile to the age bar were those like Sylvia Pankhurst and Mary Macarthur who worked with young female industrial workers. See E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London: Longmans, 1931), pp. 602–608.
R. M. Wilson, Wife: Mother: Voter: Her Vote. What Will She Do With It? (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), p. ix–x.
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© 2002 Nicoletta F. Gullace
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Gullace, N.F. (2002). Votes for Whom?. In: “The Blood of Our Sons”. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04751-9_9
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