The Spectator’s Notes | 8 February 2018

A reader writes: ‘In my last letter, I called you a numbskull. However I should have qualified this with “sometimes you are a numbskull”.’ I must apologise for an example of my sometimes-numbskullery in this column last week when I asserted that Joe Chamberlain had opposed votes for women in Parliament in 1917. This would have been impossible, as he had been dead three years. I saw the ‘Rt Hon. J.A. Chamberlain’ in Hansard’s division lists and lazily failed to check. J.A. was, in fact, Joe’s son, Austen.

In the course of looking into my error, I learn that all Chamberlains (including Neville) inherited Joe’s hostility to women’s suffrage; but his daughter Beatrice, who campaigned for the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League (of which Gertrude Bell was hon. secretary), changed her mind because of the first world war. She became zealous for Unionist (i.e. Conservative) women’s organisations, fearing that ‘lively’ women would otherwise be dragged into movements ‘ostensibly outside politics, but in reality under Radical direction’. One feels she was on to something as one follows this week’s coverage of the centenary of votes for women. If the version of history being promoted were the whole truth, one would have to believe that it was only radical women activists who won the day. This ignores at least two vital agencies. First, the all-male Parliament which, in the end, voted overwhelmingly for the change. Second, the fact that women’s suffrage was not an isolated event, but part of a massive alteration in the idea of who should vote, which took a century to work through to all adult men and women. In the 19th century, the word ‘reform’, unqualified by any adjective, meant reform of the franchise, because the issue was so dominant. The extension of suffrage moved in stages from 1832 (under a Whig government) to 1867 (Conservative) — when John Stuart Mill tried to amend it to include votes for women — to 1884 (Liberal) to 1918 (Unionist/National Liberal) to 1928 (Conservative).