The women who voted before women had the vote

Occasionally, just occasionally, you encounter a document that radically changes your view of the past. This happened to me very recently. The source was just a few scraps of parchment in a box of solicitors’ papers in Lichfield. But, at a stroke, it provided me with tangible proof that Victorian women were not only eligible to vote, but actually exercised that right, some 75 years before they received the parliamentary franchise in 1918.

The document in question was a poll book for the election to the local office of Assistant Overseer of the Poor, in the parish of St Chad’s, Lichfield in 1843…

Although I knew that in theory women retained the right to vote for some local officials in the nineteenth century, I had never seen any evidence of them doing so in practice. This lack of evidence had led me, and many other historians, to assume that voting was entirely a male prerogative before the twentieth century.

You can read more about this in her full piece, reading which reminded me of one intriguing snippet of evidence I unearthed during my own PhD (on early 19th century elections). It’s from AMW Stirling, Annals Of A Yorkshire House: From The Papers Of A Macaroni & His Kindred, London, 1911, Volume 2, p.319.

In 1807 Mary Winifred Spencer Stanhope wrote to her son:

Your father was at Wakefield yesterday canvassing. The contest will be a light one and probably cost more than the place is worth. There will be Peers and Gentlemen without end, but they have determined not to admit Ladies to vote, which is very extraordinary and very hard considering how few privileges we poor females have. Should it come to a very close struggle, I dare say they will then call for the ladies.

Other such evidence is frustratingly elusive. But this certainly suggests that women voting was far from unknown in the early nineteenth century, similar to how the use of the secret ballot in elections was far from unknown before the famous introduction of it later in the nineteenth century. (It was often used in local government elections but then in fact abolished in an overlooked move in the 1830s.)