I was delighted to be asked to do my ‘Votes for Women: the Story of the Belfast Suffragettes’ walking tour as part of the Imagine! festival as arguably one of the greatest political ideas was to give all women the right to vote in political elections.
The suffrage movement had been gaining momentum since the late 1800s and Isabella Tod established the first suffrage society in Ireland here in Belfast in 1872. By the early 20th Century there were over twenty suffrage societies in Ulster eventually distilling into two groups – The Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation or IWSF, a group who were politically neutral to the Irish politics of the time and the Irish Women’s Suffrage Society or IWSS, a more militant group. Many of the women from the IWSS went on to join the Women’s Social and Political Union and they are the women which we would today call The Suffragettes. The first militant act of the suffragettes which took place in Belfast was in 1912 when the windows of the GPO in Donegall Square North were smashed and the large stone which was found in the building was wrapped in the newspaper ‘Votes for Women. The WSPU established a branch here in Belfast in 1913 and their leader was a woman from London called Dorothy Evans. From September 1913 she had a public correspondence with the unionist leader Edward Carson in the newspapers which resulted in some of the women from the WSPU sitting on the doorstep of his house in London demanding an answer as to why he had reneged on his promise to give women here the vote as part of his plans for a provisional unionist government. At her public address in the Ulster Hall in March 1914 she said that the women would declare war on Edward Carson. She said Carson was no friend to women unless he was prepared to stand up for their rights and by refusing he has declared war on us and “we in turn declare war upon Sir Edward Carson”. She also said, “perhaps there would be trouble, perhaps civil war; but there would definitely be suffragette civil war on any powers that be”.
After her speech the women then started an arson campaign burning down mostly unionist owned properties starting with Abbeylands, a stately home owned by Hugh McCalmont which was also used as a training ground for Carson’s UVF. There were more arson attacks around Belfast including Knock Golf Club and the Tea House at Bellevue and, despite leaving their literature, the women were never caught.
The First World War broke out on the 28th of July 1914 and the women then turned their attentions to the war effort and in 1918 women who owned property and were over the age of 30 got voting rights. This was extended to all women in Ireland in 1922 but as this was the same year as the partition of Ireland the women of Northern Ireland didn’t get the same voting rights as men until 1928.
Emma’s tour starts outside Belfast City Hall on Sunday 30th March at 11.00am. You can book tickets here.
