Historian Kathy Atherton says people nowadays can find it “surprising” that women were involved in an anti-suffrage movement, but that it’s important to “put yourself in their shoes”.
“There would have been a general acceptance that women were intellectually inferior and emotional – and women would have believed that as well as men – so they didn’t have the capacity to make political judgements,” she says.
“It’s a really hierarchical society and the white male is at the top of the heap.
“There’s a fear that you’re upsetting the natural order of things, even going so far as thinking the colonies would be affected if they felt that Britain was being ruled by women.”
via 100 Women: The female protesters against giving women the vote – BBC News
