The Representation of the People Act 1918 (7 & 8 Geo. 5. c. 64) was an act of Parliament passed to reform the electoral system in Great Britain and Ireland. It is sometimes known as the Fourth Reform Act.[1] The Act extended the franchise in parliamentary elections, also known as the right to vote, to men aged over 21, whether or not they owned property, and to women aged over 30 who resided in the constituency whilst occupying land or premises with a rateable value above £5, or whose husbands did.[2][3] At the same time, it extended the local government franchise to include women aged over 30 on the same terms as men.[4]: xxv It came into effect at the 1918 general election.
As a result of the Act, the male electorate was extended by 5.2 million[2] to 12.9 million.[5] The female electorate was 8.5 million.[6][3] The Act also created new electoral arrangements, including making residence in a specific constituency the basis of the right to vote, institutionalising the first-past-the-post method of election, and rejecting proportional representation, although this failed by only seven votes in the Commons during the Act's progress.[7]
It was not until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 that women gained electoral equality. The 1928 Act gave the vote to all women aged over 21, regardless of any property qualification, which added another five million women to the electorate.[8]
After the Third Reform Act in 1884, 60% of male householders over the age of 21 had the vote.[9] This left 40% who did not – including the poorest in society. Thus millions of soldiers returning from World War I would still not have been entitled to vote in the long overdue general election. (The last election had been in December 1910. An election had been scheduled for 1915, but was postponed to a time after the war.)[citation needed]
The issue of a female right to vote first gathered momentum during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1865, the Kensington Society, a discussion group for middle-class women who were barred from higher education, met at the home of Indian scholar Charlotte Manning in Kensington. Following a discussion on suffrage, a small informal committee was formed to draft a petition and gather signatures, led by women including Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and Elizabeth Garrett. In 1869, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women (1861, published 1869), one of the earliest works on this subject by a male author.[citation needed] In the book, Mill attempts to make a case for perfect equality.[10][11] He talks about the role of women in marriage and how it needed to be changed, and comments on three major facets of women's lives that he felt were hindering them: society and gender construction, education, and marriage. He argued that the oppression of women was one of the few remaining relics from ancient times, a set of prejudices that severely impeded the progress of humanity.[10][12] He agreed to present a petition to Parliament, provided it had at least 100 signatures, and the first version was drafted by his step-daughter, Helen Taylor.[13]
The Suffragettes and Suffragists had pushed for their right to be represented prior to the war, but felt too little had changed, despite violent agitation by the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women's Social and Political Union.[citation needed]
The suffragist Millicent Fawcett suggested that the women's right to vote issue was the main reason for the Speaker's Conference[further explanation needed] in 1917.[14] She was frustrated by the resultant age limit, though recognising that there were one and a half million more women than men in the country at the time (due to the loss of life in the First World War), accepted that this would not have wide, cross-party support; many of those in favour of suffrage at the Speaker's Conference still wanted to maintain a male majority. Recalling Disraeli's quip, she noted that Britain "is governed not by logic, but by Parliament".[15]: 138–142
The debates in both Houses of Parliament saw majority cross-party unanimity. The Home Secretary, George Cave (Con) within the governing coalition introduced the Act:
War by all classes of our countrymen has brought us nearer together, has opened men’s eyes, and removed misunderstandings on all sides. It has made it, I think, impossible that ever again, at all events in the lifetime of the present generation, there should be a revival of the old class feeling which was responsible for so much, and, among other things, for the exclusion for a period, of so many of our population from the class of electors. I think I need say no more to justify this extension of the franchise.[16]
The Representation of the People Act 1918 widened suffrage by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The enfranchisement of this latter group was accepted as recognition of the contribution made by women defence workers. However, women were still not politically equal to men (who could vote from the age of 21 if they were willing to serve British rule); full electoral equality was achieved in Ireland in 1922, but did not occur in Britain until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928.[citation needed]
The terms of the Act were:[17]
The Act added 8.4 million women to the electorate as well as 5.6 million men. It was therefore the greatest of all the UK Reform Acts in terms of electorate addition.
The costs incurred by returning officers were for the first time to be paid by the Treasury. Prior to the 1918 general election, the administrative costs were passed on to the candidates to pay in addition to their expenses.[1]
The size of the electorate tripled from the 7.7 million who had been entitled to vote in 1912 to 21.4 million by the end of 1918. Women now accounted for about 39.64% of the electorate. Had women been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority because of the loss of men in the war.[19]
The age of 30 was chosen because it was all that was politically possible at the time. Any attempt to make it lower would have failed.[20] as Lord Robert Cecil explained shortly after the Act was passed:
That is the reason why the age limit of thirty was introduced, in order to avoid extending the franchise to a very large number of women, for fear they might be in a majority in the electorate of this country. It was for that reason only, and it had nothing to do with their qualifications at all. No one would seriously suggest that a woman of twenty-five is less capable of giving a vote than a woman of thirty-five.[21]
In addition to the suffrage changes, the Act also instituted the present system of holding all voting in a general election on one day, as opposed to being staggered over a period of weeks (although the polling itself would only take place on a single day in each constituency),[18] and brought in the annual electoral register.[citation needed]
The bill for the Representation of the People Act was passed by a majority of 385 to 55 in the House of Commons on 19 June 1917.[22] The bill still had to pass through the House of Lords, but Lord Curzon, the president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage did not want to clash with the Commons and so did not oppose the bill.[23] Many other opponents of the Bill in the Lords lost heart when he refused to act as their spokesman. The bill passed by 134 to 71 votes.[24]
The first election held under the new system was the 1918 general election. Polling took place on 14 December 1918, but vote-counting did not start until 29 December 1918.[25]
After this Act gave about 8.4 million women the vote, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 was passed in November 1918, allowing women to be elected to Parliament.[15]: 170 Several women stood for election to the House of Commons in 1918, but only one, the Sinn Féin candidate for Dublin St. Patrick's, Constance Markievicz, was elected; however she followed her party's abstentionist policy and did not take her seat at Westminster and instead sat in the Dáil Éireann (the First Dáil) in Dublin.[26] The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Nancy Astor on 1 December 1919, who was elected as a Coalition Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton on 28 November 1919.[27]
As Members of Parliament, women also gained the right to become government ministers. The first woman cabinet minister and Privy Council member was the Labour Party's Margaret Bondfield, Minister of Labour from 1929 to 1931.[8]
Although the Representation of the People Act extended the franchise significantly, it did not create a complete system of one person, one vote. Seven percent of the population enjoyed a plural vote in the 1918 election, mostly middle-class men who had an extra vote due to a university constituency (this Act increased the university vote by creating the Combined English Universities seats) or by occupying business premises in other constituencies.[28]
Hansard HC Debs (22 May 1917) vol 93, C 2135 Accessed 17 February 2017.(subscription may be required or content may be available in libraries)