Women’s Vote and Men

Women’s Vote and Men is a political work by Henry Nevinson, the English journalist, war correspondent, and writer who lived from 1856 to 1941. The book belongs to Nevinson’s substantial body of writing on the various political and social reform causes that occupied his attention across his long career, with the women’s suffrage movement being one of the causes to which he was most actively committed.

Nevinson was one of the most prominent male supporters of the British women’s suffrage movement during the years leading up to and including the eventual achievement of women’s suffrage in Britain through the legislation of 1918 and 1928. He was an active member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, an organization founded in 1907 by male supporters of the women’s suffrage cause who wanted to demonstrate that the demand for women’s suffrage was not exclusively a women’s movement but was also supported by substantial numbers of thoughtful men who recognized the justice of the women’s claims.

The book takes up the question of women’s suffrage from the particular vantage point of male supporters of the cause. Nevinson addresses the various arguments that were being made against women’s suffrage by male opponents and presents the case for women’s suffrage as the male supporters of the movement understood it. The book is essentially a contribution to the political and rhetorical campaign for women’s suffrage, written from the male perspective in order to address particularly the doubts and resistance that the campaign was encountering among the male voters who would ultimately determine whether the legislative changes the movement sought would actually be enacted.

Nevinson’s position in the suffrage movement was substantial. He was a respected journalist with substantial credibility in mainstream English political circles, and his public support for the women’s cause helped to demonstrate that the demand for women’s suffrage was being taken seriously by figures whose other political and social positions were broadly within the mainstream of English public life. The book belongs to this broader strategic effort to broaden the appeal of the suffrage movement beyond its original female constituency.

The book is mostly of interest now to historians of the British women’s suffrage movement and of early twentieth century English political reform. It pairs naturally with the broader literature of the suffrage movement and with Nevinson’s other political writings.