Manchester people have always pioneered radical new ideas. This cradle of the industrial revolution witnessed the bloodshed of the Peterloo Massacre (1819), when a mass meeting calling for voting reform was brutally broken up by the authorities. Manchester workers were also strong supporters of Chartism – a popular movement to win working-class men the vote – in mid-Victorian times.

However, the question of women’s rights was the Cinderella of voting reform.

For centuries, women suffered from civil disabilities. A woman’s place was ‘in the home’. Females lagged behind men in education, earnings, voting and legal rights. In the eyes of the law, husband and wife were ‘one person’, and a woman’s property became her husband’s when they married. Even a wife’s wages belonged to her husband.

In the early 19th century, women joined their menfolk at gatherings held to discuss gaining working men the vote. According to the weaver poet Samuel Bamford from Middleton, women first started voting at Lancashire reform meetings following a suggestion by him, which ‘the women were mightily pleased with’. Women soon formed their own ‘political unions’ in Ashton-under-Lyne, Bolton, Manchester and Preston (Passages in the Life of a Radical, 2 Vols., London, 1844).

But decades passed before writers like John Stuart Mill called for women to have equal voting rights with men and, in the mid-to-late 1860s, pressure began building for reform.

Manchester committees to campaign for women’s property and voting rights were founded by Elizabeth Wolstenholme (later Elmy), Lydia Ernestine Becker, Emily Davies, Alice Scatcherd and others. They organized local signatories to a petition of female householders presented to parliament by John Stuart Mill.

That year, a test case was held in court because a novel situation had arisen. Manchester residents were astonished when householder Lily Maxwell was accidentally placed on the electoral roll. She seized the initiative and voted for Jacob Bright in the 1867 by-election, seemingly with no resistance from local officials.

Now, the 1867 Reform Act said that every (property-owning) man was entitled to vote, and a previous Act of Parliament had said that ‘man’, when used in legislation, implied ‘males and females’. So did women already have the vote?

Unfortunately, the court ruled that it was illegal for women to vote. This setback sparked a flurry of fresh interest in women’s rights. The Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded circa 1867. It maintained close links with London suffragists. They began a coordinated campaign of talks, writing letters to the newspapers, lobbying members of parliament, etc. ‘Suffragists’ like Lydia Becker and Margaret Ashton argued that only peaceful, constitutional means should be used to achieve voting reform.

On 14 April 1868, the Assembly Rooms at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall were the venue for the first public meeting on female suffrage at which women themselves were given a platform. Lydia Becker was one of the speakers. (It’s worth noting that the meeting sparked letters to the local papers from some women who did not want the vote).

The suffragists’ campaign achieved some success: the Municipal Corporations Amendment Act of 1869 enabled women (with a property qualification) to vote in local government elections and act as Poor Law Guardians. Then Forster’s 1870 Education Act empowered women to serve on school boards; they could now make a real difference locally.

But the real prize was voting rights in national elections (also denied to working-class men). After Becker’s death, Millicent Garrett Fawcett picked up the leadership baton and continued the campaign, and in 1897 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed.

Meanwhile, women such as Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia grew increasingly frustrated with the movement’s lack of progress. Emmeline (née Goulden) and her husband Richard were involved with the Independent Labour Party, and gave regular talks at Boggart Hole Clough. She also served as a member of the Chorlton Board of Guardians in 1895.

After Richard’s death, Emmeline and her daughters moved to 62 Nelson St, Chorlton-upon-Medlock. To pay the bills, she became registrar for births and deaths. Pankhurst became increasingly disenchanted with the main political parties – constitutional campaigning looked like a dead end. In 1903, Emmeline and others formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (1903): its motto was ‘Deeds, not words’. Would direct action prove more effective?

Two years later, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were jailed for refusing to pay a fine. They had been arrested at the Free Trade Hall. The women had unfurled a ‘Votes for Women’ banner at a Liberal Party meeting and asked, ‘Will the Liberal government give votes to women?’ Pankhurst and Kenney’s imprisonment attracted much public sympathy. The refusal by many suffragettes to cooperate with the 1911 census also sparked much newspaper comment (so you may not find your suffragette ancestor listed in the census schedules).

The government’s increasing hostility to women’s suffrage, and strong-arm tactics at women’s marches and meetings, stiffened the suffragettes’ resolve. Many women went to prison for their beliefs, went on hunger strike. They endured the horrors of artificial force-feeding and often their health was permanently damaged.

In August 1914, the Home Office compiled an index of the names of over 1,300 suffragettes who had been arrested, the location, and the number of times arrested (The National Archives, HO45/24665).

The suffragettes switched to more violent tactics. Windows were broken; there were arson attacks on property; and in 1913 Annie Briggs, Evelyn Manesta and Lilian Forrester were arrested for breaking the glass of 13 paintings at Manchester City Art Gallery. The pictures, which were not damaged, included works by Millais and Burne-Jones.

The outbreak of the Great War led Emmeline to suspend campaigning. A split opened up between pacifist suffragists and those suffragettes who backed the war effort. Women were needed for wartime work: in munitions factories, on public transport, and on the land. It was WW1’s social upheaval which finally shattered the glass ceiling for women’s voting rights – women had proved their worth.

At last, the Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised women in national elections – half a century after that first public meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. But women had only limited voting rights: they had to be at least 30 years old, and property-holders. Another decade passed before all women over age 21 were given the vote, and put on an equal footing with men.