WALES IN 100 OBJECTS | ANDREW GREEN

Two suffragette dolls c.1910 Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

Democracy was late in coming to Britain. Despite Reform Acts in 1832, 1867 and 1884, and the efforts of the Chartists and their successors, well over half the population was still ineligible to vote in elections at the end of the nineteenth century. That included over 40% of men, and all women.

Pressure to enfranchise women grew in the second half of the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mill and others argued the cause, and bills were presented to Parliament regularly after 1870. But resistance was strong.Women were dismissed as too weak or irrational or otherwise unqualified to deserve the vote.

Women began to organise themselves, locally and nationally, to demand change. The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, established in 1897, relied on constitutional means like lobbying Parliament, public meetings, petitioning and publicity. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst set their own group, the Women's Social and Political Union, which later used more militant means. ‘Suffragettes’ chained themselves to railings, set fire to property and disrupted public meetings.

Welsh women were at the forefront of these movements. The country's first women's suffrage organisation, set up in Llandudno in January 1907, was followed rapidly by over thirty others. By 1912 the Cardiff and District Women's Suffrage Society was the largest local group outside London. Its co-founder was Millicent Mackenzie, professor of education at Cardiff and later the only woman candidate in Wales in the 1918 general election. A militant but non-violent splinter group of the WSPU, the Women's Freedom League, had a particularly strong branch in Swansea, founded in 1909 and led by Emily Phipps.

One of the movement's more radical leaders was the businesswoman Margaret Haig Mackworth, later Lady Rhondda, who set up the Newport branch of the WSPU. In 1913 she received a prison sentence for setting fire to letters in a postbox in Newport. She was released after going on hunger strike, a common suffragette tactic. Lloyd George, a particular target of the suffragettes, was hounded by campaigners on many occasions when he spoke in Wales.

‘Miss Flora Copper’ reflects faithfully the typical campaigner. She is a middle class, well-educated woman, with a determined attitude and a flag that speaks plainly of her objective. She wears the suffragette colours of purple, white and green. The doll may have been sold at a fair organised to promote the franchise cause – or it may have had a satirical, punning intent (‘floor a copper’).

The second doll is certainly intended to prompt derision or contempt. Her head is a ping pong ball, her face wears a grimace, and her clothes have seen better days. Worse, pins have been stuck into her head and body, as if in a voodoo rite. This is an anti-suffrage doll. It testifies to the strength of feeling among those opposed to the franchise, even among women themselves. They had their own organisation, the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, founded in 1908, which by 1910 had branches in Cardiff, Newport and north Wales. In 1910, however, the league was obliged to merge with the Men's National League for Opposing Women's Franchise.

In 1918, at the end of the First World War, women finally gained the right to vote in general elections. Even then, those under 30 years of age were excluded, and it was not until 1928 that most women and men aged 21 and over could vote.