The South African War and After, 1899-1906

Abstract British involvement in the military conflict known to contemporaries alternately as the South African War and the Boer War seemingly brought the activities of organized suffragists to a halt. By and large, historians have accepted liberal suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s 1925 recollection that “the war naturally caused an almost complete suspension of work for Women’s Suffrage.” Yet evidence contemporary to the conflict in South Africa suggests that the great majority of women active in the organized suffrage movement believed in the necessity of continuing to press their claim. Delegates to the conference held in 1900 by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies voted unanimously to continue its work to keep women’s suffrage before the legislature during the war. Other evidence suggests that activity on behalf of women’s suffrage actually increased during the war, as when, in December 1899, the North of England Society began to circulate a petition for women’s suffrage among women textile workers in Lancashire, expanding the suffrage organizing among working women that had begun in the early 189os. And while both the Women’s Emancipation Union and the Women’s Franchise League folded in 1899, many of their members remained active in progressive politics in the early years of the new century, including women’s suffrage, social reform, and agitation against the pending war in South Africa.