Lesson video

Hello, and welcome back to History at The Oak National Academy.

My name is Mr. Arscott, and hopefully you recognise me because this is our third lesson of four into our inquiry in why different stories are told about Britain's journey to democracy.

So if you don't recognise me, you probably haven't done those lessons first.

So please make sure you go back and do them before you have a go at today's lesson.

For today you're going to need a piece of paper and a pen, and I ask you to start by writing down today's title, The Suffragette Story of Political Reform.

And whilst you're doing that, I'll get my head out the way.

The Suffragette Story of Political Reform.

Right, we're going to begin by looking at a shocking image.

So, this shocking image was put on a poster that was put up all around Britain.

I'm going to ask you just to start by having you look at what you can see.

What do you think might be going on in a picture like this? You might want to pause the video briefly whilst you scan over and look at some of the details.

So, what can we see? Well, this poster was made by people who wanted women to have the franchise.

And that means having the right to vote.

Now, as we can see, there's a woman on a yellow chair, a woman wearing a yellow dress on a chair, and she's being forced to do something.

Now, the thing that's happening to her is she's being force fed, and all the people wearing black or dark clothes are forcing her to consume something.

So why is this happening? Well, it's happening because she previously had gone on a hunger strike, and she'd gone on a hunger strike to protest about the conditions that she was experiencing in prison.

Now, this poster was made in order to criticise the government.

It was made in order to make the government look bad.

The government at the time was led by a political party of the Liberals.

That's why it refers to the liberal Government.

Now, the full story of this is that beforehand women had been trying to get the vote, and some women had been arrested whilst they'd been campaigning.

And there's a group of female campaigners called The Suffragettes.

And they very cleverly used publicity and posters like this to try to spread the message about how badly the government was treating women.

And they did that in order to try to put pressure on the government to win women the right to vote.

So, the whole idea of this poster is to be critical of the government by showing what the government is doing to women in prison.

Right, let's have a go at you trying to analyse this image yourself.

So, I want you to answer this question.

What can you see? And I put two sentences down just to help you.

So please pause the video while you answer this question and then un-pause it when you're done.

Welcome back, let's find out what you put.

So, here's what I've written.

In this poster I can see a woman being violently force fed.

And then I said a message of the cartoon is that the government is in the wrong.

Now you might've put something completely different.

You might've put something about how the government is refusing to give women the right to vote, or the conditions in the prisons aren't good quality.

Now all of those things would be excellent things to put there, and it's quite an open ended question, so don't worry if you put something different from me.

So, if you remember in these few lessons we're trying to answer this question.

Why are different stories told about Britain's journey to democracy? Now, so far, we've had two stories, stories about parliament, which we could always call the Whig story, which focuses on the laws that people in parliament passed to gradually increase the number of voters.

And we've also looked at stories about the working class, about groups of chartists and people in The Cooperative Movement put pressure on the government in order to give working men the right to vote.

And what we're going to do today is we're going to look at our third story.

This are stories about women.

Now before we get to that, let's look at these different stories on a timeline.

So firstly, there is the Whig story, and that's the story about how Britain gradually gave more and more people the vote and gradually improved its style of government in order to make Britain a stronger, more powerful country.

So the Whig story might focus on things like The Civil War and The Glorious evolution in the 17th century, which gave parliament more power.

And then in the 19th century, it might focus on the reform acts like The Great Reform Act of 1832, and then the other reform acts passed at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, which gradually gave more and more people the right to vote.

Or, we might talk about The Working Class Story.

And the Working Class Story is going to focus on ordinary people, put pressure on the government to give themselves the right to vote.

Now, they might look at historical things which happened way, way back in the past that inspired them like The Peasants Revolt.

More recently lots of British workers were inspired by the events in the French Revolution, When the first democracy was established in a major European country.

There are also events of the Peterloo Massacre, where British soldiers charged at working men and working women and gave them an idea that they were victims and needs to fight back.

And after The Great Reform Act, the working class put increased amount pressure on the government in order to give working people the vote.

Now today, we're going to look at the story of women.

Now, the story of women in some ways starts a bit later than the other stories, but that's actually quite misleading.

Obviously women have had a huge important role in history all the way through.

But sometimes those stories are under reported.

And it's an important job for a historian to try to uncover some of those under reported stories.

Now, for our purpose, we're going to start by talking about The French Revolution.

which in The French Revolution, there's a series of attempts made by some people to get women the right to vote.

Then during The First World War, women played a big role in helping Britain win.

And after that parliament extended the franchise, which mainly gave women the right to vote.

However, this story is in some way misleading.

It doesn't tell us about the huge amounts of political pressure women put on the British Parliament to give them the vote.

And in the sense, all the way from The French Revolution beginning, in 1789 up until the 20th century, women were putting pressure on the government to give them equal political rights with men.

So, let's look at this long history of equal political rights of important and influential women, trying to put pressure on the government.

Well, we could start the story with Olympe de Gouges.

And she is one of the French Revolutionaries who published a document called "The Declaration of The Rights of Women and The Female System." And in that she said that if France wants to be an equal country, then it has to give equal political rights to women.

Now, Mary Wollstoncraft was a Briton who was living in Paris at the time of The French Revolution.

And she was inspired by lots of what was going on during The French revolution.

When she went back to England, she tried to put some of those ideas into the minds of British political thinkers.

And she wrote a famous book called "The vindication Of The Rights Of Women", where she talked about why women should be seen as political equals of men.

And then at the time of The 1832 Reform Act, Anna Wheeler was trying to persuade British men, that women should also be given the right to vote at the same time they're thinking about getting middle class men the right to vote.

Now all three of these women tried to influence the rulers of the time by writing documents and books, and writing letters to them, trying to persuade people gradually, in order to give them the vote.

that also indicates, that all three of these women were middle class or upper class.

So, they were from the wealthier backgrounds and they thought the best way to try to bring about change was to persuade other people who are wealthy and influential to try to change how Britain was run or how that country was run.

So, let's briefly just answer this question.

How did early campaigners try to gain equal political rights for women? So, I put sentence starters there, I want you to copy that down and then try to finish that sentence.

Un-pause when you're done, and then we'll see if you got the right answer.

Welcome back, Let's see if you've got the right answer.

So, early campaigners tried to gain equal political rights for women by publishing books and writing letters to try and persuade others.

So that's the key tactical strategy they were using.

And we're going to find out, as time goes on, women change their strategies to try to get equal political rights.

Now in the period, 1832-1884, some people would say that there was lots of progress in making Britain more democratic, but that progress ignored women.

So in 1832, a Reform act was passed, which gave middle class men the right to vote.

In fact, it actually for the first time, deprived women of their right to vote officially.

There had been a few areas in the country Britain, where women have been able to vote, and in the 1832 Reform act, women were explicitly told, they did not have the right to vote in general elections.

Then, in 1867 and 1884, more Reform Acts were passed, which gave a greater number of working class men the right to vote.

This were labelled at the time as the Respectable working class.

Now, all the way up to that point, there'd been pressure put on the government to try to extend the franchise, some of that by the Chartists.

And as we can see on the right, there's a woman called Anne Knight.

And Anne Knight was one of the Chartist, who was campaigning for an extension of the franchise to include working men.

But she was also saying that all people should be included In the franchise.

She was saying that working class men and working class women, as well as middle class women should be included in the franchise.

Despite her efforts and the efforts of other Chartists, there was no progress in this period for women being given the right to vote.

So, this takes us to the end of the 19th century.

At this point, lots of women are becoming understandably very frustrated.

And one of these was called Emmeline Pankhurst and we can see her hare on the right.

And she thought women have been trying and campaigning for a long time to get the right to vote and nothing had changed.

So, in 1903, she set up an organisation called Women's Social and Political Union, and she decided that it was time for a new set of tactics or a new set of strategies.

She wasn't interested in just trying to publish books or write letters to persuade people, she was interested in campaigning alongside men in in order to increase the number of male voters.

She thought it was time for women to use radical methods, to try to win the vote.

And she and some of her followers came up with the slogan, "Deeds not Words." And what she meant by that was that it was time for action.

And so, she and her followers who became known as The Suffragettes, decided to use action to try to change people's opinions on whether women should have the right to vote.

Right, let's just briefly get down our definition of suffragettes, so suffragette's a name given to women who use radical methods to campaign for the vote.

So, pause the video if you want to copy that down, and un-pause it when you're done.

So, what did the Suffragettes actually do? Well, they were brilliant at trying to get attention, Now, by the start of the 20th century, Britain had become more and more democratic, more, more people had a say in elections.

And that meant, the Suffragettes realised that if they could change public opinion, they could put pressure on the government to bring about change.

So they tried to grab people's attention, and we can see here, Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested and carried away by a police officer.

And the reason for that, was that Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers, realised if they started committing crimes or doing things that got written about in the newspapers, more and more people would find out about what they're doing.

They were trying to get publicity.

And over the year they're active, they started carrying out more and more active, and more and more aggressive things to do.

So, they did things like smash the windows of public buildings.

They then went on to trying to bomb letterboxes and tried to set fire to buildings.

Emmeline Pankhurst herself, even hit a police officer.

And at one point, a Suffragette threw an axe at the carriage carrying the Prime Minister.

Now, all of these are examples of direct action, trying to do actions which are going to grab attention.

It can be described as being militant, using violent methods in order to try to gain attention.

Now, they weren't trying to harm individuals.

They are only trying to harm property.

She thought that would be the best way to get people's attention.

Now, what then happened was that Suffragettes were imprisoned.

Now, that didn't seem like a problem to Suffragettes.

They realised being put in prison would get them more attention, the newspapers would write more stories about them, and that put more pressure on the government to change things.

But, the conditions that the Suffragettes experienced in prison were very unpleasant.

As so some Suffragettes, started to campaign in prison in order to try to change the prison conditions.

And they went to a hunger strike, but, as we found out, the government was not willing to listen and change their conditions.

They weren't willing to improve the conditions in the prisons, or to give women the right to vote.

So, they instructed the governors of the prisons to force feed the Suffragettes.

Now, the reason they did this, is the government did not want to have the responsibility of Suffragettes having died in British prisons.

And they also didn't want to change the women's voting rights.

So, they forced fed women in these horrible, violent experiences in order to avoid having to change what they were doing.

So, how the Suffragettes try to gain equal political rights? Read through the four options and then choose the options that you think is most accurate.

Right, welcome back.

Well done if you went for option four, that they tried to gain publicity by carrying out violent acts and getting arrested.

Right, What then happened changed what Suffragettes would do.

In 1914, The First World War Broke out.

Now, at this point, it seemed very unpopular for the Suffragettes to be critical of the government, and the whole country got behind the war effort.

Now, that involved lots of women working in jobs, which helped the war effort.

So huge numbers of volunteered to work as nurses, and work in Britain, or going over to France and Belgium and helping the soldiers there.

Now, women had always played a big role in working in factories, especially in the cotton industry.

However, for the first time between 1914 and 1918 women started playing a big role working in munitions factories.

And munitions factories are the factories that make guns or ammunitions, or other technology which was important to the war effort.

And the fact that women were working in large numbers in munitions factories, showed the population how important women were to the war effort.

Now, the Suffragettes under Pankhurst themselves wanted to make sure they were supporting the war effort.

So they ended their disruptive action, they stopped trying to carry out militant acts and, they encouraged their members to support the war effort.

Now, circled in green are two of the roles that the Suffragettes encouraged women to join, working as nurses or in munitions factories.

But there's another thing the Suffragettes encouraged women to do, which is to put shame on any men who weren't contributing to The War effort.

And the man stuck in an orange is meant to be someone who seems to be a bit guilty because he is not helping out like everyone else in the poster.

Now, because of the effort that women put in during the war effort, and also because of the actions of the Suffragettes before the war, directly after the first world war, women were given the right to vote.

Now, we've seen this graph before, it's a bit complicated.

If we look at the blue line, we can see the point at which women were given the right to vote.

So, here in 1918, this blue line here, about just under half of women in the country were given the right to vote, and then in 1928, all women were given the right to vote or adult women, as women and men have equal voting rights.

Right, you are now in a really good position to have a go at answering the comprehension questions.

So I'm going to read through them now, and then I'm going to explain how you're going to answer them.

So, question one, what happened to female prisoners who went on hunger strike? Two, what organisation did Emmeline Pankhurst create? Three, how did the Suffragettes try to gain attention? Four, why did women start working in munitions factories? Five, why did the government force-feed Suffragette prisoners? Right, so what you're going to have to do, is I'm going to ask you to shortly pause the video, and go to the next page, read through the worksheet slides, and then have a go at answering these questions based on what you've read.

Once you have their answers, I'm going to ask you to come back to the video, un-pause the video, and we'll go through the answers.

So, please pause the video now, and then return the video once you've answered the questions.

All right, welcome back.

Let's go through the answers and see how many you got right.

Question one, what happened to female prisoners who went on hunger strike? An accepted answer could be force fed.

Now, a good answer in a full sentence, and it's always a good idea to write in a full sentence, would be female prisoners who went on hunger strike were force fed, right.

Question two, what organisation did Emmeline Pankhurst create? An acceptable answer would be The Women's Social and Political Union.

A good answer in a full sentence would be Emmeline Pankhurst established The Women's Social and Political Union.

Its members were known as the Suffragettes.

Question three, how did the Suffragettes try to gain attention? Acceptable answer could be, get arrested or destroyed property or hunger strikes.

Good answer in a full sentence.

The Suffragettes tried to gain attention in order to put pressure on the government.

To gain attention, they would commit crimes like destroying property or hitting police officers.

When in prison, many Suffragettes then went on a hunger strike.

Question four, why did women start working in munitions factories? An acceptable answer, to support the war effort.

A good answer in a full sentence, between 1914 and 1918, many women started working in munitions factories.

Many male munitions workers had joined the army, so women started working these factories to support the war effort.

And question five, challenge question which is a bit harder.

Why do the government force feed suffragette prisoners? Acceptable answers could be to stop women dying, or embarrassing for prisoners to die.

Good answer which puts that in a full sentence, and it gives a bit of context.

Suffragette prisoners, went on hunger strike, to protest about their treatment and gain attention for extending the franchise to women.

The government did not want the bad publicity of female prisoners dying, so it arranged for Suffragettes to be force fed.

Right, now, brilliant work for you on those questions so far, and if you didn't get any of these questions exactly in the way that I word them, that doesn't mean you're wrong.

Look for common language and you can still give yourself a tick.

If you got something very different, you might want to copy out my good answers, so you get some really nice comprehensive notes.

Now, really well done for your hard work today.

If you're running out of time, I suggest you stop the video at this point and then move on to the final quiz.

If you've got a bit of extra time, I'd like to have a go at our extension activity, which is what can we learn from suffrage campaign posters? That is going to give us a bit of a broader understanding of The Women's Suffrage Movement.

Now, we looked at this question before, how did the Suffragettes try to gain equal political rights? If you remember, the Suffragettes tried to gain equal critical rights by gaining publicity, by carrying out violent acts and getting arrested.

However, the other options are also things that other women were doing in order to try to win the vote.

So, other women were writing books and letters to persuade men to give them the vote.

And that had happened earlier in the 19th century and in the 18th century, other women were working with working class men to increase the number of voters.

And at the same time, the Suffragettes working, other women were raising awareness by campaigning peacefully.

Now, one of those people who's doing that was this woman here, Millicent Fawcett.

And she actually was leading an organisation at the same time as Emmeline Pankhurst.

And Millicent Fawcett's organisation was much larger, it was much more popular, and it's called The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, a bit of a mouthful.

Now, unlike Emmeline Pankhurst Fawcett believed that the best way to win the vote was to carry out a peaceful campaign, which spoke to people's sense of morality, which persuaded men and the rest of the British population, that it was unfair and morally wrong that women did not have the right to vote.

So, she came up with slogans, published documents, and famously they created posters, her followers created posters.

And we're going to look at one of those posters now.

So, I'm going to ask you to start by pausing the video and just having a brief scan of what you can see in this poster.

So, what this poster does is it shows what jobs women could have or what roles women could have in the society, and still not be able to vote.

And at the same time, what roles or what jobs men could have in society and still be able to vote.

Now, one of the messages of this image is that women could be responsible, hardworking, and valuable members of society, but yet did not have the same political rights as men.

Whereas men could be useless, could damage parts of the society, could be a drain on resources and yet be allowed to vote.

Now, the poster is not trying to say that women are better than men, but it is trying to say that women can be useful and therefore should be given the right to vote.

Right, now what I'm going to ask you to have a go at doing is answering this question.

What can we learn from suffrage campaign posters? And that poster we just looked at would count as a suffrage campaign poster.

So it's a campaign poster trying to get women the right to vote.

Now there are some sentence starters here.

The women's suffrage poster attempts to show how it was unfair that women cannot vote, for example.

And then there's some key words that you can include in order to support that sentence So, I'm going to ask you to have a go at trying to write this now.

If you want to go back and look at the image, then if you go back to the worksheet slides and go to the extension, you'll find it there, as well as the sentence starters and key words to help you have a go at answering.

So, brilliant work having done that.

Now stop option to end the lesson.

So, I want you to now stop the video and move on to the final quiz.

I want to just repeat one more time.

Well done for your hard work.

Today we've learned about a really interesting story, you did really good work, especially having a go at the extension activity.