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.8 In November 1869, oneof these four ( Chorlton v.Lings) was argued before the court of commonpleas.The court determined that the precedents for women’s parliamentaryvoting were rare, concluding that “‘in modern and more civilized times, outof respect for women and by way of decorum.[women] are excludedfrom taking any part in popular assemblies, or in the election of Members ofParliament.’”9Chorlton v.Lings represented a pivotal point in Edwardian suffragists’ un-derstanding of the evolution of the campaign for women’s parliamentary en-franchisement.10 In her many publications, suffragist Charlotte CarmichaelStopes emphasized the importance of judicial interpretation in excludingwomen from citizenship.While acknowledging that the criteria of inheri-tance and matrimony historically had limited the number of women whocould act as legal persons, Stopes insisted that no statute explicitly deniedwomen the parliamentary vote.Chorlton v.Lings thus exemplified the judi-ciary’s role in upholding masculine privilege by denying women what Stopescalled “the natural and constitutional equivalent for a tax in a vote.”11 Lawyers, she contended, had decided “that the word ‘man’ always includes a ‘woman’when there is a penalty to be incurred, and never includes ‘woman’ whenthere is a privilege to be conferred.”12 And judges, Stopes contended, con-curred with this interpretation.Women’s disabilities, then, she argued, “donot depend on Constitution or Statute, but on the limited vision of judgeswho did not know their Constitutional history in 1868.”13 Stopes’s assessmentwould be repeated by suffragettes throughout the Edwardian campaign.1464r e s i s ta n c e o n t r i a l , 19 0 6 – 19 12The judicial decision in Chorlton v.Lings shaped suffragists’ narration oftheir campaign long after militancy had ended.In 1931, more than a decadeafter the first women’s suffrage victory in the United Kingdom, Sylvia Pank-hurst presented the decision in Chorlton v.Lings as the precipitating event forforty years’ agitation for the vote.15 Pankhurst may have had a personal in-terest in framing it thus, since her father, Richard Marsden Pankhurst, hadserved as counsel for the appellants, but the pervasive references to the casein discussions of the struggle for the vote suggest that it continued to holdgreat significance for many suffragists.In The Cause (1928), Ray Strachey sim-ilarly portrayed the case as decisive in shaping the form taken by the women’smovement after 1869.She quoted from a leading article in the Times on theoutcome of the case:As we cannot affect a decent sorrow at the result, it might be thoughtmore becoming that we should say nothing at all.But we are appre-hensive that silence in this case might be considered more offensiveeven than a shout of victory.The contention that women, beingliable to taxation, must also be entitled to a share in representation,might justify women in a rebellion, but not a Court of Law in adjudg-ing a privilege to them which no law, customary or statutory, can beshown to have conferred.Even as the Times’s article was being written, Strachey observed, Manchestersuffragist Lydia Becker, by bringing together women in a regional suffragesociety, had begun to organize such a rebellion, albeit one on “peaceful, con-stitutional” lines.16Chorlton v.Lings (1868) was upheld in Beresford Hope v.Lady Sandhurst(1889), in which women’s incapacity for election as members of countycouncils rested upon the earlier decision.17 Suffragists in the decades fol-lowing understood the significance of these cases for their cause.In 1891,Harriet McIlquham singled out for criticism the judicial decisions renderingwomen’s constitutional rights moot, derisively noting that the Master of theRolls’ declaration that neither common law nor the constitution allowedwomen to exercise public functions presumed “either gross ignorance of lawand of fact, or inveterate masculine bias [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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