Suffragettes ‘were classist and some supported eugenics', says professor
Prof Sarah Richardson, who teaches modern history at the University of Glasgow, said the campaign to give women the vote had a 'dark underside'.
She said feminist academics had covered up the 'nastier side' of the women's suffrage movement, which she said involved classism and support for eugenics.
She said:'Feminist historians sometimes haven't really wanted to expose the nastier side of the suffrage movement.'
The suffrage movement, whose leading lights were predominantly upper-class women, led to women being given the right to vote for the first time in 1918.
The movement fought for the right of women by law to vote in national or local elections. It became a national movement in the Victorian era and succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928.
But the franchise was initially limited to women aged over 30 who met property qualifications, thereby excluding poorer, working-class women. It was later extended to all women regardless of their wealth in 1928.
Prof Richardson told BBC History magazine that prominent figures in the suffrage movement had been subject to 'girl bossification', where they were presented as 'consumable motivational figures'.
She added:'The Pankhursts, for instance, have been eulogised – and understandably so, because without the activism of such individuals, it's unlikely that women would have got the vote.
'It's true that, in the end, it was introduced by men and by Parliament. But it's also true that it was the pressure that the more militant suffragettes put on the public that got their message across, in a way that hadn't been possible across the previous 40 years of activism.
'Yet the links some of the women had with the eugenics movement, and the attitudes some had towards the working class, are pretty horrific.'
Emmeline Pankhurst spoke in favour of eugenics in Canada in the 1920s and said it would enable 'race betterment'. Marie Stopes, a fellow suffrage campaigner, supported compulsory sterilisation, writing in a 1920 tract that she supported it for 'the insane', 'revolutionaries' and 'half-castes'.
Prof Richardson added: 'So on the one hand these are women who have long been seen as inspirational, and who have had statues erected to them. But, on the other, there's a dark underside that has been neglected until quite recently.
'Feminist historians sometimes haven't really wanted to expose the nastier side of the suffrage movement. In my own work on gender and political culture, a lot of the really interesting and successful women in politics have been pretty unpleasant people.
'That might be because of the nature of the political arena.'
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