Podcasts History Witness History Women in Britain get the right to vote

Women in Britain get the right to vote

Published: Feb. 6, 2018, 2:16 p.m.

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On 6th February 1918, women in Britain were given the right to vote for the first time. The campaign for women's suffrage had begun decades earlier. But it wasn't until the final months of the First World War that the British parliament relented and said property-owning women over the age of 30 could vote in a general election. It would take another ten years before women got parity with men. Louise Hidalgo has been listening back to the voices of the women activists known as suffragettes, and talks to politician Shirley Williams, the daughter of an early feminist.

Picture: suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested outside Buckingham Palace, 1914 (Credit: Jimmy Sime/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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