Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, enamelled uniface medallet, bearing central rose, thistle and shamrock on a red ground, with the league’s title around on a black ground, fitted with integral loop and ring suspension, 21mm., very fine and rare £200-300

The burgeoning of the activities of British organisations devoted to attaining the Vote for Women during the early years of the twentieth century did not meet with universal approval from all women. In fact many were opposed to such an idea. An anti-suffrage campaign was gradually co-ordinated following a letter from a Francis H. Low published in The Times in December 1906. She argued that if women became directly involved in politics then the ‘triviality’ found in newspapers written by or for women would permeate Westminster. Two months later she announced the formation of a committee whose purpose was to collect signatures for a petition ‘in the quietest and speediest manner possible,’ and within a fortnight some 37,000 signatures had been presented to Parliament. The document stressed the importance of women’s work in education and the Poor Law and stated that the women’s vote would destroy their undoubted influence in their spheres of work.

Francis Low was again to be found writing to the papers in 1908, when in February she wrote a letter to the Spectator saying that the women’s anti-suffrage movement desperately needed leadership. Her position not surprisingly found support from some notable Parliamentarians and that July an inaugural meeting of “The Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League” was held at the Westminster Palace Hotel, when it was agreed that more action was needed if the organisation was to counter the more high profile campaigning of the pro-suffrage organisations. Lady Jersey was nominated Chair of the Executive Committee, and the following day The Times encouraged the League to make the greatest efforts to counter Suffragist arguments and tactics.

From 1908 a monthly news sheet The Anti-Suffrage Review began publication to inform members about news and relevant issues and to keep them in touch with each other, and in the same year the League achieved a significant triumph when it managed to collect 337,108 signatures to an anti-suffrage petition, more than the 288, 736 signatures collected by the suffragists a few months later. Moreover, by mid-1909, the League had established throughout the country 82 representative branches.

The work of the League arose substantially from the premise that obtaining the vote was not a matter that interested most women and hence it responded to what it believed was the danger of unnecessary and unwanted change being forced through by a militant voice. As Suffragette and Suffragist campaigning intensified during the years before the Great War, so the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League responded, mainly with meetings, petitions and the lobbying of Parliament, in a campaign to represent what was believed to be a silent majority of women who agreed with the League’s views. Although the League significantly increased membership and support in the years running up to the outbreak of war, once hostilities commenced, like the Suffrage movement, the women turned their attention to the war effort and eventually, after the Armistice, a new world dawned in which attitudes to women had changed: the Vote for Women was now only a matter of time.