Did women stop women's suffrage?

They didn't stop the fight for the right to vote but many women helped to make the fight more difficult and years longer.

There were many women who upheld the Victorian view of women and society: that a woman's place was in the home, women were too weak minded and irrational to take part in political life by voting, were too innocent and in need of protection to take part in public life and should rely on and support all their husband's decisions. Therefore, they didn't need to vote. Of course, this position always ignored the reality that there were thousands of women who worked and had no husbands and had no protections from the men they worked for. They had no voice in the halls of justice nor in the halls of political power. Men had total control over their destinies and could continue to pass laws that benefitted men.


The Women's National Anti-Suffrage League was founded in London in 1908 under the sponsorship of thirty peeresses and other branches soon followed. It joined forces with the Men's National League for Opposing Women's Franchise and that provides historical evidence of the horrific resistance faced by the women who worked tirelessly for the right to vote.


Those opposing organizations had more members and many more resources than the groups fighting for women's rights. There were many mothers who forbid their more modern thinking daughters to participate in the fight for the right to vote.


There have always been groups of women who defeated their sisters' battles for freedom from subjection. That reality is clearly evident in modern eastern cultures where women abuse other women by performing female circumcision on young girls, ignore the rape of their daughters by male family members and help to kill daughters-in-law who fail to produce male offspring.