The women's suffrage movement began before March 4th, 1912 in London, but it was on that day that the world understood that suffrage was no women's tea-party discussion, it was now a violent rage against the male oppression of women that had been in evidence since God stripped Hagar of her son and turned her back to slavery. The London newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, ran this article relating the uprising that occurred in Parliament Square that day, "The attack was begun practically simultaneously. It was one of the busiest periods of the day. Suddenly women, who a moment before had appeared to be on peaceful shopping expeditions, produced from bags and muffs, hammers, stones, and sticks and began an attack on the nearest windows" (Kowal, 240). All women jailed after the riot were released after only a few days due to a successful hunger strike. The impact of this riot was immediate - it sent the entire British nation into an uproar. Women, who had been made 'docile' for millennia by the patriarchal system (and for centuries under the extremes of social oppression in England) had finally snapped - they struck out in the only way they could, by breaking the world around them. Suffrage has proven to be much more than the fight for the right to vote, for fertility rights, and for opportunities to be real people engaged in the world for women, but for the very soul of humanity which had, for so long been eating itself from the inside by suppressing its feminine half. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the suffrage movement at the turn of the last century within the context of Victorian England and to demonstrate that the ability to participate in the political system was only the tip of an iceberg that would eventually lead to a woman holding the highest public office in Great Britain.
