When the fight in Britain over women’s suffrage came to an end with the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which enfranchised property-holding women over 30, Mary Augusta Ward was almost relieved to have been defeated. For nearly forty years she had been the public face of the anti-suffrage campaign: head of the Woman’s National Anti-Suffrage League, editor of the Anti-Suffrage Review, author of the League’s founding manifesto, which attracted 104 signatures including Gertrude Bell’s, Beatrice Webb’s, and Virginia Woolf’s mother’s. In her capacity as the famous novelist “Mrs. Humphry Ward,” she had published Delia Blanchflower, a social problem novel about a feminist virago who comes to grief after burning down a cabinet minister’s house as an act of protest.
But all of this campaigning had come at a cost. Old friends had cut ties. Her college at Oxford had quietly disavowed her in 1909, although she had been one of its founders—the name “Somerville Hall” had been her suggestion. Sales of her novels suffered, or so she believed to the end of her life. Nor was Mrs. Ward the only one to pay a price for her involvement. Her son Arnold, a Unionist MP for eight years, was rejected by his party before the following election because women in his constituency objected to his family’s well-known anti-suffrage stance. The nomination instead went to a 71-year-old rubber tycoon whom Mrs. Ward called “the stupidest man I know, and a perfectly incompetent speaker.”
Mrs. Ward also had reason to feel bitter over the way the suffrage fight had ended. It had all come down to the House of Lords. The suffragists wanted them to pass the Commons’ bill, and the antis wanted them to reject it and call for a referendum on the suffrage question. Ward believed, probably correctly, that any referendum in which women themselves voted would yield a negative, as such plebiscites had in the United States. The leader of the House of Lords was then George Curzon, an Anti-Suffrage League board member and the man who had approached Mrs. Ward about becoming involved in the cause in the first place. She therefore assumed that the vote was likely to go their way, even if her referendum proposal did not get through.
But Curzon let her down. On January 10, at the end of an exceptionally long speech, he declared that although he personally opposed the suffrage bill, as leader of the house he felt obliged to abstain from the vote. The reason he gave was the looming threat of “Lords reform,” which, if the upper house picked the wrong moment to be recalcitrant, might result in its complete abolition. But of course Mrs. Ward did not see his point. She saw only cowardice and a stampede of skittish Nays. When she complained of Curzon’s betrayal to the pro-suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett, Mrs. Fawcett is said to have replied, “That’s what comes of trusting to your men friends.”
As she contemplated the future, Mrs. Ward could not help but feel pessimistic—about the prospects for British politics, and British womanhood, and about her own future. But however pessimistic she was then, she could not possibly have predicted just how complete would be the oblivion to which history would consign her and her friends.
