Emily Davison Died So Women Could Vote

by Read Listen Learn

Emily Davison Died So Women Could Vote

On 8th June, 1913, Emily Davison died. She was forty years old. Four days before, she ran in front of the King’s horse at an important race in southern England. At the time, the newspapers said she was mad, but now we see her death differently. We understand that she wanted the world to think about women’s rights and that her death was one way that she could make people do it.

Emily Wilding Davison was born in 1872 and, all her life, loved books. Her father was a rich man and Emily’s childhood was very comfortable. But when Emily was nineteen, he died and Emily did not have the money to go to university as she hoped. She took a job as a teacher in a rich home and soon saved enough money to do degrees in English at Oxford and London Universities. However, there were no jobs for educated women in those days. So, Davison went back to teaching again.

For many years, Davison taught at schools and worked for women’s rights groups. In the end, she stopped teaching and worked full-time for a suffragette group. She did not have much money but she enjoyed the new friendships she made. It was dangerous work at that time, because the British government and police did not want women to vote. Many women did not want it either. In 1909, the police arrested Davison five times. She went on hunger strike in prison because the British government did not agree that she was a political prisoner. The prison gave her food by force. This meant putting a tube in her mouth and pushing it into her stomach. Davison hated it of course and never forgot it. But it did not make her eat. It happened nearly fifty times.

In 1913, Davison wrote that the only way women could get the vote was if someone died. On that terrible day in June, 1913, she tried to put the flag of the women’s rights group on the King’s horse when it ran past her. A court decided it was an accident. Davison had a return train ticket to London in her pocket.

At her funeral, five thousand women all dressed in white walked with her coffin. Women could vote in the U.K. (if they were thirty years old) in 1918. In 1928, the government changed the age to 28, the same as men.

New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote in 1893. Australia followed the next year, but not for Aborigines. Finland was the first country in Europe to give women the vote – in 1907. France only followed thirty-seven years later in 1944 and Switzerland in 1971. Bahrain was the first country in the Gulf in 2002 (although Kuwait gave them the right in 1985 but then took it away again until 2005). King Abdullah has said he will give women the vote in Saudi Arabia in 2015.