A Political Neighbourhood
The suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found in Belsize Park and Hampstead a community of particular sympathy and engagement. The neighbourhood's concentration of educated, professionally active, and politically aware women — the wives and daughters of the professional middle class, the independent women who had achieved a degree of economic autonomy through professional work, the intellectuals and artists whose engagement with progressive ideas extended naturally to the cause of women's political rights — made it a natural base for suffrage organising and a natural constituency for suffrage arguments.
The suffragette movement, which took the more confrontational approach to the suffrage cause — civil disobedience, property damage, hunger strikes — had its principal organising base in the central London establishments of the Women's Social and Political Union founded by Emmeline Pankhurst. But the movement's social base extended far beyond the WSPU headquarters, into the drawing rooms and meeting halls of middle-class neighbourhoods like Belsize Park, where the sympathetic educated women who formed the core of the movement's support base lived and worked and organised.
The suffragist movement, which took the more constitutional approach to the campaign for women's votes — petitioning, lobbying, education, and the gradual building of political pressure — had an even more direct presence in the NW3 neighbourhood. The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, was supported by a network of local societies whose members were predominantly drawn from the educated professional classes. The Hampstead and Belsize Park local suffrage society — one of many across the country — organised meetings, circulated literature, lobbied local politicians, and maintained the public pressure for change that eventually, combined with the more dramatic actions of the suffragettes, succeeded in securing the vote for women over thirty in 1918.
The Women of NW3
The women who engaged in the suffrage movement in Belsize Park and Hampstead were a diverse group, united by their commitment to the cause of women's political rights but varied in their social position, their professional activities, and their approach to the movement's tactics. The wives and daughters of the professional middle class who made up the largest single group were women who had benefited from the educational reforms of the late Victorian period — the opening of girls' secondary schools, the establishment of the women's colleges at Oxford and Cambridge — but who found themselves excluded from the political rights that their education and their social engagement seemed to make natural.
The professional women who lived and worked in the neighbourhood — the teachers, the doctors, the social workers, the artists and writers — brought to the movement a different perspective: not merely that of women seeking the vote as an expression of their equal citizenship, but of women who had direct experience of the ways in which the absence of political rights limited their ability to advance the professional and social causes they cared about. The suffrage movement, from this perspective, was not merely a matter of abstract principle but a practical necessity for women who wanted to change the conditions of women's lives.
The Local Campaign
The local suffrage campaign in Belsize Park and Hampstead involved the full range of activities that the movement deployed across the country. Drawing-room meetings were the basic unit of the constitutional suffrage campaign: gatherings in the homes of sympathetic women, at which speakers explained the case for women's suffrage and discussed the tactics of the campaign, and at which new members were recruited and local committees organised. The NW3 neighbourhood, with its supply of large drawing rooms and its population of politically engaged women, was well suited to this form of organising.
The public meetings in local halls, the distribution of literature, the collection of signatures for petitions to Parliament, the lobbying of local MPs — all of these activities were pursued by the local suffrage society with the systematic determination that characterised the constitutional wing of the movement at its most effective. The campaign required sustained organisational effort over many years, maintained in the face of frequent disappointment as successive Parliamentary opportunities for suffrage legislation failed to materialise. The women who sustained this effort — working without pay, in addition to their domestic and professional responsibilities — demonstrated a degree of political commitment and organisational capacity that was itself an argument for their fitness to exercise the vote they were claiming.
The Vote and Its Aftermath
The partial victory of 1918, which granted the vote to women over thirty who met the property qualification, was received in the NW3 suffrage community with a mixture of celebration and disappointment. The victory was genuine — the principle of women's voting rights was established for the first time — but the restriction to women over thirty, and the property qualification, meant that the majority of women in the neighbourhood were still excluded. The full victory of 1928, when women finally received the vote on equal terms with men, completed the campaign that the NW3 suffrage community had sustained for decades.
The legacy of the suffrage movement in Belsize Park is partly the political right that the campaign secured — the right to vote that is now so taken for granted that many women do not exercise it — and partly the model of organised political action that the movement demonstrated. The suffragettes and suffragists of NW3 showed that women could sustain a complex, long-term political campaign, that they could combine the organisational skills of the movement with the professional and intellectual capacities that the neighbourhood's educated women possessed, and that they could achieve, through persistence and intelligence, a transformation of the political order that had seemed unattainable when the campaign began.
Remembering the Campaigners
The women who campaigned for the vote in Belsize Park and Hampstead are largely forgotten as individuals, their names unrecorded in the blue plaques that commemorate their more famous male and female contemporaries. This forgetting is characteristic of the historical treatment of collective political movements, which tends to remember the famous leaders while losing sight of the majority of participants who sustained the campaign through its long years of disappointment. The recovery of their individual stories, through archive research and oral history, is one of the tasks of local history that the NW3 community has not yet fully undertaken.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*