Why didn the Chartists demand votes for women?
They nearly did. William Lovett (left) who wrote the Charter for the London Working Men’s Association, later recalled that he wanted all adults to be given the right to vote, but was advised to tone this down in case it alienated potential supporters. Although some Chartists did call for women to be given the vote (R J Richardson wrote a pamphlet called The Rights of Women demanding just this while he was in prison in 1840), others were hostile to the idea and often linked their ideas in this area to the growing call in Victorian public life for women to be excluded from the workplace.
