Today, December 14, 2018, marks a hundred years since the first general election in which women in the UK — or at least some of them — could vote.
The election was called immediately after the armistice with Germany that ended the First World War, and 10 months after the Representation of the People Act, which extended the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification and all men aged 21 or older, had received royal assent.
However, a century on, women are still disadvantaged when it comes to participating in democracy, from victims of domestic violence who need to provide evidence each year to register anonymously to vote, to women MPs who struggle to balance childcare responsibilities with work.
BuzzFeed News spoke to four women about the barriers they had faced in participating in democracy, 100 years after women first had the opportunity to vote.
Laura Smith, Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich
Laura Smith was first elected to parliament last year and splits her time between Westminster and her constituency in the north of England. She is a single parent to children aged 7 and 2.
Following the 2017 general election, the UK parliament had a record number of 208 female MPs, including Smith, but women still make up less than a third of all members of the House of Commons.
"I'm really lucky because I have fantastic family and friends and obviously my children have their dad, so you just make it work," Smith told BuzzFeed News.
"I wasn't expecting to win [in] the general election [her majority is just 48 votes], so because of that I didn't have time to put the barriers in place that I would have done otherwise, but you find that you just deal with it."
The things that make her life harder, Smith said, are "the times you sit, the way you vote, the fact everything is so London-centric, it means being away from your kids a few days a week."
"I'm sure there's a more modern way of doing that," she added.
It is not just the practicalities of Westminster life that are difficult for mothers, Smith said, but also getting there in the first place. Being a candidate is expensive, she told BuzzFeed News, and the traditional route that many MPs take of seeking lower office such as a local council seat first is not open to those with care responsibilities who are unable to attend evening meetings.
Smith, a former teacher and education campaigner, said that the short timeframe of the 2017 election meant that the financial burden of the campaign was not too great, and she made her way to parliament without being a councillor first. "If I had been in that situation it would have been impossibly difficult," she told BuzzFeed News.
It is support for women who aren't as far down the line that Smith said is important if parliament wants to become more gender-balanced. "There's a lot of things that parliament could do to improve it for women," she said. "But to be honest the barrier is before coming to parliament.
"There are barriers for women with children there far before you get to this place. If you address those issues you will get more people with that background coming in, and you'll find it naturally changes."
Mehala Osborne, domestic violence survivor and campaigner
Mehala Osborne founded Women's Aid's successful Right to Vote campaign, which saw the government change the evidence requirements for anonymous voter registration. This meant that health professionals and refuge managers could provide written evidence — making voting safely a reality for domestic violence survivors for the first time.
However, Osborne is still working with the charity to campaign for this right to be granted to survivors for an indefinite length of time. It currently lasts for only 12 months, so survivors have to reapply each year, but providing valid evidence becomes increasingly difficult as the years go by, while the risks to their safety may never diminish.
Osborne told BuzzFeed News that she started the campaign while she was living in a refuge in Bristol and realised she would not be able to participate in an upcoming local election.
"I was campaigning locally on how they allocated priority housing," she told BuzzFeed News, "and I was keen to register to vote because of the local campaigning I was doing. I rang the elections office in Bristol and they advised me to register anonymously. I got the forms printed off at the library for me and for people in the house, and on the last page you have to have evidence of why you need to be anonymous — but all the evidence they required I didn't have, because the threshold was too high."
Osborne said she didn't get to vote in that election, which she described as "gutting."
"Me and another lady that was living there at the time, we both just cried," she said, "because we tried so hard. It had been two months of trying to find a way. I did not realise I'd be unable to vote, because it's my right. I was so disappointed in the system."
Osborne said she'd always voted but had never been particularly engaged before, adding: "I never appreciated my right to vote until it was taken away."
Although survivors now find it easier to register anonymously, Osborne continues to campaign against the requirement to reregister every year because, as time passes, survivors may lose track of evidence, meaning they may never be able to vote.
"A lot of survivors told me they haven't voted for years and years," Osborne said. "One woman said she hasn't voted for 20 years because she's too scared to be on the electoral roll because she knows her perpetrator will find her and come after her, so she can't vote."
The thing that really spurred her on to campaign, and to continue to do so, she said, was the fact that so many big political decisions, including the EU referendum and a general election, were being put to the electorate.
She told BuzzFeed News: "All these things were happening that were so important for our future and our children's futures, and we couldn't have a say in it. It was devastating, is the only way I'd describe it."
Holly Hannigan, a single mother who juggles several jobs
Holly Hannigan is a single parent to two children aged 8 and 5. She told BuzzFeed News that she is always keen to vote and likes to take her children with her to impress on them the importance of participating in democracy, but the fact that she juggles several jobs alongside her care responsibilities makes life difficult.
While nowadays options like postal and proxy voting exist, life is still generally more difficult for single parents — the majority of them mothers — who often have to work part-time to avoid paying for expensive childcare.
According to figures supplied to BuzzFeed News by the Trades Union Congress, women are around 60% more likely to have a second job than men, and according to research from the charity Gingerbread, 9 in 10 single-parent families are headed by a mother. In 2017, there were around 1.7 million single-parent
families in the UK.
Hannigan is a trained hypnotherapist and is trying to build her own business, but she also works part-time as a re-enablement worker with people leaving hospital and does other work including bar shifts and copywriting to pay the bills. When she wasn't picking up extra work, Hannigan told BuzzFeed News, "there was never enough to pay the bills and have a life as well as surviving".
"I went through a period where I was working night shifts," she said, "and I was just sleeping every day and realised I wasn't having any time for myself."
"I try to juggle things around to pick up any work I can," she said. "It's hard to get one role that pays and fits around everything else. There are full-time jobs out there — I was offered one, but I would have to put my children in afterschool care every day and the pay isn't as much as the cost of that, and I don't want to miss out on all that time with my children."
Managing her different income streams and caring for her children, Hannigan said, makes the practical things in life, like voting, more difficult — or sometimes impossible.
"I'm lucky that the polling station for me is my children's school," she said, "but last time I had to finish work and rush to try and get there just as it was closing. I like to take my children with me to see what I'm doing and the importance of making that vote, but it is a challenge when you don't have set hours or shift patterns."
Ola Daniel, former prisoner
In the UK prisoners are unable to vote in elections. Although the female prison population is much smaller than the male one, women are disproportionately disadvantaged in the criminal justice system.
Women are more likely than men to be sent to prison for nonviolent offences, and according to the charity Women in Prison, more than a quarter have no previous convictions. It's also disproportionately common for women to be handed down shorter sentences, and according to the Prison Reform Trust, women who are given these shorter sentences are more likely to reoffend.
According to Women in Prison, 84% of female inmates who are sentenced to jail time have committed a nonviolent crime, and theft offences accounted for 48% of all custodial sentences given to women in 2016.
Data from the Office for National Statistics also shows that the proportion of women held in custody on remand is higher than that for men, and according to Prison Reform Trust research, in 2016, 60% of women remanded by magistrates’ courts and 41% by crown courts did not receive a custodial sentence.
Women prisoners are also more likely to experience mental health problems than men, and more likely to harm or kill themselves while in jail.
Ola Daniel spent two years in prison and is now an advocate for charity the Prisoners' Education Trust. She told BuzzFeed News that a lot of the women she encountered in prison had complex issues such as addiction or mental illness. "That's the main thing I realised," she said.
"I realised that a lot of them were overcoming addiction problems; a lot of them were there for crimes regarding shoplifting or, if it was drug-related, protecting a partner; a lot of them had been victims of abuse throughout their lives.
"I got close to some of the ladies from families who had been introduced to crime at a young age or had nothing else around them... They had minimal education, problems with drug and alcohol addiction."
Some of the women she met, she said, had "children who had been taken off them and that just spiralled into a whole lot of mental health issues".
Daniel, a former solicitor, told BuzzFeed News that she believes it is important for women to vote, especially because, in her view, many encourage their children and other family members to do the same.
"I believe it's incredibly important because a lot of women are influential within the family," she said. "When I'm at home I have three adult children and my husband, and I ensure everybody gets to vote. I take them to the polling station to vote — when I was away nobody bothered."
Daniel also thinks that the right to vote should be extended to prisoners. "I believe that because a lot of things affect them as well, even while they're in custody," she told BuzzFeed News. "Even though they have lost their liberty as punishment for their crime, they should be able to vote.
"A lot of them will be back in society, especially those coming out on temporary license to work and see their family. There's lots going on that affects them and their family."