of women. The late Miss Helen Blackburn, historian of the movement, truly observes, "The seed of the Women's Suffrage agitation lay in that one short word 'male.'" The twentieth-century woman wonders why women made no protest. Let her spend a few weeks in the British Museum Library pondering over some of the myriad volumes catalogued under the word "Women," and she will realise that years of discouragement and denial of educational privileges had as surely deprived her of the sense of civic freedom as the Oriental woman of to-day still lacks the sense of personal freedom.
Yet even in those dark days it is said that a petition from women of Yorkshire was presented to the House of Commons while the Reform Act of 1832 was under consideration, asking for the enfranchisement of their sex.
"The disabling process thus set up soon spread further; the first Parliament elected under the Reform Act showed its representative character by introducing the same restrictive word 'male' into the enfranchising clauses of the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835, by which the various local charters, with their various generic franchises, were reduced to one uniform male franchise." Two years earlier the right of English widows to a share of one-third their husbands' estates was barred, so that they only became entitled thereto if so expressed by will (Aug. 29, 1833). Sex prejudice culminated in 1840 when duly accredited women from the United States were refused as delegates at the Anti-Slavery Convention in London. This was the proverbial "darkest hour."
