Asquith On Women's Votes Quotes

There is no end to the grotesque absurdities that would follow the passing of this measure. It would be possible for women to have a vote while living in a state of prostitution; if she married and became an honest woman she would lose that vote, but she could regain it through divorce.’25 A regular criticism of Churchill was that, as Asquith put it to his close friend Venetia Stanley,* ‘Winston thinks with his mouth,’ meaning that he adopted policies because they sounded good in speeches.

I continued: "Mr. Asquith has said that the parents of children have a right to be consulted in the matter of their children's education, especially upon such questions as the kind of religious instruction they should receive. Women are parents. Does not Mr. Asquith think that women should have the right to control their children's education, as men do, through the vote?

Asquith, in the House, had shocked many people by opposing the franchise for women on the grounds that woman was not the female of the human species but a distinct and inferior species of her own, and disqualified from voting in the same way that a rabbit was disqualified. When it was reported there were angry letters and much protest in the press, together with several satirical cartoons about the lapine origins of various public figures. Someone commented that Asquith’s ‘rabbit theory’ made it difficult to vote Liberal and then look the women of one’s household in the face.