Bateman’s in east Sussex was home to Joseph Rudyard Kipling, the much-loved author of the Jungle Book and Just So Stories. Kipling was fiercely anti-suffrage and held extremely misogynist views on the suffragettes themselves.
The female of the species
Quick to join a committee to oppose women’s suffrage, his chauvinist poem ‘The Female of the Species’ was parodied by suffragettes. His letters reveal the kind of sexual slurs with which the suffragettes had to deal. In 1911, he wrote that suffragettes were desperate to get close to men and might subsequently 'agitate for admission into the church and so on – anything that mentally or physically, brings ‘em into contact, even dilutedly, with the male’.
He believed that ‘from the lowest to the highest, the driving force of the suffrage agitation comes (a) from the surplus who, consciously or unconsciously want a man and don’t care a curse for the politics (b) from the women without power to hold or charm the man they’ve got’.
Women’s contribution to the war effort failed to change his views on the vote.
Britain’s leading female anti-suffragist: Margaret (Leigh) Child-Villiers, Countess of Jersey
Osterley Park, London
Osterley Park was home to Margaret (Leigh) Child-Villiers, Countess of Jersey, a Tory political hostess and philanthropist who became Britain’s leading female anti-suffragist. She chaired the first meeting of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League and was co-president of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage.
Marching against suffrage
On 21 June 1910, she led an anti-suffrage deputation to the Prime Minister on the same day as a pro-suffrage demonstration led by Laura McLaren.