PETER KELLNER
I am rather glad that my mother never knew the story I am about to tell. She was proud to be the daughter of a suffragette— and to be born on 14th December 1918, the very day of the first general election after parliament gave women the right to vote, a date that you will hear a lot about as the centenary approaches. But in fact, the 1918 general election was the second, not the first, at which women voted. Some—dozens certainly, hundreds possibly—cast their votes in another, almost precisely half a century earlier, in November 1868.
Our story involves a fatal illness, a sharp-eyed Liberal activist, an accidental heroine and a sexist judge. It begins with a clerical error by an unknown official in Manchester a year earlier. He noted that the resident of 25 Ludlow Street, in its Chorlton- upon Medlock district, paid enough rent to meet the strict property qualification that then applied to join the electorate. He added the tenant to the local electoral register, as number 12326, failing to spot that “Lily Maxwell” was a woman.