History at key stage 3    (Year 8/9)

• Give pupils accounts of three women who struggled against inequality or injustice. Choose three contrasting women from different parts of the period, eg Harriet Taylor, Josephine Butler and Emmeline Pankhurst.
• Provide pupils with a grid for analysing the three women's struggles under three headings:
  • What were they struggling for?
  • What methods did they use in their struggle?
  • Why do we not have to struggle for this today?
• Introduce the 'big question' for the whole unit Why did it take so much longer for British women to get the vote? Tell pupils that women did not get the vote until 1918-28. Carry out mini-voting activity about a classroom matter, but exclude one section of the group for an arbitrary reason, in order to emphasise the impact of exclusion from franchise.
• Begin to explain and emphasise the teaching point, by introducing pupils to nineteenth-century views on public and private spheres of activity.
• Use a large Venn diagram and give pupils a list of activities to position in the circles which should be labelled public sphere and private sphere, eg making laws, declaring war, looking after children, etc.
• Talk about which activities pupils have put in each sphere and tell pupils that Victorians regarded the private sphere as being the proper business of women and the public sphere that of men. Refer to the 'Angel in the House' model.
• Brainstorm why and how this attitude inhibited women's progress toward national suffrage.

• Help pupils to understand two fundamental principles which tend to affect current western democratic societies' beliefs about voting: (i) responsibility and (ii) freedom. Ask them Why should all 18-year-olds have the vote? Ask them to think of people who do not have the vote. Ask them to think back to earlier units where they encountered institutions of 'slavery' or 'serfdom'. Exactly why were these people not considered eligible to vote?
• Give pupils lists of facts or fact cards about who could and could not vote in 1815. Discuss principles, eg property owning, legal freedom, beliefs about responsibility, which underpinned each. Remind them about continuity from earlier periods they have studied.
• Using a parallel timeline activity, remind pupils of (or introduce pupils to) what was happening in France.
• Check pupils' understanding by interviewing individual pupils posing as characters from the period who must explain to their puzzled interviewer why it is a shocking idea that women and/or many men other than landed gentry should vote.

• Tell pupils that the period 1815-28 was a period of great tensions - of repressions, riots and risings. Remind them of the recency of the French Revolution, of corresponding societies, the returning soldiers and the government's fear of revolution in Great Britain.
• In pairs or groups, pupils research one of: Spa Fields Riot 1816, Derbyshire Rising 1817, the Blanketeers, Peterloo Massacre 1819, the Cato Street Conspiracy 1820.
• Each group reports findings to the class as if they were advising the government. Initiate a whole-class discussion on which event posed the greatest threat to the government. Build up a timeline of revolt and repression.
• Tell pupils the story of the events 1828-32 that led to the 1832 Reform Act. Ask pupils to consider the apparent strangeness of people like William IV and Earl Grey supporting parliamentary reform at that time.
• Outline the main changes made by the Reform Act. What has changed? How does this reflect changes happening in Britain? What about women?
• Ask pupils to speculate about what radicals and the working class were likely to do next, given their disappointment with the 1832 Act. Remind them, first, of constraints on action.
• Tell pupils that the Chartists were one group of largely working-class people agitating for change. Give pupils a summary of the Six Points of the People's Charter. Ask pupils to annotate this with reasons why the governing classes were unlikely to agree with these.
• Use this activity to monitor and review pupils' understanding of the existing government system.
• Provide pupils with a series of information cards about women and the Chartist Movement 1838-48. Each card should focus on a specific activity, development or individual.
• Ask pupils to use their knowledge of Victorian Britain to discuss and explain why the Chartists, who made such radical demands, had these attitudes to women.

• Give pupils lists of possible factors why the 1867 and 1884 acts were passed. Include some obviously bogus reasons and some less obviously bogus. Ask pupils to use their period knowledge to select those reasons which they think are sensible.
• Introduce pupils to simple accounts of 1867 and 1884, either through stories or sources, and ask them to check whether they were right. Ask pupils to summarise the main changes to the franchise, emphasising how they affected the proportion of men who could now vote.
• Assess pupils' understanding by asking them to produce simple causation diagrams to explain why either or both of these Acts were passed.

• Return to the 'Angel in the House' model of Victorian women and to the division of interest into public and private spheres.
• Pupils brainstorm what they think women could and could not do in the mid-nineteenth century.
• Provide pupils with a number of partially completed 'factcards' relating to legislation affecting women's steps on the way to equality with men. Pupils, in groups, research and complete the factcards to find out what happened to bring about changes in the status and independence of women.
• Pupils use the information they have researched to speculate about the range of attitudes in men and women these changes may have brought about. Give pupils examples of specific attitudes of actual men and women. Would all women have felt the same? All men?
• Final discussion on whether the 'Angel in the House' model still held good by, say, the end of Victoria's reign in 1901.

• Explain to pupils that, meanwhile, alongside all these events, many different people were arguing for and against votes for women. Illustrate with examples of individuals, eg John Stuart Mill, Mrs Humphry Ward, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, David Lloyd George, Sylvia Pankhurst, Millicent Fawcett, Annie Kenny, Emily Davison. Give pupils sample arguments and ask them to match them to individuals involved.
• Check pupils' understanding of this work by asking them to suggest social and political types who would not have argued or campaigned for votes for women.
• Pupils investigate suffragist and suffragette campaigns. Use focused, limited research in which pupils must classify different methods used and the reasons why these methods were used. More able pupils use timelines and timeline commentaries to indicate when and why methods changed, and what the differences were between the two groups.
• Display timelines and use these to recap, to reinforce and to remind pupils of the overarching question: Why did it take so long for British women to get the vote?

• Using video clips, visual sources, suitable websites or overhead transparencies of visual sources, give pupils an overview of women's war work.
• Ask pupils to annotate a poster encouraging women to take part in the war effort, with reference to (i) the propaganda devices used; (ii) the values and attitudes revealed by the poster.
• Ask pupils to think back to work at the start of the enquiry on 'freedom' and 'responsibility'. Ask pupils to speculate about how established attitudes to women might now change.
• Direct pupils to sources of information on legislation in 1918 and 1928. Ask them to (i) note how it affected women and men; (ii) list the reasons why this happened when it did.

• Provide a structure for an essay (answering the above question) which will require pupils to go back over all foregoing work and select relevant items. Build the essay around four main issues:
  • nineteenth-century views on voting
  • nineteenth-century views about women
  • how nineteenth-century views on voting changed
  • how nineteenth-century views about women changed
• Afterwards, devise paired activity in which pupils write short promotional reviews on each other's essays.