Our recent History of Parliament / University of East Anglia conference on ‘Politics before Democracy’ featured over 30 papers on topics ranging across the 18th and 19th centuries. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting some summaries as part of a guest blog series. To start us off, Professor Sarah Richardson explores how widows, many of whom could vote in local elections, assumed a central place in some of the earlier debates about giving women the parliamentary vote.
According to the Earl of Salisbury in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III, among the heinous crimes that should not be pardoned, even if enacted under solemn oath, were rape, murder, robbery and wringing ‘the widow from her customed right’. The widow’s ‘customed right’ was of course her property or dower, and with property ownership came the right to vote, or did it? Women’s suffrage campaigners in the 19
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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