How difference and diversity of opinion within the women’s militant suffrage movement led to the formation of the Women’s Freedom League, 1903-1914

The women’s suffrage movement was by no means a united campaign. As the event is quite well known, many may assume that the 1907 split in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) that created the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) was one of the only large disagreements that the militant suffragette movement ever had to handle; this could not be further from the truth. Leading up to the 1907 split, there were numerous disagreements within both the women’s movement, and the WSPU, over which approaches and tactics should be adopted, occurrences that arguably came to fruition due to the previous examples set by women in the nineteenth-century movement.