The women's suffrage movement campaigned, from the mid-nineteenth century, to win British women the right to vote in parliamentary elections, and did so across generations of activists who disagreed sharply among themselves about method even while sharing the same goal.
The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, founded in 1897 under Millicent Fawcett, pursued the vote through peaceful, legal campaigning: petitions, lobbying and public argument. Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union, founded in 1903, broke from that approach and adopted militant tactics, including window-smashing, arson and hunger strikes by imprisoned members, who were sometimes forcibly fed; the newspapers' word for these militants, "suffragette", stuck to the whole movement in public memory even though most suffrage campaigners were never militants at all.
Women's extensive contribution to the war effort during the First World War is widely credited with shifting the political calculation that had resisted suffrage for decades. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to women over thirty who met a property qualification, a partial victory completed a decade later by the Equal Franchise Act of 1928, which extended the vote to all women over twenty-one on exactly the same terms already held by men.