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Hello, on the 4th of June, 1930, in the Epsom Derby was underway. King George V was watching his horse Anma, written by Herbert Jones.

Also watching was a young woman called Emily Davison.

As the horse is thundered towards the finish, Emily Davison stepped through the barrier and threw herself in front of the King's horse.

She died of her injuries four days later.

Emily Davison's a suffragette, a campaigner for the woman's right to vote, and her death is perhaps the most powerful image of that entire movement.

But is it fair to distill the movement into this one image of desperate militancy?

How was Universal Suffrage for Women actually achieved?

And what was the nature of the opposition to granting women equal rights with men?

Widmitted Discuss Suffragesome, a Christic Carmen, Professor of History at the University of Lincoln,

June Purvis, Professor of Women's and Gender History at the University of Portsmouth,

and Julia Bush, Senior Lecture in History at the University of North Hampton.

Christic Carmen is difficult nowhere to begin, but let's begin in June 1866 with a petition

handed into the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill. What did the petition ask Parliament to do?

The petition was asking Parliament to give women the vote on the same grounds that men were getting the vote.

We have to look at it, I think, in a context of parliamentary reform.

Britain had moved reasonably rapidly from a system with a very small contained elite government

towards a far more participatory form of politics. So in 1832 there was a reform act

which enfranchised far larger numbers of men and returned more MPs to Parliament.

It was clear that there was going to be another reform act, another reform act was very,

very much on the cards, and one of the things that women were saying at the time was,

...