n women who were fighting for the right to vote. As more women took up seats in parliament, Astor was able to gain more allies. The Indian suffragist Radhabai Subbarayan wrote to Astor in August 1932, asking her to bring all the female MPs in parliament together to support Indian women. As Subbarayan put it: ‘We expect you, as women, to help us’.
Eleanor Rathbone, the Independent MP for Combined English Universities from 1929 to 1945, was also an active campaigner on behalf of Indian women. In 1933, Rathbone set up a Committee for Indian Women’s Franchise, and took a leading role in pushing through reforms to the franchise in the subsequent 1935 Government of India Act.
Led by Astor, Conservative female MPs were keen to show that Conservatives could take the lead on this issue. As Astor put it in March 1934, ‘I was extremely anxious that all the pressure with regard to Indian women should not come from the Liberal and Labour women, and for this reason I took fairly active steps in order that the Conservative women might be in a position to express some sort of an opinion’.
Mary Pickford, Conservative MP for Hammersmith North from 1931 to 1934, took up a place on an Indian Franchise Committee that toured India in 1932, looking for ways to increase the number of men and women who could vote. Irene Ward, Conservative MP for Wallsend 1931 to 1945 (and then Tynemouth 1950-1974), was also known for her interest in this issue. She put forward two amendments to the 1935 Government of India Act to increase the number of Indian women who could vote. Aware that MPs needed grassroots support for these amendments, Ward met with and lobbied northern Conservative groups to ensure there was wide-scale party support for this issue. Meanwhile, Astor urged Ida Copeland (MP for Stoke from 1931 to 1935) to pass resolutions at Conservative area councils in the East and West Midlands in support of Indian women. Thelma Cazalet also supported her colleagues on this issue.
Nancy Astor wrote to Samuel Hoare, the Secretary of State for India, in July 1935 on this matter. ‘I can’t sit down quietly under a scheme which is going to enfranchise only one woman to sixteen men at the best.’
Astor went on: ‘We must have a proportion of one to five by some means or other. Unless that is secured you will have a suffragette agitation in India in a very short time- and you will deserve it. Surely you know that the Indian women can make themselves troublesome? If they are left out of the new constitution instead of getting their help you will get their hostility, and of course all the more active of them will become wreckers.’
She closed with: ‘You are as good a feminist as I am, I really believe. Can you sleep easy in your bed and think of India governed only by Indian men?’
As a result of this lobbying, the 1935 Government of India Act enfranchised the wives and widows of existing male voters, and introduced a literacy qualification as an alternative means to qualify women to vote.
It was through the work of this first generation of British female MPs, who refused to be insular in their feminism or their politics, who engaged and conversed with Indian campaigners both in Britain and India, that they were able to enlarge the franchise for Indian women. Indian women had hoped for more, and had engaged in their own active campaigns for full universal adult suffrage. They were often critical of the timidity of British reformers who didn’t push harder to enfranchise all women. They would have to wait until 1949 to achieve this aim.
Dr Sumita Mukherjee, University of Bristol
 University of Reading Special Collections, Astor Collection, MS 1416/1/1/1012, Subbarayan to Astor, 26 August 1932.
 University of Reading Special Collections, Astor Collection, MS1416/1/1/1256, Astor to Hoare, 1 March 1934.
 University of Reading Special Collections, Astor Collection, MS1416/1/1/1013, Astor to Hoare, 25 July 1935.