a, 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.