Published in the Glasgow Weekly Herald, 20 September 1884, p. 2.

Before 1832 only 5,000 Scottish men enjoyed voting privileges. After the passage of the First Reform Act, the number of voters jumped to 65,000 and included men in emerging middle-class professions. In 1868, the Second Reform Act extended voting rights to skilled workers, and the electorate swelled to 230,000 men. But in the late 1870s there was increasing agitation for universal male suffrage. On 6 September 1884 a great demonstration was organized in Glasgow, and 64,000 working-class men and rural householders marched through the streets to Glasgow Green, where another 200,000 citizens had gathered to cheer them. The tide of protest was strong, and a Third Reform Act doubled the number of voters to 560,000. By the end of 1884, forty percent of all men in Scotland were eligible to vote. But women were excluded from the rolls. In her poem “On the Franchise Demonstration of the 6th Inst,” Bernstein addresses her female readers and chastises them for their passivity: “Women of Glasgow, / What do you mean? / Why were you idle / All through such a scene?” A significant number of women had joined the workforce after 1870, and Bernstein urges them to follow the example of the men who had demonstrated. Gordon notes that working-class women had supported the Chartist Movement at the start of the nineteenth century, but had done so chiefly to win their suffrage. Now, with many adult women working at unorganized textile manufacture and domestic labor, it was more difficult for them to campaign on matters of concern to them, even on an issue like the franchise. Nevertheless, Bernstein trumpets: “Prove your right to the vote / By the thousands who crave it; / And with steady persistence— / To ask is to have it.” The appearance of this poem in the Glasgow Weekly Herald signals a shift also in the paper’s position on women’s suffrage and echoes the tenor of the daily Glasgow Herald, which had begun to quote opinions “to reassure those who imagined the movement to be out of harmony with the religious aspect of women’s work and duty” (Leneman 36).