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In 1903, the campaign for women\'s suffrage was intensified by the founding of the Women\'s Social and Political Union. The WSPU, associated particularly with Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, was far more militant than the National Union of Women\'s Suffrage Societies, led by Milicent Garrett Fawcett.WSPU members, known as \'suffragettes\', became increasingly violent in the years before the First World War, as successive governments failed to reform the voting laws. The harsh manner in which imprisoned suffragettes were treated - including forcible feeding of women on hunger strike - contributed to the growing public sympathy for the cause of women\'s suffrage (in tandem with imaginative - and legal - campaigning of the moderate NUWSS).The outbreak of war in 1914 led to a political truce in the suffrage movement but the participation of British women in the war effort - in factories and the armed services as well as in the home - was a major factor in the Government\'s decision to give women over the age of thirty the right to vote in 1918. This right was extended to women over 21 in 1928.
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