{"id":719,"date":"2017-06-08T13:41:51","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T13:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/?p=719"},"modified":"2017-06-08T13:41:51","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T13:41:51","slug":"equal-franchise-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/equal-franchise-act\/","title":{"rendered":"For the word &#8220;man&#8221; there shall be substituted the word &#8220;person&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is election day today here in the United Kingdom, with the attendent exhortations to vote.<\/p>\n<p>Among these exhortations was a tweet from the UK Parliamentary Archives:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Here\u2019s the 1928 <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/EqualSuffrageAct?src=hash\">#EqualSuffrageAct<\/a> which gave women electoral equality with men and meant that 15 million women were able to vote <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/GE2017?src=hash\">#GE2017<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/5BuAxx1sVA\">pic.twitter.com\/5BuAxx1sVA<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Parliament Archives (@UKParlArchives) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/UKParlArchives\/status\/872717460767723520\">June 8, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Which infuriated me. Firstly, there isn&#8217;t a link to the document, even though <a href=\"http:\/\/www.parliament.uk\/about\/living-heritage\/transformingsociety\/electionsvoting\/womenvote\/case-study-the-right-to-vote\/the-right-to-vote\/birmingham-and-the-equal-franchise\/1928-equal-franchise-act\/\">it is on their website<\/a>.\u00a0 Secondly, because the digitization on their website is, as I put it in an intemperate tweet, Badly digitised, low resolution, illegible, incomplete. Insulting.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Badly digitised, low resolution, illegible, incomplete.<br \/>\nInsulting.<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/legalhist?src=hash\">#legalhist<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/0GK5sJDI6j\">https:\/\/t.co\/0GK5sJDI6j<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 The Law (@statutesUK) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/statutesUK\/status\/872730651602059264\">June 8, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s expand on this. It is badly digitized, probably just a photograph rather than a proper scan. It&#8217;s a low resolution image, so when running it through an OCR reader produced far worse text than what one can expect from a twentieth century document. It&#8217;s not just software that can&#8217;t read it; it&#8217;s difficult for a human to read as well. And finally, it is incomplete, reproducing only the first three pages of text.<\/p>\n<p>And all this means it is insulting. It&#8217;s showing off a possession, not actually sharing or allowing others to read and understand it. This is made worse given the subject: a historic piece of legislation, that finally gave women the vote on the same terms as men, is being used as a boast, reducing the long struggle for this essential right to a scrap of property you can glimpse but not enjoy.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, it reduces democracy to one, electoral, dimension. Democracy is not just about voting. It is also about checks and balances, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. The blas\u00e9 maxim <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat\">Ignorance of the law is no excuse<\/a> has to be matched with a commitment that the law be easily available to all. That includes laws like this one, that although repealed have established fundamental principles that survive to this day.<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, I&#8217;ve rushed to the British Library to transcribe the act, and <a href=\"http:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/the-statutes\/twentieth-century\/1928-18-19-george-5-c-12-equal-franchise-act\/\">published the full text<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Note that I have not found this act in the commercial law archives <a href=\"https:\/\/home.heinonline.org\/\">Hein Online<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lexisnexis.co.uk\/en-uk\/home.page\">Lexis Nexis<\/a>. It is available via Justis, but behind in a paywall. On a happier note, hunting for this text has led me to Matthew William&#8217;s fantastic plain text archive of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewlippoldwilliams.com\/data-sets\/\">U.K. legislation, 1900-2015<\/a>. I will be writing more about this amazing resource when I&#8217;ve dug deeper into it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is election day today here in the United Kingdom, with the attendent exhortations to vote. Among these exhortations was a tweet from the UK Parliamentary Archives: Here\u2019s the 1928 #EqualSuffrageAct which gave women electoral equality with men and meant that 15 million women were able to vote #GE2017 pic.twitter.com\/5BuAxx1sVA \u2014 Parliament Archives (@UKParlArchives) June [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digitization","category-laws"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statutes.org.uk\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}