How Dadabhai Naoroji’s support for women’s rights helped him get elected to the British Parliament

Naoroji’s association with Josephine Butler appears to have facilitated further involvement with women’s rights activities in Britain. By the 1890s, for example, he was serving as a vice president of two major feminist associations, the Women’s Progressive Society, a socialist organisation that targeted parliamentary candidates opposed to women’s suffrage, and the International Women’s Union, which had members in the United States and Europe as well as in India, Persia, Brazil, and Japan.

Naoroji also had a long-standing association with the Women’s Franchise League, which was led by some of the most prominent suffragists of the late Victorian era, including Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Ursula Bright. He was a member of the league’s council and was regularly sought by Elmy and Bright to speak in public.

In 1890, for example, he delivered a lecture on the condition of Indian women at a major conference organised by the league, the International Conference on the Position of Women in All Countries, held at Westminster Town Hall. A draft programme for this conference lists Naoroji, remarkably, alongside Rukhmabai, the Indian child bride who had kicked up a legal storm in Bombay after refusing to cohabit with her husband, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the...

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