Women's Tax Resistance League

Women's Tax Resistance League

The Women’s Tax Resistance League (1909–1918) was a direct action group associated with the Women's Freedom League that used tax resistance to protest the disenfranchisement of women during the British women’s suffrage movement.

Dora Montefiore proposed the formation of the league in 1897, and it was formally established on 22 October 1909. The league’s activities peaked in the years before World War I but were largely deflated in 1914 by the onset of that war, when the league membership passed a resolution to temporarily suspend their tax resistance.

Members saw themselves in a tradition of British tax resistance that included John Hampden. According to one source: “Tax resistance proved to be the longest-lived form of militancy, and the most difficult to prosecute. More than 220 women, mostly middle-class, participated in tax resistance between 1906 and 1918, some continuing to resist through the First World War, despite a general suspension of militancy.”

Read more about Women's Tax Resistance League:  Program, Action, Membership, Women's Tax Resistance in The United States

Famous quotes containing the words women, tax, resistance and/or league:

    “This ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed anxious to get across the Merrimack River at this particular point, waiting to get set over,—children with their two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke lose and constable with warrant, travelers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women to whom the Merrimack River was a bar.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.”
    —Edmund Burke (1729–1797)

    “Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short- lived. It may be only momentary but it takes place. That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains.”
    —bell hooks (b. c. 1955)

    “Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. You toodle along, thinking that all gay men wear leather after dark and should never, ever be permitted around a Little League field. And then one day your best friend from college, the one your kids adore, comes out to you.”
    —Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)