Week 9
‘There’s always been a women’s movement in Britain’?
Assessing decline, impact and social change 1918-1945
Questions to ponder whilst you read…
 To what extent did the feminist movement change the lives of working-class
women in the first half of the twentieth-century?
 Did a ‘feminist identity’ still have political purchase among women in the
inter-war years?
 Was feminism still a ‘mass movement’ after 1918?
 How might historians assess the impact of feminism on social change?
Documents
‘Six Point Group. Extension of the franchise to women in the colonies’ (1939) from
the Women in the National Archives original documents database. [Access via
Warwick Library: Databases – History]
‘The Bastardy Bill’ (1920) MRC MSS.243.56 [available digitally at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/modules/docs/feminism]
Workers’ Birth Control Group, ‘To Our Men Comrades’ (1928) MRC
MSS.292/824/1 [available digitally at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/modules/docs/feminism]
V. Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, in Three Guineas (1926)
D. L. Sayers, Gaudy Night [a detective novel]
Party Political Pamphlets aimed at Women Voters [available digitally at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/modules/docs/feminism]
‘Report of a Conference of the Abortion Law Reform Association’ (1936) [available
digitally at
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/studying/modules/docs/feminism]
Histories
B. Caine, English Feminism 1780-1980 (1987) [chapter on the inter-war citizen]
L. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (2000)
D. Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement this Century (1983) [the
seminal work]
J. Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914-1928 (1989)
J. Martin, ‘Beyond Suffrage: Feminism, Education and the Politics of Class in the
Inter-War Years’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 29:4 (2008), 411-23
L. Hall, ‘"Not a domestic utensil but a woman and a citizen": Stella Browne on
Women, Health and Society’, Clio Medica: The Wellcome Institute Series in the
History of Medicine,1 Aug (2000) 60:1, 275-302