The interwar period and
conclusions
Overview
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Suffrage
Women and Legislation
Women and Voting
Work
Sexuality
Conclusion
Suffrage
• NUWSS founded in 1897 numbered about 50,000 followed a policy
of civil disobedience
• WSPU which started in 1903, with about 5,000 members used
militant tactics
• Government response included forcible feeding and the so-called
Cat & Mouse Act
• But women remained unenfranchised at the start of the war
• The Speakers Conference added the grant of the vote for women to
its recommendations.
• Women over thirty who were on local government registers or
wives of registered men and/or graduates of British universities
were enfranchised by the 1918 Representation of the People Act.
Interpretations
• The ‘gift’ thesis – that women received the vote in return
for their war effort has been discredited by historians.
• Only women over 30 were given the vote thus excluding
the vast majority of women who worked during the war.
• Martin Pugh wrote that the vote was won for women by
men rather than as a reward for war work or by the
campaigning of the suffragettes
• Recent feminist historians have demonstrated that the
NUWSS kept up the pressure during the war and it is likely
the government wanted to escape renewed suffrage
aggression
• Sandra Stanley Holton: ‘an appreciation of the suffrage
campaign as a site for gender contestation’
Legislation
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The enfranchisement of women had an immediate political effect. Millicent
Garrett Fawcett noted in The Women's Victory and After: ‘only two really
important Acts bearing especially upon the welfare and status of women had been
passed.. from 1907 to 1914’ But in the year following the Reform Act of 1918 ‘at
least seven important measures effecting large improvements in the status of
women have rapidly gone through all the stages in both Houses of Parliament’.
These included the Sex Disqualification Removal Act, 1919, which enabled women
to enter certain professions; the doubling, in 1918, of the sum fathers could be
obliged to pay toward the maintenance of an illegitimate child, from five to ten
shillings a week; the Midwives Amending Act and the Nurses Registration Act,
1919; the Maternity and Child Welfare Act, 1918, which improved health and
welfare facilities for mothers and children and the Industrial Courts Act, 1919,
which appointed women to these newly established courts of arbitration on pay
and working conditions.
Fawcett wrote: We did not, except as a symbol of free citizenship, value [the vote]
as a thing good in itself . . . but for the sake of equal laws, the enlarged
opportunities, the improved status of women which we knew it involved. We
worked for it . . . because . . . it would benefit not women only, but the whole
community . . . it was the cause of men, women and children.
Equality?
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At least twenty-three pieces of legislation were passed between 1918 and 1930 for
which women's groups lobbied because they believed that they would promote
gender equality. These included changes in marriage and family law in the
direction of equalization of the right to sue for divorce, equalization of
guardianship rights over children and greater equalization of property rights. There
were new welfare measures, such as the first state pensions for widowed mothers
and orphans, introduced in 1925,. In 1929 the permissible age of marriage for both
sexes was raised to sixteen.
Millicent Garret Fawcett resigned her leadership of the reformed NUWSS now
called the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship because of its change
of focus away from the franchise (which was still unequal) to a broader agenda.
She was replaced by Eleanor Rathbone.
Rathbone did not promote gender equality but an equal valuation of different
gender roles. Her major campaign was for sizable family allowances
Her campaigns lost popularity and the women’s movement fragmented in the
interwar period. The 478 original branches were reduced to 90 by 1929 and 48 by
1935.
Historians more recently have been celebrating the diversity of the interwar
feminist groups rather than emphasising ‘failure’
The vote
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The 1918 General Election was contested by 1623 candidates of whom 17 were
women. Few suffrage camapigners stood for election. Christabel Pankhurst was
the most successful, failing to win a seat as a Conservative by a mere 775 votes.
Only one woman was elected, Sinn Fein’s Constance Markiewicz. She refused to
take her seat in protest at British imperialism.
Viscountess Astor was the first woman to take up her parliamentary seat winning
Plymouth at a by-election in 1919 caused by her husbands accession to the
peerage. The first three women in the Commons all replaced their husbands.
15 Conservative seats were won by women from 1918-39; 4 Liberal; 16 Labour; 1
independent (Eleanor Rathbone) and 1 Sinn Fein. The presence of women did not
change the party political balance.
The bills they introduced were largely on social policy including the bastardy laws,
adoption, nursing home regulations, the Poor Law, expectant mothers and the
death sentence, hire purchase and alcohol licensing.
4 women had been appointed to cabinet positions by 1939: Margaret Bondfield
(Labour – as Minister for Labour); the duchess of Atholl (Conservative, Education);
Susan Lawrence (Labour, Health) and Florence Horsburgh (Conservative, Health)
Women MPs:
Constance
Markiewicz and
Nancy Astor
Women
Ministers:
Margaret
Bondfield and
Florence
Horsburgh
Party affiliations
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Women voters also made an impact on local government. In 1937 sixteen per cent
of London borough councillors were female and women made up five per cent of
the membership of other councils, with considerable local disparity.
Political scientists, have generally argued that women voters are predominantly
both conservative and Conservative.
Contemporary commentators in the inter-war years did not make this assumption.
Lord Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail) was convinced that the new young
women voters enfranchised in 1928 would vote socialist. The Labour party did
increase its poll in the election of 1929 (the number of voters increased by six
million over the previous election; Labour increased its vote by three million, the
Conservatives by only 600,000; the percentage turnout was unchanged)
The press also tended to treat ‘women voters’ as a single bloc whilst male voters
were differentiated by class, occupation.
Commentators expressed unease and uncertainty about women's voting
preferences and perceived women as politically powerful despite their small
numbers in parliament
Work
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There has been a more positive analysis of women’s economic status in the
interwar period – particularly that of young working-class girls due to young
women’s increasing economic importance as household breadwinners
Young women constituted over 45 per cent of the female workforce. Continuity
can be traced between their employment in the late nineteenth century and in the
early 1930s.
Personal service (of which domestic service constituted 70 per cent) was the
largest occupation of this group, accounting for 22 per cent of young women
workers in 1921. Textiles employed 20 per cent of this group in 1921, and enabled
young women in certain communities to earn higher wages
By 1931 10 per cent of young women workers were shop assistants, and 12.5 per
cent were clerks. Both occupations paid higher wages than domestic service, and
clerks could benefit from relatively low working hours.
Employment patterns differed by locality. In Northumberland, a reliance on mining
meant that just 43 per cent of girls were in the labour force in 1931, compared
with 78 per cent of boys.
In Blackburn 79 per cent of both girls and boys were in the labour force in 1931.
Leisure
• Changing employment patterns and working hours
facilitated the growth of leisure time.
• Leisure was viewed as a reward for paid work. Hours were
reduced after WWI and there was an extension of paid
holidays culminating in the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act.
• Commercial leisure was aimed at sixteen- to twenty-fouryear-olds: Dance halls targeted youthful consumers; by
1937 up to 90 per cent of young men and women went to
the cinema at least once a week; mass production of
clothing and cosmetics enabled young women to engage
with fashion; chain stores like Woolworths sold cheap
cosmetics, jewellery, and sweets; magazines for young
working-class women also flourished
Sexuality
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The Eugenics Society was founded in 1907 and its view was that women as
guardians of the future of the British ‘race’ should be both chaste and fruitful
some arguing that the employment of married women led to a decline in virility
and high infant mortality rates
The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 gave local authorities powers over pregnant
women who were homeless, destitute or ‘immoral’
There was an attempt in 1921 to criminalise lesbianism. The Obscene Publications
legislation was used to repress Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness written in
1928
the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 made adultery the sole grounds of divorce for
either spouse. Further grounds were added in 1937 including a wife’s right to
divorce her husband for rape.
Marie Stopes founded a birth control clinic but contraception was controversial
and its availability largely confined to middle and upper class women. Abortion
remained illegal although in 1929 legislation was passed making it legal to abort if
the mother’s life was in danger. The Abortion Law Reform Association was formed
in 1936 and a government committee was created to review the legislation in 1938
A new dawn?
Benefits
Need for further progress
Progress in public health
Women remained clustered in
traditionally female occupations
Decline in family sizes and higher
standards of living
Women’s pay levels remained far lower
than men
Greater access to education at primary,
secondary and tertiary level
Elite women remained largely excluded
from work and public sphere
New opportunities in employment
Vote limited to women over 30 (28 after
1928)
Legislative achievements such as the
Married Women’s Property Act, Divorce
Act etc
‘High’ politics still the preserve of men
The vote
Return to traditional campaigning issues
(eg emphasis on welfare and maternity
rather than increased employment or civil
rights)