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What Difference Did The Vote Make - Women in Public and Private Life in Britain Since 1918
What Difference Did The Vote Make - Women in Public and Private Life in Britain Since 1918
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Blackwell
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2003
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Britain since 1918
Abstract
This article looks at what has and has not changed in women’s lives since they
gained the vote. Women are still more prone to poverty than men, especially
single mothers and older women, a fact which would have disappointed the
suffragists, many of whom saw elimination of poverty as a priority and played a
major role in bringing the Welfare State into being. Suffragists did not expect
gender equality to follow quickly after getting the vote. They expected – and
got – a long, hard struggle. The women’s movement was stronger in the
nineteen-twenties and thirties than it had ever been and led to an impressive
number of legislative changes. Women’s activism was more muted after the
Second World War, but revived in the nineteen-fifties even before the great
wave of feminism after 1968. The spate of legislation which resulted was com-
parable with that of the nineteen-twenties.
* This article is based upon the inaugural lecture given by Professor Pat Thane on 22 May
2002, as Professor of Contemporary British History at the Institute of Historical Research,
University of London.
© Institute of Historical Research 2003. Historical Research, vol. 76, no. 192 (May 2003)
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 269
Clearly there have been changes. There are more women now in public
office and in influential posts in the private sector than fifty or even ten
years ago. Change has been slow and insufficient, but it has been real.
However, it has not been change in a positive direction for all women.
Whereas more women in Britain now than in 1918 enjoy independence
and influence, many others are poor and excluded. Two of the groups in
greatest poverty now are single mothers and single or widowed women
in their late seventies and older. One hundred years ago two of the
groups in greatest poverty were – single mothers and single older women.
The proportion of mothers of young children who were single and alone
was almost as great then as now, although the cause was different: widow-
hood rather than divorce and separation.1 Although there were fewer
older people in the population, there were many more than is often
thought, about 7.5 per cent of the British population were aged over sixty
in 1901.2 The poverty of older women was a major reason why state
pensions were first introduced in Britain in 1908.3 The relative poverty
of older women – one of the most powerless groups in society – has
remained dismally stable over the past century and their absolute numbers
are now much greater.4
The numbers of single mothers have fluctuated over time. In a period
of the mid twentieth century – from the nineteen-thirties to the early
nineteen-sixties – they were less prominent in the poverty statistics than
before or after because they represented a relatively smaller proportion
of all mothers. The fall in adult male death rates, combined with low
1
M. Anderson, ‘The social implications of demographic change’, in The Cambridge Social
History of Britain, 1750–1950 , ii: People and their Environment , ed. F. M. L. Thompson
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1– 70, at pp. 50 –1.
2
See P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experience, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000),
p. 478.
3
Thane, Old Age, pp. 216 –35.
4
Thane, Old Age, pp. 216–35; Social Security and Social Change: New Challenges to the Beveridge
Model, ed. S. Baldwin and J. Falkingham (New York and London, 1994), pp. 197ff.
divorce rates, made the mid twentieth century the golden age of the long,
stable marriage, which in most other periods was relatively rare. It was
probably the only time in history when those who married in their
twenties, as most people did, could be almost certain that the marriage
would last forty years or more.
Poorer women also gained at this time from the post-war welfare state.
For all its imperfections, there can be no doubt that poorer women in
particular gained enormously in standards of health and personal security
from the introduction of the National Health Service and other new or
improved benefits and services. Nor can it be doubted that they were
especially vulnerable to the erosion of social welfare provision in the
nineteen-eighties, including the decline in the real value of state old age
pensions. Whatever has changed for women since 1918, it has not
included the removal of severe poverty and limitations from the lives of
many of them. Poverty has not, of course, been eliminated among men,
but, historically (through all the centuries that we can trace it), poverty
has afflicted more women than men and that has not changed.5 We
should bear this in mind when considering other, more hopeful aspects
of women’s lives.
This continuing poverty among women would have been a severe
disappointment to many suffragists. Although many of them came from
privileged social backgrounds, a key reason why many of them wanted
the vote was, at least in the first instance, to improve the living condi-
tions of the mass of women and children. Many women were drawn into
the campaign for the vote through their philanthropic work and their
resulting day-to-day experience of misery. They came to recognize that
philanthropy alone could not achieve improvements fast enough. 6 They
believed that a male dominated state that had failed for so long to
improve social conditions would not bring about change either, so it was
necessary for women to gain the vote and a role in formal politics.
This was not the only, or even the main, reason why women cam-
paigned for the vote. The women’s movement before the First World
War, like that of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies, was an amalgam
of individuals and groups with a variety of motives and objectives.
Women who prioritized welfare did not necessarily believe that this was
the only interest women should have in politics, but, rather, that the need
was so urgent that it should take priority in the short run. After getting
the vote, many women campaigned vigorously at local and national level
for improved health care, housing, education and much else. After thirty
5
See, among others, R. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge,
1994); M. Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early
Modern England (1998); P. Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian
England’, History Workshop Jour., vi (1978), 29 –51.
6
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in 19th Century England (Oxford, 1980).
7
P. Thane, The Foundations of the Welfare State (2nd edn., 1996); Maternity and Gender Policies:
Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s, ed. G. Bock and P. Thane (1991).
8
E.g., H. L. Smith, ‘British feminism in the 1920s’, in British Feminism in the 20th Century,
ed. H. L. Smith (Aldershot, 1990), p. 47.
9
P. Thane, ‘What difference did the vote make?’, in Women, Privilege and Power: British
Politics 1750 to the Present, ed. A. Vickery (Stanford, Calif., and Cambridge, 2001), pp. 253–88.
10
L. Shepherd-Robinson and J. Lovenduski, Women and Candidate Selection in British Political
Parties (Fawcett Soc., 2002).
11
M. Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: the Women’s Institute as a Social Movement (1997).
12
See C. Beaumont, ‘The Women’s Movement, politics and citizenship, 1918–50’, in
Women in 20th-Century Britain, ed. I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2001), pp. 262– 77; C. Beau-
mont, ‘Women and citizenship: a study of non-feminist women’s societies and the women’s
movement in England, 1928–50’ (unpublished University of Warwick Ph.D. thesis, 1996).
13
M. G. Fawcett, The Women’s Victory – and After : Personal Reminiscences, 1911–18 (1920), p. 165.
14
Fawcett, p. 165.
15
J. Carrier, The Campaign for the Employment of Women as Police Officers (Aldershot, 1988).
16
Fawcett, p. 165.
17
Thane, ‘What difference did the vote make?’.
18
L. Fisher, Twenty-One Years and After, 1918 –46 (National Council for the Unmarried
Mother and her Child, 2nd edn., 1946). D. Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, i: Pioneering and Reform,
1869–1929 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 278.
19
There is nothing for the post-First World War period to compare with P. Hollis’s study
of women in local government before 1914, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government,
1865–1914 (Oxford, 1987).
20
P. Thane, ‘Visions of gender in the making of the British welfare state: the case of women
in the British Labour party and social policy, 1904–45’, in Thane and Bock, Maternity, pp. 93–
118; P. Thane, ‘Women in the British Labour party and the construction of state welfare, 1906 –
39’, in S. Koven and S. Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of
Welfare States (1993), pp. 343– 77; E. Peretz, ‘Maternal and child welfare in England and Wales
between the wars: a comparative regional study’ (unpublished University of Middlesex Ph.D.
thesis, 1992); S. Davies, Liverpool Labour: Social and Political Influences on the Development of the
Labour Party in Liverpool, 1900 –39 (Keele, 1996); M. Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class
Politics: the Labour Movement in Preston, 1880 –1940 (Cambridge, 1987).
21
B. Caine, English Feminism, 1780 –1980 (Oxford, 1997); Smith, ‘British feminism’, p. 47.
22
P. Thane ‘The women of the British Labour party and feminism, 1906 –45’, in Smith,
British Feminism, pp. 124–43.
woman – Betty Boothroyd, the first ever woman to hold the position. I
am not going on to say that the election of large numbers of women as
Labour M.P.s in 1997 and 2001 has made no difference because I do not
believe it to be true. The denigration and stereotyping of female M.P.s
at all times, including since 1997, is a shameful indicator of the extent and
survival of institutionalized sexism in contemporary British culture.
agenda which located women only in the home.31 At the same time, large
women’s organizations like the Townswomen’s Guilds (formed by the
feminist N.U.S.E.C. in 1929 as an urban analogue to the Women’s Insti-
tutes and which had 250,000 members in the nineteen-fifties) were not
conforming to their subsequent stereotype and focusing upon domestic-
ity. They were giving practical encouragement to the increasing numbers
of married women who were combining family and paid work.32 Also,
the Fawcett Society, a survivor from the suffrage years, kept up pres-
sure for equal opportunities. From the early nineteen-sixties women in
the Labour party and the trade unions were increasingly campaigning for
equal pay.33 The campaigns of the nineteen-fifties seem often to have
involved older rather than younger women and, like much in British
society in the nineteen-fifties, were inheritors of the culture of the
nineteen-thirties, but they are poorly understood because until now there
has been so little historical analysis of the social and cultural history of
the nineteen-fifties and so much polemical stereotyping of the decade as
dull, static and uniformly conservative.
Women’s campaigns had some notable achievements before the emer-
gence of the large-scale ‘second wave’ women’s movement from 1968.
Abortion was legalized in 1967 following a well-organized campaign by
the women of the Abortion Law Reform Association, with crucial
support from male M.P.s, notably David Steel.34 From the mid nineteen-
sixties to the mid seventies there was a surge of legislation on gender-
related issues comparable with that of the nineteen-twenties. The reasons
for this are not wholly unconnected with the return of Labour govern-
ments in 1964, 1966 and 1974, although this is not the whole explanation.
The remarkable run of liberal legislation of the late nineteen-sixties
(including the legalization of abortion and of male homosexual relation-
ships in certain circumstances, abolition of capital punishment, divorce
law reform in 1969, free birth control in 1967 and the Equal Pay Act of
1970) has received less attention than other activities of these govern-
ments. Also, in 1970 the Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act gave
women an increased share of matrimonial property by recognizing the
wife’s non-financial contribution to the partnership. In 1973 (under a
Conservative government) mothers at last gained equal legal rights with
fathers in decisions over a child’s upbringing. In 1975 the Equal Oppor-
31
I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the gender gap: the Conservative party and the
women’s vote, 1945–64’, in The Conservatives and British Society, 1880 –1990, ed. M. Francis and
I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Cardiff, 1996).
32
D.Phil. research in progress by Joyce Freeguard, University of Sussex.
33
P. Thane, ‘Towards equal opportunities? Women in Britain since 1945’, in Britain since
1945, ed. T. Gourvish and A. O’Day (1991), pp. 204–5. E. Meehan, ‘British feminism from the
1960s to the 1980s’, in Smith, British Feminism, pp. 189 –204.
34
The Abortion Act 1967, ed. M. D. Kandiah and G. Staerck (Institute of Contemporary
British History Witness Seminar, 2002).
While considering women’s activism over time we need to ask how much
it has been informed by feminism. The Fawcett Society has recently been
exercised about signs that younger women reject the word feminism
and the Society fears that this means that they are unaware of the extent
of continuing gender inequality.36 Many younger women probably do
underestimate the extent of continuing gender inequality, since they have
grown up in a world influenced by the campaigns I have been describing.
They are less likely than earlier generations to experience inequality at home,
in school and at university and are unprepared for it in later life. Naomi
Wolf ’s recent howl of anguish on discovering that she is not treated as
respectfully as a mother as she was as a smart young media person is only
a very public and articulate expression of a wider experience. 37
The relation of many women to the term feminism is complicated and
rejection of the term even by activist women is nothing new. The term
has probably been endorsed enthusiastically only by a minority of women,
even during times when there have been active, visible women’s move-
ments. Throughout the past century many women have been willing to
commit themselves to equal pay, equal work opportunities and other
aspects of gender equality while refusing to call themselves feminists,
because to them feminism means aggression, confrontation and an hostil-
ity to men which they do not share. There have been multiple tensions
between feminism and women’s movements. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, as Lucy Delap has shown, some radical women who
called themselves feminists were uneasy about the suffrage movement,
and especially about what they saw as the authoritarianism of the militant
suffragettes.38 One of them pointed out in 1911, ‘we recognise . . . that
[feminism] is a word that carries a good deal of odium; but it has so
established itself that we feel there is nothing for us to do but to employ
35
E. G. Setch, ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, 1969 – 79: organization,
creativity and debate’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 2001).
36
L. Pattison, ‘The “F” word: young women and feminism’, Towards Equality (The Maga-
zine of the Fawcett Soc.) Sept. 2001, pp. 12–13.
37
N. Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (New
York and London, 2001).
38
L. M. Delap, ‘“Philosophical vacuity and political ineptitude”: The Freewoman’s critique
of the suffrage movement’, Women’s History Rev. (2002); L. M. Delap, ‘The Freewoman, peri-
odical culture and the ideas of Edwardian feminism’ (unpublished University of Cambridge
Ph.D. thesis, 2002).
and family patterns contributed to a further fall in the birth rate, since if
women start their families later they tend to have fewer children.
The Pill again shifted the way in which young women growing up
could imagine their future lives. We can see the outcome in the careers
of women who came to maturity from the later nineteen-seventies. They
have been slower than their mothers to settle down in stable partnerships
and to have children, and birth rates have fallen to just a little below those
of the early nineteen-thirties. Now, as in the thirties, this trend is inter-
national, so we should be wary of looking exclusively for local causes.
The declining birth-rate causes concern to some now, as it did in the mid
twentieth century, but if history has a message in this connection it is that
no effective means has been found anywhere to persuade women to have
more children when they do not want to and have learned how to avoid
childbirth.46
The fall in the birth rate has coincided with the opening of a wider range
of careers to women, although we should be wary of assuming direct cause
and effect: the fall in the birth rate in Britain cuts across social classes, and
career opportunities for women are still limited, most of all in the lowest
social classes. This leads on to the discussion of women and paid employ-
ment. The most rigid barriers against female employment are in the
skilled trades. It is still not easy for a woman to become an investment
banker or a director of one of the top F.T.S.E. 100 companies, but it is
a whole lot easier than becoming a film technician, a central heating
engineer or a train driver, although there is no physical or intellectual
reason why they should not and there are serious shortages in many such
occupations. Why are women not being trained in these flexible, inde-
pendent trades – such as plumbing or decorating – which can be highly
adaptable to family needs and are much better paid than the jobs most
available to most women? The exclusion of women from skilled trades
has been much less studied than inequalities of access to ‘top jobs’ in
management and the professions, although it was noted as a problem even
in the nineteen-sixties. The [Donovan] Royal Commission on Trade
Unions and Employers’ Associations of 1968 – no feminist tract – stated:
Lack of skilled labour has constantly applied a brake to our economic expansion
since the war and yet the capacity of women to do skilled work has been
neglected . . . women provide the only substantial new source from which extra
labour can be drawn . . . prejudice against women is manifest at all levels of
management, as well as on the shop floor.47
46
P. Thane, ‘The debate on the declining birth-rate in Britain: the “menace” of an ageing
population, 1920s–50s’, Continuity and Change, v (1990), 283– 305.
47
Rept. of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, 1965–8 [Cmnd.
3623], pp. 90–3, H.C. (1968), xxxvii. 731.
pressure on women and men. It became harder, not easier, for men and
women to combine parenting and a paid career. A major, unforeseen,
change in the past two decades has been the changing shape of the adult
work/life cycle. Intense working has become increasingly concentrated
among workers in their twenties, thirties and forties, the peak parenting
years, whilst increasing numbers of people are retired, often involuntarily,
in their fifties. At present about one-third of men are retired by the age
of sixty. Astonishingly, this is happening at a time when expectancy of
healthy life is greater than ever before and when much research clearly
demonstrates that people in their sixties can perform as efficiently at
most employment-related activities as those in their thirties and forties. 50
People are working most intensely when their parental responsibilities are
greatest; least when they have fewest responsibilities.
Recently the government has led discussion of the need to facilitate
what is called ‘work-life balance’; in other words, to make it easier, in
particular for women, to combine parenthood and career through flexible
hours, part-time working, career breaks and re-training. There is every
sign that this is what many women want and have long wanted.51
Throughout the past century they have taken advantage of opportunities
for such flexibility whenever they have presented themselves, most visibly
during both world wars. Also, it is now recognized that some men want
to give more time to parenthood. This issue has become a concern for
government not only, or perhaps not at all, due to a desire to diminish
gender inequality, but due to awareness of shortages in the economy of
skills and talent that women can supply, especially now that so many of
them are highly educated and more successful than males at most levels
of education. Many more women than before are being highly and
expensively trained and the economy has gained, and has the potential to
gain further, from the greatly increased pool of talent and skill that has
been released. But the opportunities for women to use their training have
not expanded commensurately. In the very recent past there has been
some increase in the flexibility of the labour market for women at the
top end (although it has been least apparent in the private, corporate
sector), but it remains limited, and opportunities for women in other, less
élite, sectors of the labour market remain very restricted.
What can we expect in future? Expanding opportunities for flexible
working in ways that are compatible with competent parenting, for men
and women, is urgent for the sake of women, of families and of the
economy. This requires a shift for many people in the balance between
work and the rest of life – over the whole range of years in which people
are able and willing to work, not only in the peak parenting years. It is
50
T. Kirkwood, The End of Age (Reith Lectures, 2001). Thane, Old Age, pp. 489 – 93.
51
E.g., from the author’s on-going study of the life experiences of female Cambridge
graduates over much of the 20th century.
52
E. Showalter, ‘Inventing ourselves: feminism in the 21st century’, Royal Holloway, Uni-
versity of London, Fawcett Lecture, 2002.