What difference did the vote make?

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public and private life in Britain since 1918*

Patricia M. Thane
Institute of Historical Research

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.

It is not enough to examine legislation. The greatest change in women’s lives

has been due to increased use of birth control from the late nineteenth century.
From the nineteen-sixties the Pill has allowed women to delay starting families
without sacrificing sexual relationships, and to establish themselves in a career.
However, career opportunities for women remain limited, especially in the
skilled trades, while divorce and the ‘long hours’ culture since the nineteen-
eighties have made it more difficult for women to combine family and career.
The historical record suggests that increased gender equality has been achieved
only by campaigns, legislation and measures of positive discrimination, not by
gradual persuasion.

The purpose of this article is not only to discuss the relationship of

women to voting and politics, although I will discuss both, but to raise
wider questions about what has and has not changed in women’s lives
and in gender relations since some women first obtained the vote in 1918.
When women campaigned for the vote, they did not want the vote
alone. They saw voting, and an increased presence for women in political

* 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

decision making, as the key to much wider changes in ‘gender relations’

(although they would not have used this late twentieth-century term),
and in the public and personal lives of women.
As, officially, given the title of both this and my previous chair, a
‘contemporary historian’, I am concerned with the present as well as the
past, with how study of the past can inform thinking about the present.
Only if we study the long run – history is the study of the long run –
can we assess what difference it makes that we now have more women
involved in public life, as doctors, M.P.s, professors and in many other
occupations barred to women in 1918. So what has, and has not, changed
since the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918 and their complete
enfranchisement in 1928?

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.

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.

270 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

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).

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.

 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 271

years of studying the development of the British welfare state, I am quite

sure that the enfranchisement of women played an important part in
bringing it into being, as similar movements did in other countries. 7

It is sometimes suggested that the suffragists expected massive change to

follow the granting of the vote.8 In fact, women who had spent years
fighting the opposition to women’s suffrage were more realistic. They
expected opposition to continue, change to be slow and the fight to
continue, although in a different form: the mass campaign for a single
goal – the vote – would have to be replaced by patient, well-informed,
well-targeted and organized lobbying for a variety of goals. This is clear
from the comments at the time by women as varied as the moderate
suffragists Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Eleanor Rathbone, and the more
militant Sylvia Pankhurst.9 They also believed that it would take time for
the women’s movement to adjust to the new, post-suffrage situation.
When sections of the press commented slightingly on the small number
of female candidates in the general election of 1922 (the second in which
women were entitled to vote), the radical women of the Women’s Free-
dom League retorted that since men had been involved in the political
process since 1265 and women for only four years, thirty-three female
candidates was quite an achievement, especially in view of the extreme
difficulty of persuading political parties to select women candidates, par-
ticularly for seats thought to be winnable. Women were aware of this
problem from the beginning, and, of course, it has not gone away. 10
Fight the newly enfranchised women did. It has become increasingly
clear, especially from excellent work by younger scholars, both female
and male, how mistaken is the notion that women’s campaigns for gender
equality ended in 1918 or 1928. Rather the main suffragist organizations
changed their goal to helping women to use the vote and to orchestrating
campaigns for a range of institutional and cultural changes favourable to
gender equality. For example, the leading non-militant suffrage organiza-
tion, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (N.U.W.S.S.),
changed its name to the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizen-
ship (N.U.S.E.C.) and changed its goal to assisting women to use the vote
and to providing practical support for women’s campaigns. They worked
closely with a large and increasing number of single issue, occupational,
faith-based and other women’s organizations such as the National Union

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).

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272 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

of Women Teachers, the working-class Women’s Co-operative Guild,

the Union of Jewish Women and the Women’s Institutes (which, it has
been largely forgotten, were founded by suffragists devoted to promoting
the political inclusion of countrywomen).11 All of these, and other organ-
izations, had substantial and growing memberships. In the nineteen-
thirties the broad umbrella organizations such as N.U.S.E.C. declined in
support, but single issue groups remained vigorously active.12 I have no
doubt that more women, from a wider range of backgrounds, were
actively campaigning for gender equality in the nineteen-twenties and
thirties than before the First World War.
The enfranchisement of women had an immediate political effect. The
most prominent figure in the N.U.W.S.S., Millicent Garrett Fawcett,
noted in the final chapter of her memoir The Women’s Victory and After,
‘The difference the vote has made’, that between 1902 and 1914 ‘only
two really important Acts bearing especially upon the welfare and status
of women had been passed – namely the Midwives Act, 1902, and the
group of Acts dating from 1907 to 1914 dealing with the qualifications
of women as candidates in local elections’.13 But she stated that 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’.14 These included the
Sex Disqualification Removal Act, 1919, which, among other things,
enabled women to enter certain professions and to take up public roles
from which they had previously been debarred. They could, for example,
for the first time become barristers, solicitors and magistrates and sit on
juries. The changes were slow to take effect: for example, in 1947 women
still provided only twenty-five per cent of magistrates and they edged
towards equal numbers with men only in the nineteen-nineties. But
change it was, and women campaigned for such changes not only because
they extended the range of careers open to them but in order to end the
exclusion of women from institutions, such as the legal system, to which
they were subject, as men were, but in which, unlike men, women had
no authority. Before 1918 any woman on trial faced a wholly male court:
barristers, solicitors, jury, judges, police, clerks, ushers were all male. Not
surprisingly, they found this intimidating. Before the First World War the
National Union of Women Workers (later the National Council of Women)
won permission to provide a female ‘friend’, someone to sit with a

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.

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.

 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 273

woman facing proceedings in court. Other aspects of the law could be

equally intimidating for wholly innocent women. An important reason
for the vigorous campaign of women’s organizations in the inter-war
years for the appointment of policewomen was not just to extend the
careers open to women, but to end the situation in which women and
children who had suffered physical and sexual abuse (which were major
problems, then as now) could report their experiences only to policemen,
who were not reliably sympathetic.15 Again this campaign was slow to be
effective. Only ten per cent of police officers were female even by the
mid nineteen-nineties.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett also included in her triumphal list 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 –
an early victory for the lobbying of the newly formed National Council
for the Unmarried Mother and her Child. She made mention, too, of the
Midwives Amending Act of the same year, followed by the Nurses Reg-
istration Act, 1919, both of which improved the professional status of
women as well as the quality of care available to them. Interestingly, in
view of accusations that feminists at this time were excessively concerned
about the needs of mothers, Fawcett’s list did not include the Maternity
and Child Welfare Act, 1918, which improved health and welfare facil-
ities for mothers and children and was the outcome of campaigns during
and before the war by many organizations, notably the Women’s Co-
operative Guild. Fawcett also noted improvements in the inheritance
rights of women under Scottish law, and the Industrial Courts Act, 1919,
which appointed women to these newly established courts of arbitration
on pay and working conditions. Fawcett believed that such changes in
the law were the necessary next step after women gained the vote. She
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.16

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.17 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

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?’.

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274 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

equalization of property rights, in all of which aspects of the law married

women had more restricted rights than married men. There were new
welfare measures, such as the first state pensions for widowed mothers
and orphans, introduced in 1925, in recognition of the needs of this
impoverished group of single parent families. In 1929 the permissible age
of marriage for both sexes was raised to sixteen. It has been largely
forgotten that before 1929 it was possible for a female to marry at age
twelve and a male at age fourteen, provided that they had parental con-
sent. Through the nineteen-twenties an average of twenty-four girls each
year married below the age of sixteen, most of them pregnant.
It is always difficult to establish who or what brings about legislative
change, since the processes involved are complex. However, it is hard to
believe that this unprecedented flow of legislation favourable to gender
equality in the nineteen-twenties was unrelated to the fact that women
had gained the vote and were agitating for these very changes. Much of
it occurred under the Conservative government of 1925–9. The Conservat-
ive party in general was not known for its commitment to gender equal-
ity, but it did provide the first woman member of parliament – Nancy
Astor in 1922 – and Neville Chamberlain (Minister of Health, 1924– 9)
was president from 1928–31 of the National Council for the Unmarried
Mother and her Child, an organization founded by women in 1918 to
support other women, whose cause was not popular in the Conservative
party or elsewhere. Chamberlain introduced in the house of commons
the Bill drafted and sponsored by the National Council which sought the
legitimation of children by the subsequent marriage of the parents and an
increase in the maximum amount payable by the father under an affilia-
tion order.18 The latter came into law in 1923, the former in 1926.
Chamberlain was one of many male supporters in all political parties
who worked with women’s organizations to promote their causes. The
flow of legislation continued through the nineteen-thirties, but has not
been fully analyzed and there is not time to say more here. There has
been still less study of the impact of women voters on local government, 19
which still had considerable autonomy and power in the inter-war years
and was often more accessible to women than central government, not
least because service in local government was more compatible with
family life and was deemed by many voters and candidate selectors to lie
within women’s proper sphere, whereas national government, many of
them believed, did not. The few studies there are suggest that women

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).

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 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 275

could have considerable impact on local government.20 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. In 2001 women formed twenty-nine per cent of all local
councillors, but local authorities had become much weaker than in the
inter-war years.
There were limits to how much the first generation of women voters
could achieve at any level. Campaigns, then as now, were most successful
on issues in which the potential cost to the taxpayer was least, where they
had least obvious impact on the structure of power (however defined)
and where they involved the public rather than the private, corporate,
sector. It was easier, although not very easy, to change the law on divorce
than to achieve equal pay. Gender equality in the divorce courts had been
achieved by 1939, gender equality in the pay packet had not. Feminists
have sometimes criticized women campaigners in the inter-war years for
focusing too narrowly on welfare issues concerning women in the home 21
– underestimating how important these issues were, given the appalling
living conditions of all too many at this time – and have accused them
of neglecting the needs of women in paid work. In reality there were
vigorous campaigns for equal pay and on other workplace issues, such as
abolition of the ‘marriage bar’, which excluded women from paid work
on marriage.22 Many women’s organizations sought to make the choice
to work in or out of the home a reality. But they were less successful at
achieving change in the labour market than in state welfare issues. They
faced fiercer opposition from private sector employers than from the state.
Once women had the vote, politicians could not ignore them, even
though the number of women actually elected to parliament remained
small, not only in the inter-war years but until as late as 1997, when
numbers improved dramatically, even if still only in one party. Following
the 1997 general election, 101 female Labour M.P.s entered the house of
commons, compared with thirty-seven in 1992, which had been the
largest number of women elected for any party until that date. In 1997
thirteen female Conservative M.P.s were elected, three Liberal Democrats
and two Scottish Nationalists. The speaker (officially non-party) was also a

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.

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276 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

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.

It is a widely held belief, especially among political scientists, that women

voters had little impact upon changing legislation or the political system
because they have been predominantly both conservative and Con-
servative.23 As we have seen above, prominent Conservatives were not
necessarily unsympathetic to progressive women’s causes, but in any
case the evidence for this belief is, at best, slight. For the inter-war years
there is no statistical evidence: voting is, of course, secret. Opinion polls
developed only after the Second World War, and serious questions
should be asked about their methodological soundness for some time after
that. Contemporary commentators in the inter-war years did not assume
that women were C/conservative in either sense. Adrian Bingham has
recently described Lord Rothermere’s conviction that the new young
women voters enfranchised in 1928 would vote socialist, by which he
meant Labour.24 Admittedly, Rothermere and his paper the Daily Mail
saw reds under every bed, but the Labour party did greatly increase its
poll in the election of the following year (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 Times, which in those days was a sober newspaper of record,
throughout the nineteen-twenties assessed women voters as thoughtful,
independent-minded and varied in their voting patterns according to their
assessment of political issues; that is, that they behaved much like male
voters.25 The press tended to assume that women were often interested
in different issues to men – in food prices rather than foreign affairs – and
there may have been some truth in this for many women, although it
was hardly a sign either of conservatism or lack of political judgement.
The press, like more recent commentators, also tended to treat ‘women
voters’ as a single bloc whilst male voters were differentiated by class,
occupation and so on. But there is not much sign that in the inter-war
years contemporaries assumed that women voters were particularly
biased towards Conservatism. Rather commentators expressed unease and
23
V. Randall, Women and Politics: an International Perspective (2nd edn., 1987), pp. 70– 6;
J. Blondel, Voters, Parties and Leaders: the Social Fabric of British Politics (Harmondsworth, 1965).
24
A. Bingham, ‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly’: Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the
equalization of the franchise, 1927–8’, Twentieth Century British History, xiii (2002), 17–37.
25
The Times, 16 Nov. 1922, 7, 8 Dec. 1923, 30 Oct 1924, 30 May 1929. Thane, ‘What
difference did the vote make?’, pp. 259–63.

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 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 277

uncertainty about women’s voting preferences, which they found them

generally unwilling to reveal. They certainly perceived women as politic-
ally powerful despite their small numbers in parliament. 26
The rather patchy studies of some post-war opinion polls that have
been carried out indicate that women provided a higher proportion of
the popular vote for Labour than did men in 1945 and 1966 and that
female and male votes were evenly matched in 1950, 1997 and 2002. 27
Butler’s and Kavanagh’s study of the 2002 election provides an analysis of
voting patterns by party, region, age, level of education and class but,
oddly, not by gender.28 An analysis of British Institute of Public Opinion
(B.I.P.O.) polls between 1945 and 1951 showed working-class women
demonstrating a stronger preference for Labour than working-class men,
whilst middle-class women preferred Conservatism.29 In the nineteen-
fifties, polls indicate that women voters did incline more strongly to the
Conservatives: 1951 and 1955 were the only post-war elections in which
polls showed that more than fifty per cent of women polled expressed
a preference for the Conservative party. Women voters leaned strongly
against Mrs. Thatcher when she was in office – although as much in
favour of the Liberal Democrats as of Labour – and swung back to
Conservatism in John Major’s only election. Such evidence as there is
suggests that the commentators of the inter-war years may well have
been right: women have not given any party a consistent advantage but
have been divided and shifting in their political allegiance, and open to
persuasion by the parties and by their own assessments of political issues,
at least comparably with men.
Women’s activism was more muted after than before the Second
World War, but it did not disappear. A certain cultural conservatism
settled over post-war Britain, understandably after the exhaustion of war
and when, by the nineteen-fifties, most of the population were enjoying
higher living standards than ever before. But also in the nineteen-fifties
mainly middle-class, often Conservative-voting, women campaigned suc-
cessfully for equal pay in the public sector, which was gained in teaching,
the civil service and local government in 1955.30 As Ina Zweiniger-
Bargielowska has shown, the Conservative party in the nineteen-fifties
was anxious to win and keep the support of women, including those in
the paid workforce, evidently not simply by promoting a conservative
26
Thane, ‘What difference did the vote make?’, pp. 259– 63. A. Bingham, ‘Debating gender:
approaches to femininity and masculinity in the popular national daily press in inter-war Britain’
(unpublished University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 2002).
27
J. Lovenduski and others, ‘The party and women’, in The Conservative Century: the Con-
servative Party since 1900, ed. A. Seldon and S. Ball (Oxford, 1994), pp. 611–35.
28
D. Butler and P. Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2001 (2002).
29
J. Hinton, ‘Women and the Labour vote, 1945–50’, Labour History Rev., lvii (1992),
59 – 66.
30
H. L. Smith, ‘The politics of Conservative reform: the equal pay for equal work issue,
1945–55’, Historical Jour., xxxv (1992), 401–15. Beaumont, ‘The Women’s Movement’.

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278 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

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).

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 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 279

tunities Commission was established. The Fawcett Society was especially

important in lobbying for this. I could go on. None of these pieces of
legislation was perfect or achieved all that campaigners hoped, but they
were a great deal better than what had gone before and their achieve-
ment owed a great deal to women’s agency in a variety of campaigning
organizations.35

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).

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280 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

it and to give it a new significance’.39 Rescuing the term feminism from

odium is what feminists have been trying to do ever since, without
conspicuous success.
This has been evident from my own studies of two very different groups
of women: working-class women in the Labour party in the inter-war years40
and largely middle-class graduates of Girton College, Cambridge from the
nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-eighties.41 Commitment to gender
equality combined with sometimes vituperative hostility to ‘feminists’, who
were perceived as aggressive, intolerant man-haters, was common to sig-
nificant numbers in both groups. Since most self-confessed feminists over
the past century have been neither aggressively militant nor hostile to
men we need to know more than we do about how this contradiction
has been constructed and sustained. Its long persistence suggests that we
should not assume in the present that if women reject the name feminist
they are necessarily also rejecting the aspiration to gender equality.

Tensions such as these have survived through a century of major changes

in women’s lives. We cannot measure these changes only by examining
legislation or by counting the numbers of women in parliament. Many
of the indicators of when and where gender makes a difference to life
experiences and life chances are unexpected. For example, a recent study
reinforces earlier research findings that gender stereotyping influences
even medical diagnosis and the chances of recovery.42 Men suffering heart
attacks are more readily admitted to intensive care than women and have,
in consequence, higher survival rates. Other conditions, such as pneumo-
nia, are more expected among women and more readily diagnosed and
treated. Men and women both gain and lose as a result of this type of
stereotyping. It suggests the pervasiveness of unhelpful assumptions about
gender and the difficulty of tracking and measuring their effects and
removing them. A major achievement of the women’s movements of
the past century is that gender has become an important dimension of
research in many fields and is increasing knowledge and awareness of how
pervasive and sometimes harmful or absurd gender discrimination can be.
However, the biggest transformation in women’s lives in the past cen-
tury – perhaps in the whole of history – is measurable and cannot be
accounted for by changes in legislation or by public campaigns. This is
the use of effective birth control. By the Second World War most British
couples were limiting the size of their families by a variety of more or
less uncomfortable means. Nationally the birth-rate fell dramatically from
the beginning of the twentieth century, reaching a low point in the early
39
D. Marsden, ‘Women’s future’, Evening Standard and St. James’s Gazette, 25 Oct. 1911,
quoted in Delap, ‘“Philosophical vacuity” ’.
40
Thane, ‘The women of the British Labour party and feminism’.
41
Work in progress.
42
Reported, I hope accurately, in the Guardian, 10 Apr. 2002.

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 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 281

nineteen-thirties before rising again, although to nothing like the high

levels of the previous century. Also, births were increasingly concentrated
in the early years of marriage, in place of the historical norm for most
women of pregnancy, birth and miscarriage spread over the fertile years.
This brought about a major change in how women and girls growing up
could imagine and experience their lives, but it took time to adjust to
this new normality. It was not until after the Second World War that
most young women grew up expecting to be able to control the number
and timing of their children and certain of the possibility of a substantial
period of active later life without responsibility for child care, for which
they could plan. For this was also a time when expectation of healthy life
was lengthening.43 It was also only during the war that the ‘marriage bar’
was finally abolished, enabling women to continue to work after marriage
and childbearing and hence to seek to combine long-term careers with
marriage and raising a family. It cannot be coincidental that it is this
generation, born during and after the war, who led the women’s move-
ment of the late nineteen-sixties. They grew up with quite different
expectations from previous generations of women.
Present day commentators often regard the introduction of the Pill in
the nineteen-sixties as the breakthrough in birth control which changed
women’s lives, especially their career options. But the real breakthrough
in the capacity to control births came much earlier, by the nineteen-
thirties. If birth control was all that was needed to transform women’s
career opportunities it should have happened much sooner. Nor can we
be sure, as is sometimes suggested, that wider career opportunities for
women are the cause of the falling birth rate at present. It fell rapidly in
the early twentieth century when there was very little expansion of
opportunities for most women. The introduction of the Pill was import-
ant, not in making birth control possible but in making it more comfort-
able.44 There is much evidence that many users were uneasy with the cap,
the condom and withdrawal, the main methods in use before the Pill.
Many couples restricted their family size by giving up, or severely restrict-
ing, sex once they had the desired number of children. The Pill enabled
people to enjoy sex early in a partnership, or in a succession of partner-
ships, but to postpone births. For women it became easier to envisage
becoming firmly established in a career before starting a family, without
sacrificing the possibility of close relationships. This carried the risk of
delaying too long, since it has long been known that fertility declines
with age, but there is no evidence for Britain that this is leading to a
major crisis of involuntary infertility.45 This change in women’s career
43
Thane, Old Age.
44
H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception, 1800 –1975
(Oxford, forthcoming 2003).
45
As recently suggested for the U.S.A. in S. A. Hewlett, Baby Hunger: the New Battle for
Motherhood (2002).

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282 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

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.

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 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 283

Other surveys of the time supported this. The Donovan Commission

recognized that family commitments were obstacles to women’s work
and training, but felt that problems could be overcome and urged recruit-
ment and training for older women wishing to return to the workforce
after child-rearing, who were evident in large numbers in the nineteen-
sixties. Less has changed in the intervening thirty-four years than we
might hope, other than that the shortage of skilled workers has grown.
Other studies since the nineteen-sixties of women’s employment have
focused upon ‘top jobs’ in management and the professions. These show
that women now enter most professions in substantial numbers, for ex-
ample four per cent of all lawyers in 1971 were female, twenty-seven per
cent in 1990. There has been a parallel change in medicine, although in
these and other professions women are relatively under-represented in
higher status branches (they are far more likely to be anaesthetists than
heart surgeons) and are less well paid than men of similar age and quali-
fications. The numbers of women in private sector management have
increased, but very slowly and most slowly of all in the largest companies.
Women are – still, as has long been the case – most likely to reach the
top in management and the professions if they have no children. These
gender differences are not simply attributable to women choosing to
trade-off the pleasures of rearing children against having a successful
career. The relatively poor prospects of childless and unmarried women
compared with men with similar qualifications makes this interpretation
unlikely.48
Many women, of course, do choose to give up careers or to progress
more slowly in order to raise families. But many find it difficult to
persuade employers to allow them to fulfil their preferences, to work
part-time, or to find training when they want to return after a career
break. The importance of enabling women and men to combine work
and parenting flexibly over their changing life experiences has been
argued since at least the nineteen-sixties. However, the sixties studies of
women’s limited access to careers differ from those of today in that they
anticipated greater future flexibility in the labour market. Commentators
then expected working hours to fall due to advances in technology. The
problem they foresaw was that of too much leisure in the future.49 In fact,
an unforeseen obstacle to women’s career progression was that just as in
the nineteen-seventies and eighties they seemed poised for breakthrough
two things happened: increased divorce, leaving more women alone rais-
ing children; and the coming of the ‘long hours culture’ and greater work
48
See, among others, M. Fogarty, R. Rapoport and R. N. Rapoport, Women and Top Jobs
(1967); The Report of the Hansard Society Commission on Women at the Top (Hansard Soc., 1990);
S. McCrae, Women at the Top: Progress after Five Years (Hansard Soc., 1996); K. Ross, Women
at the Top 2000: Cracking the Public Sector Glass Ceiling (Hansard Soc., 2000).
49
Fogarty, Rapaport and Rapaport, pp. 66 – 7; L. Bagrit, The Age of Automation (Reith
Lectures, 1965).

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284 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918

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.

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 Women in public and private life in Britain since 1918 285

as important to end involuntary early retirement and enable those who

wish and are able to work to later ages, whether full- or part-time, as it
is to enable younger mothers to work outside the home. How is this to
be achieved? Can we rely, as the government seems to hope, on persua-
sion of employers and gradual change? The historical record suggests that
significant changes to women’s lives and opportunities came only when
people – mainly women – campaigned for them and gained legislative
change or measures of positive discrimination, such as those which
increased the numbers of female Labour M.P.s in 1997, female repres-
entation in the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales and in elected
assemblies in other countries. In the last lecture I heard in this hall, this
year’s Fawcett lecture, hosted by Royal Holloway and Bedford New
College (as it was named until recently, commemorating the two pio-
neering women’s university colleges from which the new ‘Royal Hollo-
way’ was forged), Elaine Showalter argued that there was unlikely to be
another feminist movement in Britain.52 Maybe not a feminist movement,
in view of my earlier comments about the troubled relationship between
feminism and the demand for gender equality, but campaigns for gender
equality certainly. These have not gone away over the past century
because the need for them remains. Maybe future campaigns for gender
equality will not be so overwhelmingly composed of women seeking
equal rights with men, but will include more men seeking genuine gen-
der equality because they feel the disadvantages of working practices that
detach them from their children and of gender stereotyping in health care
and other aspects of life. Maybe, and I hope so, but I doubt it will happen
soon. One of the stories of the last century is of major changes in the
lives and expectations of most women, but much less change in the lives
and expectations of most men, with some unfortunate results.
To return to the question posed in the title of this article, the differ-
ence the vote made was to enable women to feel that their presence in
public life was legitimate. This presence also increased their capacity to
control their private lives. To have reached this position, and to achieve
some of the necessary changes, has been a long and slow process and one
that is far from complete.

52
E. Showalter, ‘Inventing ourselves: feminism in the 21st century’, Royal Holloway, Uni-
versity of London, Fawcett Lecture, 2002.

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.