From Domesticity to War, 1928–45

Abstract

In 1928 feminists finally achieved what they had dreamed of for decades: the vote on the same terms as men. The strange thing is, though, that instead of transforming the situation — as many people had predicted — it seemed to make very little difference. Baldwin had warned NUSEC that this would probably be the case. He felt that the immediate results would be modest: ‘I have been too long in politics to take the Apocalyptic view.’¹ Of course, that is why Baldwin went against the advice of the party leadership and insisted on giving the vote to women on the same terms as men — because he knew it would make little difference. This had, in fact, been the lesson of all past reform acts. We have already seen how Salisbury had been stunned to discover that the vastly more democratic Britain that came into being after the Third Reform Act was more likely to vote Conservative than before.² Baldwin was certainly right when he perceived that women’s position would be improved, not so much through the vote, as through changing attitudes in society. He told women’s suffrage supporters that: ‘… it is … by a mere procession of time, ideas, customs, and conditions perfectly natural to our great grandfathers became per­fectly absurd to us.’³