Abstract
There was a momentous sense of achievement when the Representation of the People Act was passed in March 1918 by 385 to 55 in the House of Commons. Amongst other important provisions, the Act granted most women over thirty the right to vote. Of the entirely new elements introduced by the Act — the naval and military voter and the woman voter — the latter excited the most expectation and anxiety. It was reported that while there was never such an outwardly tame general election as that held on 14 December, 1918,
there was one section of electors to whom, however externally calm, the election must have brought a thrill. The women are said to have voted in crowds, in some London constituencies greatly outnumbering the men, and in their eagerness forming queues at the more populous polling stations, for all the world as though they were out for the impossible butter or meat before the Food Controller took us on hand.1
This ravenous anticipation was dampened by frustration on the part of those still excluded from the franchise, and the women’s rights campaigner Mary Macarthur pointed to the paradox that although ‘the vote was conceded to women on the ground of their services in the war’, the Act ‘excluded the vast majority of women war-workers’.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Whyte, ‘How Much Discrimination Was There Under the Unionist Regime, 1921–1968?’, in Tom Gallagher and James O’Connell, Contemporary Irish Studies (Manchester, 1983), pp. 1–35.
Under the City of London (Ward Elections) Act 2002. For discussion, see Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London, 2011), pp. 265–7.
Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 387–9; Chris Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain 1922–1929 (London and Basingstoke, 1975), p. 49n.
Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (Basingstoke, 2002).
Mary Hilson, ‘Women Voters and the Rhetoric of Patriotism in the British General Election of 1918’, Women’s History Review, 10 (2001), pp. 325–347, at 341.
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), p. 96.
See Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009).
Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951 (Oxford, 2010), p. 33.
Jon Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics After the First World War’, Past & Present, 190 (2006), pp. 185–216. See also Kit Good, “Quit Ye Like Men”: Platform Manliness and Electioneering, 1895–1939’, in Matthew McCormack (ed.), Public Men: Masculinity Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 143–64.
H.C.G. Matthew, R.I. McKibbin and J.A. Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 361 (October 1976), pp. 723–52, at 749.
P. F. Clarke, ‘Liberals, Labour and the Franchise’, English Historical Review, Vol. 92, No. 364 (July 1977), pp. 582–590 at 583–4. Here Clarke was refining claims made initially in his Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), to which Matthew, McKibbin and Kay had responded.
Duncan Tanner, ‘The Parliamentary Electoral System, the ‘Fourth’ Reform Act and the Rise of Labour in England and Wales’, Historical Research, 56 (1983), pp. 205–19, at 219.
Michael Dawson, ‘Money and the Real Impact of the Fourth Reform Act’, Historical Journal, Vol. 35, No. 2 (June 1992), pp. 369–81. More recently, David Thackeray has drawn attention to the provisions of the Act (further amended in 1922) which prevented election expenditure by persons other than the candidate. The intention of this was to prevent outside organisations (including newspapers) spending money on a candidate’s behalf: Politics for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century England, Manchester, forthcoming, 2013.
Stuart Ball, ‘Local Conservatism and the Evolution of the Party Organization’, in Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 261–311, at 264.
John E. Turner, Labour’s Doorstep Politics in London (London and Basingstoke, 1978), p. 4; David Howell, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1923–1931 (Oxford, 2002), p. 18.
As Paul Readman notes: ‘The debate on the rise of Labour and the concomitant decline of the Liberal party has now reached an advanced level of sophistication, with historians turning away from deterministic class-based “sociological” explanations and toward more fashionable “textual” approaches that place emphasis on the transformative impact of political language’ (‘The State of Twentieth Century British Political History’, Journal of Policy History 21 (2009), pp. 219–38, at 220.
David Jarvis, ‘Mrs. Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1994), pp. 129–52; idem., ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, English Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 440 (February 1996), pp. 59–84.
Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour 1920–1924: The Beginnings of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971), p. 3.
Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), p. 14. Emphasis in original.
See Joanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (London, 1989); Deidre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women Between the Wars, 1918–1939 (London, 1989); Esthere Breitenbach and Pat Thane (eds), Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (2010); Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (1991); Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 1884–1911 (London,1996); Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement, 1918–1928 (London, 1999); Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1959 (Basingstoke, 1992); Dale Spender, There Has Always Been a Women’s Movement this Century (London, 1983); H. Smith (ed.) British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (London, 1990).
Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose, ‘Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations’, in Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose (eds), Gender, Citizenships & Subjectivities (Oxford, 2001), p. 1.
E. Breitenbach and P. Thane (eds), Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (London, 2010), p. 8.
Martin Pugh, ‘The Impact of Women’s Enfranchisement in Britain’, in C. Daley and M. Nolan (eds), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York, 1994), p. 316.
Krista Cowman, Women in British Politics, c. 1689–1979 (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 149.
See Pamela Brooks, Women at Westminster (London, 1967), p. 15.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, and the Three Guineas (Oxford, 2008; originally published 1929) p. 35.
Ray Strachey (ed.), Our Freedom and Its Results by Five Women (London, 1936), P. 9.
Adrian Bingham, ‘“Stop the Flapper Vote Folly’: Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail and the Equalization of the Franchise 1927–8”, Twentieth Century British History, 13, 1 (2002), pp. 17–37.
Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 151.
Winifred Holtby, Woman and a Changing Civilization (London, 1934), p. 2.
Anthony Ludovici, The Future of Woman (London, 1936), p. 149.
Ibid., p. 151.
Thelma Cazalet-Keir, From the Wings (London, 1967), pp. 126–7.
‘Old Mother Riley MP’ (1939), and see also Steven Fielding, ‘Cinematic Representations of Politicians and Party Politics c. 1944–1964’, Journal of British Studies, 47, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 107–28.
Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke, 2009).
Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (London, 1953), pp. 251–2.
Julie V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–1945 (London, 2000), and Susan and Angela McPherson, Mosley’s Old Suffragette: A Biography of Norah Dacre Fox (2011).
Ray Strachey (ed.), Our Freedom and its Results by Five Women (London, 1936), p. 10.
See Jill Liddington, ‘Era of Commemoration: Celebrating the Suffrage Centenary’, History Workshop Journal, issue 59, (2005), pp. 194–218.
Julie V. Gottlieb, “‘Broken Friendships and Vanished Loyalties”: Gender, Collective (In)Security and Anti-Fascism in Britain in the 1930s’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13 (2012), pp. 197–219.
See Joanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (New York, 1989), June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London, 2002), Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement, 1918–1928 (London, 1997), Susan Kingsley Kent, both her Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Inter-war Britain (Princeton, 1993), and Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke, 2009), among others.
P. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: 1926), p. 370.
Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2003).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gottlieb, J.V., Toye, R. (2013). Introduction. In: Gottlieb, J.V., Toye, R. (eds) The Aftermath of Suffrage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333001_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333001_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-01534-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33300-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)