Abstract
During the summer of 1917 when the enfranchisement of women was becoming an accepted fact, Millicent Fawcett urged Helena Swanwick to start tackling the next problem: the organisation of women voters with a view to subjecting the political system to effective pressure on women’s issues. ‘I remarked on the difficulty of organising what doesn’t exist’, recalled Mrs Swanwick, to which Fawcett replied, ‘Oh. I shall retire and watch you all floundering.’1 The question remains largely unexplored by historians: how much difference did the enfranchisement of women really make? Any answer must involve consideration of a number of distinct themes: changes in the style and agenda of politics, the extent of the success of the women’s movement in achieving its legislative goals, the motivation and tactics of the political parties in managing the influx of women into the system, and the actual impact made by women in electoral terms.
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Notes
E. Barton, Woman in the Home, the Store and the State (WCG, n.d., late 1920s).
Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenhorn: Feminism and Anti-militarism in Britain since 1820 (1989), pp. 109–19.
Women’s Labour League, Annual Conference Report, May 1927.
M. G. Fawcett, What the Vote Has Done (NUSEC, 1926), p. 1.
Brian Harrison, ‘Women’s Suffrage at Westminster 1866–1928’, in High and Low Politics in Modern Britain, ed. M. Bentley and J. Stevenson (1983), p. 91.
Ruth Hall, Marie Stopes (1978), pp. 169, 206; HC Debates, 25 July 1923, c 480; 30 July 1924, c 2050.
Joan Lock, The British Policewoman (1979), pp. 153–4.
C. T. Stannage, Baldwin Thwarts the Opposition (1980), p. 291.
Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People 1880–1935 (1985), pp. 179–80.
See Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism (1981), p. 164;
Lucy Middleton (ed.), Women in the Labour Movement (1977). For the opposite view Harold Smith, ‘Sex vs Class: British Feminists and the Labour Movement 1919–29’, The Historian, 47 (Nov. 1984).
For an intermediate position see Pat Thane, ‘The Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906–45’, in Harold Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (1990), and Brian Harrison, ‘Class and Gender in Modern British Labour History’, Past and Present, 124 (Aug. 1989).
Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: the Labour Movement in Preston 1880–1940 (1987), pp. 164–70.
The Labour Woman, v (21 Jan. 1918), 2; Labour Party Women’s Organisation, Annual Conference Reports, 1920, pp. 77–8, and 1923, p. 87; The Woman’s Leader, 2 Mar. 1923; M. Phillips (ed.), Women and the Labour Party (1918), p. 6.
Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree (1975), p. 172.
R. M. Wilson, Wife: Mother: Voter. Her Vote — What Will She Do With It? (1918).
See M. Benney, A. P. Gray and R. H. Pear, How People Vote (1956), p. 107;
D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (1971), p. 164;
R. McKenzie and A. Silver, Angels in Marble (1968), pp. 88, 91; F. Parkin, ‘Working Class Conservatives’, British Journal of Sociology, XXVIII (Sept. 1967); Judith Evans, ‘Women and Politics: a Reappraisal’, Political Studies, XXVIII, 2 (1980); J. S. Rasmussen, ‘Women in Labour: the Flapper Vote and Party System Transformation in Britain’, Electoral Studies, 3, No 1 (1984);
B. Campbell, The Iron Ladies (1987).
J. Turner, ‘The Labour Vote and the Franchise After 1918: an Investigation of the English Evidence’, in P. R. Denley and D. I. Hopkin (eds), History and Computing (1987), pp. 138–41.
D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (1977), p. 235.
E. Pethwick-Lawrence, My Part in a Changing World (1938), pp. 322–3.
Stuart R. Bell, ‘Asquith’s Decline and the General Election of 1918’, Scottish Historical Review, LXI, 171 (1982); see also K. O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity (1979), pp. 152–3.
Peter Rowland, Lloyd George (1975), p. 469.
Stuart Ball, Baldwin and the Conservative Party (1988), pp. 220–1; Butler and Stokes, Political Change, pp. 105–15.
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© 2000 Martin Pugh
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Pugh, M. (2000). The Domestication of British Politics. In: Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21850-9_5
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