Women get the vote: the suffrage movement during the War

According to the traditional view, an important element in the granting of the vote to women in 1918 was the stance taken by the different suffrage groups during the war[1]. By acting responsibly and supporting the war effort, it is argued, the suffrage groups demonstrated than women were mature and responsible enough to gain the vote. However, to suggest that the decision taken by the leaders of the WSPU to support the government’s prosecution of the war was echoed by all factions of the women’s movement is to misrepresent the nature of the movement, its membership and its work. Not all suffrage groups did support the war effort and the main suffrage groups that did so suffered splits over their patriotic stance.

To Victorian and Edwardian women, especially those of the middle class raised on the concept of ‘duty’, an immediate response was required from the suffrage societies. Many suffrage societies knew where their ‘duty’ lay and directed their resources to the war effort. Such a response might have been thought predictable from the NUWSS. That everyone expected the war to be over by Christmas might be considered to have influenced the NUWSS membership (consulted by post in August) who agreed to a suspension of political activity. Within the WSPU, both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst adopted a highly patriotic stance, calling on their members to suspend militant action and to support the British war effort. The Home Secretary quickly offered to release the suffragette prisoners and the Pankhursts took the opportunity of the war to escape without any loss of face from the impasse by suspending militancy. The WSPU then worked in collaboration with the government particularly, after 1915, with Lloyd George’s Ministry of Munitions publicising and coordinating female recruitment into the workforce. In July 1915, the government gave the WSPU a grant of £2,000 to finance the so-called ‘Great Procession of Women’, a march through London designed to heighten awareness of the need for women to actively support the war effort.

Not all WSPU members supported the leadership stance. As a result, two different groups split from the WSPU to form their own suffrage organisations: the Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Unions (SWSPU) in October 1915 and the Independent Women’s Social and Political Unions (IWSPU) in March 1916. In addition, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) led by Sylvia Pankhurst was highly critical of the WSPU leadership. During the war, the ELFS campaigned against the war and, as well as providing relief for many working class people in London, demanded the implementation of a socialist programme.

The NUWSS was also divided between those who supported the war (including Millicent Fawcett) and those who opposed it. Millicent Fawcett’s view eventually prevailed and in the spring of 1915, a major split occurred in the group over her refusal to allow NUWSS delegates to attend a peace conference for women at The Hague. The pacifist members of the group, including most of the national officers split away and formed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Unlike the WSPU, the NUWSS continued to press for female suffrage during the war, as well as providing relief work. When the issue of electoral reform was raised in the summer of 1916, the NUWSS immediately began to lobby for the inclusion of female suffrage.

Other women, either as individuals or as groups, were prominent in campaigns on behalf of women, especially from the working class, during the war years.  Women were involved in the development of a peace campaign[2]. Links between feminism, suffrage, peace and internationalism had long informed women’s networks and in wartime, there was a heightened recognition of the divisiveness of an ideology that sought to embody the power of the state in force and militarism. The debate for suffrage women in 1914 centred on the combination of tactics that would best sustain the Cause during the war. For many, the peace issue was of significance in throwing the suffrage question into sharper relief. Peace groups regarded it as essential to triumph over the revival of the anti-suffragist argument arising from force. This argument suggested that the power of the state lay in its capacity for physical force. It also defined citizenship as including only those individuals strong enough to bear arms in defence of the state. Women’s supposed incapacity for such a role meant that they had no right to the franchise. The Peace campaigners argued that women should be enfranchised as soon as possible to prevent such conflicts. Socialist feminists, committed to international solidarity and the class struggle, had a double motivation to resist the tide of war. Divisions within the women’s movement followed as the support given to the war effort by some suffrage groups could not be tolerated by those members whose pacifism was an integral part of their socialist beliefs. In 1915, for example, Helen Swanwick resigned from her position on the NUWSS executive because of the Union’s wartime policy.

Some suffrage groups, despite the demands of war, believed it essential to sustain their suffrage propaganda work. The three largest active organisations were the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) and the United Suffragists (US). All three originated in expulsions from the WSPU: the WFL in 1907, the United Suffragists in 1912 and Sylvia Pankhurst’s ELFS in 1914. At a special meeting on 10^th August 1914, the WFL “re-affirmed the urgency of keeping the suffrage flag flying” and the need “to organise a Women’s Suffrage National Aid Corps whose chief object would be to render help to the women and children of the nation”. Working closely with the WFL, the ELFS reflected the socialist attitudes of its founder, Sylvia Pankhurst. The ELFS refused to compromise or sacrifice the needs of working class women whose lives would inevitably become harder because of the war. Anticipating the nature of wartime problems, the ELFS argued for government control of food supplies, the provision of work for men and women at equal rates of pay and reserved places for working women on government committees dealing with food, prices, employment and relief. The Forward Cymric Suffrage Union, with its network of branches in Welsh and English counties as well as 28 branches in London also pointed out the need for women to be involved in the government of the nation. The FCSU worked closely with the ELFS and intended to combine relief work for women and children in Wales with its suffrage activities. Two Irish societies that continued their involvement were the Belfast Women’s Suffrage Society and the militant Irish Women’s Franchise League. In addition to these and many other established groups that continued the franchise struggle, four new organisations emerged. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom originated at the Women’s International Conference at The Hague in April 1915. The British branch was founded in September 1915 because of the discontent of a number of suffrage women at the failure of several peace initiatives. In addition to its peace work, the WILPF also supported the work of the hard core of suffrage organisations in their wartime activities.

The Suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (SWSPU) that held its initial meeting in October and the Independent Women’s Social and Political Union (IWSPU), formed in March 1916 were both established after divisions within the Pankhurst’s WSPU. In August 1914, Mrs Pankhurst circulated the membership to the effect that the union’s activities would be suspended. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and a handful of ‘loyal’ WSPU members subsequently began working with Lloyd George on nationalist propaganda. The Pankhursts’ activities came in for increasing criticism from WSPU members and at a meeting at Westminster in October 1915, there was criticism of the activities of WSPU officials and their abandonment of suffrage work. The meeting also called for the production of WSPU audited accounts. A second meeting on 25^th November accused Mrs Pankhurst of participating in activities that were outside the union’s remit and of using WSPU assets and staff in the process. Both Emmeline and Christabel responded in characteristically autocratic form. Critics like Charlotte Despard of the WFL and Dora Montefiore, an ex-WSPU member were scathing in their attacks on the now exposed private ambitions of the Pankhursts for power and political status. What was left of the WSPU membership then formed two new groups, the IWSPU and the SWSPU.

The last new organisation of this period was the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organisations (SJCIWO) founded on 11^th February 1916 at a meeting called by the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). The call for closer co-operation among women’s groups representing female industrial workers originally came from the Women’s Labour League. Initially, the SJCIWO comprised the WLL, the Women’s Co-operative Guild, the Railway Women’s Guild, the National Federation of Women Workers and the WTUL. Its three aims were to draw up a list of women willing to become representatives on government committees to protect women’s interests; to devise a policy for Labour women on these committees to assist them in their work; and, to initiate joint propaganda campaigns with the rest of the women’s movement on subjects of concern to industrial women. These aims allowed the SJCIWO to dovetail its work with the active suffrage societies’ campaigns. The WDL rightly said that the SJCWIO had adopted the role of ‘watchdog’ for women’s affairs during the war.

Minority groups learn to develop survival strategies and manipulate situations to advantage. It seems that this was exactly what the women’s movement did during the war. This meant that new links were forged that was intended to extend the feminist network. NUWSS branches created new alliances with groups working on women’s industrial issues. Old allegiances were strengthened as suffrage societies and women’s industrial groups worked together on committees such as the NUWSS’s Women’s Interest Committee. The movement’s handling of industrial circumstances to enhance its public standing and win concessions for women by refusing to concede to the status quo was yet another instance of political opportunism.

In August 1914, the suffrage societies had to make difficult decisions. The duty of supporting the nation while sustaining loyalty to relations and friends involved in the fighting was not an easy one to dispute and vied with suffrage women’s loyalty to personal political agendas. Whatever accommodations were made and whatever combinations of allegiance and action resulted, the continuity of the women’s movement was never threatened, nor the suffrage campaign abandoned. Women may have got the vote in 1918 because of political manoeuvring or as a ‘reward’ for their war effort but historians should not neglect the wartime experiences and activities of the suffrage societies.

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[1] For the suffrage movements during the war, see and Sandra Stanley Holton Feminism and democracy: women’s suffrage and reform politics in Britain 1900-1918, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pages 116-150 and Cheryl Law Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement 1918-1928, I. B. Tauris, 1997, pages 13-41.

[2] On this, see Anne Wiltsher Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War, Pandora Press, 1985 and Jill Liddington The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1920, Virago, 1989.

Women get the vote: What role did women play during the War?

Historians have described the First World War as the nation’s first experience of ‘total war’. By this, they mean a war in which society is organised in such a way that all available resources are channelled into the war effort. As a result, total war has an impact on the lives of everybody in society, not simply those directly involved in the fighting. Some of the experiences of the First World War that can be said to have made a social, cultural and psychological impact are as follows.

• The emotional trauma suffered by many men who were forced (because of conscription) to serve in the Armed Forces.
• There was widespread bereavement because of the death of family and friends.
• There were changes in diet and habits resulting from food rationing.
• People lived in a society in which government propaganda and government controls were more extensive than in pre-war society.
• The new experience that many upper and middle class women gained from taking up paid employment for the first time.

The social, cultural and emotional impact of the war was such that it has led some historians to argue that the period after 1918 witnessed a fundamental realignment of moral and social attitudes.  Stanislaw Andreski developed the idea of a ‘military participation ratio’ in the early 1950s[1]. He argued that, after a period of war, government rewards proportionately those sections of society on whose support it has depended. The greater the contribution made by the middle classes in a war, for example, the more likely a post-war government is to pass reforms to address middle class needs. The more ‘total’ the war and, therefore, the greater the involvement of the working class, the more likely that there is a post-war process of social levelling by removing class inequalities. According to Andreski, it was because the First World War was so large in scale and involved, for the first time, virtually all sections of society that Britain became a democracy in the 1918 and 1928 Representation of the Peoples Acts. The war itself was instrumental in providing the environment in which democracy could emerge.

Andreski’s theory has been challenged in a number of ways. First, he placed too great an emphasis on military participation suggesting that this was the key to post-war social levelling. Arguably, the most significant social change resulting from the war was the changed role and status of women. Yet, women’s direct military participation was, in Andreski’s terms, limited. Second, the idea of the ‘ratio’ implies that social change can be isolated and precisely measured. However, many of the changes that can be seen in British society in the post-war period can be traced back before 1914. Indeed, it could be argued that the war alone was responsible for few of the social changes that took place. Some historians suggest that, rather than initiating changes; the war accelerated and intensified changes that were already underway. Finally, Andreski’s theory has been seen as an oversimplification. Other societies, hardly affected by the First World War, showed similar patterns of development after 1918.

A different approach has been adopted by Arthur Marwick. He identifies four ‘dimensions’ that, he claims, help us to understand the complex inter-relationship between society and its experience of war. First, he identifies the destructive and disruptive dimension, the notion that destruction in the war created an impulse towards rebuilding after it. Second, there is a test dimension. This is the idea that wars place society under a great deal of pressure (that is, they provide a ‘test’) and society has to adapt to avoid defeat. Third, there is a participation dimension. This revolves round the idea that total war requires the involvement of under-privileged groups and their participation in the war changes attitudes towards them, bringing the possibility of social change after the war. Finally, the psychological dimension. War encourages intensity of emotions (for example, it encouraged hatred of the enemy) that stimulate a new cultural response.  The critical question is whether these ideas help to provide an explanation for why some women got the vote in 1918. Andreski’s theory of ‘direct military participation’ does not seem to relate directly to the experience of women who were non-combatants. If the notion is stretched to include those involved directly in the war effort, for example by taking over jobs so men could fight in the trenches, then Andreski may provide a possible explanation for women getting the vote in 1918. However, this only works if those women directly involved in war work got the vote in 1918. The 1918 Act gave the vote largely to middle class women not to the working class who made up the bulk of working women. Marwick’s dimension may provide a better explanation of why women got the vote in 1918, especially his emphasis on continuity between pre- and post-war experiences.

It has long been assumed that the most important indirect effect of the war was to bring about a fundamental change in attitudes towards women and their economic and social roles. This argument suggests that the vital contribution women made to the war effort opened the eyes of men to their capabilities and revealed them as citizens in every sense. There is certainly widespread newspaper and film evidence on women’s work that is very flattering. However, historians have increasingly come to regard much of the contemporary record as largely ephemeral. By 1918, the press had already begun to lose its enthusiasm for women workers who were now being urged to surrender their jobs to returning soldiers. By the 1920s, it was clear that there had not been a fundamental reappraisal of the role of the sexes and women were increasingly excluded from employment by the combined actions of employers, government and male-dominated trade unions. The extent to which the role and status of women changed during the after the First World War is at the heart of the debate about the nature and extent of change brought about by the war.

Some historians have argued that there is a direct link between the economic role of women during the war and the granting of the vote to most women over thirty in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. It was because women made a contribution to the war effort, they argue, that they won the right to vote after the war. Arthur Marwick argues “it is difficult to see how women could have achieved so much in anything like a similar time span without the unique circumstances arising from the war”[2]. Other historians argue that such an interpretation underplays the significance of the suffrage campaigns before 1914. Martin Pugh, for example, places greater emphasis on continuities and claims that the nature of the pre-war suffrage movement determined the shaped of legislation in 1918. He maintains, “It is significant that, where women who undertook male tasks during the war have left a record of their feelings, they seem to have taken in for granted that they were stepping in on a purely temporary basis and they vacated their jobs at the end of the war without protest. This is not surprising in view of the relatively conservative, middle-class nature of the pre-1914 women’s movement that had confined itself to the narrow question of the franchise and neglected the wider social objectives that the vote might have helped them to attain. In this light, either the grant of the franchise in 1918 to women over 30 who were local government electors themselves or wives of parliamentary electors is understandable. Members of Parliament were determined to keep women in a minority among voters, and to enfranchise only those who, as relatively mature family women, seemed likely to make up a stable, loyal section of the community.[3]“

By November 1918, 947,000 women were employed in the munitions industry. This was unpleasant and potentially dangerous work and more than 300 lost their lives because of TNT poisoning and explosions. Women also served with the military forces. There were 40,850 in Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Corps by the end of the war. Some 17,000 women were employed with the British Expeditionary Force in August 1918. Many of these were nurses. In all, the total number of women employed during the war rose form 5.96 million in 1914 to 7.31 million by 1918. Some changes were particularly striking. The number employed in metalworking rose from 170,000 to 594,000, in transport from 18,200 to 117,200, in commerce from 505,200 to 934,000. In national and local government, the number of female employees rose from 262,000 to 460,000. At the same time as the number of women in munitions and factories went up, the numbers working in ‘traditional’ areas of female employment such as domestic service and the clothing trade declined[4].

Although there was an overall rise in the number of women employed during the war, female employment was an established feature of many pre-war industries. What gave the impression of change was the temporary change in the background of the women employed. In particular, many middle class women took on jobs that had previously been done by working class women. It has been suggested that both the increase in and changing character of, female employment during the war has been exaggerated because of some historians’ readiness to rely too much on the evidence of contemporary propaganda. This was produced both by the government (that hoped to give the impression that it was solving a national crisis) and by feminists (who hoped to use the image of wartime involvement as a lever for further expansion of employment opportunities after the war)[5]. Despite the formation of the Women’s Land Army, there were only 23,000 more women working on the land in 1918 than there had been in 1914. It could be argued that the overall increase in the number of women employed during the war – around 1.5 million – was not particularly large. In addition, many women lost their jobs when the war was over. In fact, the overall percentage of women in work fell from 35 per cent in 1911 to 34 per cent in 1921. The net impact of the war was a temporary increase in female unskilled munitions workers and a permanent shift in the bulk of women’s employment from domestic service to white-collar and service-sector employment.

During the build-up to the 1918 Representation of the People Act, government propaganda suggested that the sacrifices made by women during the war had earned them the right to vote. When women were enfranchised, billboards announced “The Nation Thanks the Women”. In reality, most historians agree that there is little evidence that war service caused a change in attitude towards women’s political rights. The restrictions on women’s voting in 1918 suggest that there was little alteration in the treatment of women as second-class citizens. Men continued to oppose the idea that women should come out of the private sphere and into the workforce, because they believed that the employment of women would push their wages down. Attitudes towards women in work did not shift in any fundamental way.

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[1] Stanislaw Andreski Military Organisation and Society, Routledge, 1954.

[2] Arthur Marwick The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, 2^nd ed., Macmillan, 1991, page 333.

[3] Martin Pugh The Making of Modern British Politics 1867-1939, Blackwell, 1982, page 188.

[4] Arthur Marwick Women at war, Fontana, 1977 is both well written and well illustrated. Gail Braybon Women workers in the First World War, Routledge, 2^nd ed., 1989 looks in greater detail at industrial workers. Carol Twinch Women on the land: their story during two world wars, Lutterworth, 1990 considers the agrarian dimension. Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard Working for victory? Images of women in the First World War 1914-1918, Routledge, 1987 provide a visual dimension.

[5] On this issue, see Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard Working for victory? Images of women in the First World War 1914-1918, Routledge, 1987; it provides an interesting visual dimension.