Women’s Suffrage

1. Women’s Suffrage The Impact of the First World War

2. Changing Behaviour and Attitudes • The conflict involved a huge human effort • Three quarters of a million were killed and a million seriously injured • People who lived through those years detected changes • Robert Roberts in “The Classic Slum” observed “the First World War cracked the form of English lower class life and began an erosion of its socio-economic layers that has continued to this day.”

3. Changing Attitudes to Women • Women’s services were needed in a whole range of occupations • Factory work brought better pay and more free time • It demonstrated women’s ability to undertake employment from which they had previously been excluded • It demonstrated the crucial importance of their contribution to the economy at a time of crisis

4. Changing Attitude cont. • A Marwick, The Deluge 1965 quotes “The wartime business girl is to be seen any night dining out or alone with a friend….Formerly she would never have had her evening meal in town unless in the company of a man friend. But now with money and without men she is more and more beginning to dine out.”

5. Changing Attitude of Women • Robert Roberts in “The Classic Slum” is quoted “ It undoubtedly snapped strings that had bound them in so many ways to the Victorian age ….. Master had gone to war and Misses ruled the household….The events in 1914-18 ,then, did not start, but they accelerated significantly, a movement already well developed, one which would go some way to release that other general undermass of the time – the working class women of Britain.”

6. Historian Views • M Pugh in “The Making of Modern Britain” “The experience and response of the mass of people during the First World War were of major importance in shaping the modern pattern of British politics.” • G E Mingay in “The Transformation of Britain” writes “ World War One marked the end of old Britain, the beginning of the new. Life was never quite the same again.” • Historians in general agree about the importance of the Great War

7. Women and war • Suffragettes and Suffragists ceased campaigning at the outbreak of war. • Mrs Pankhurst’s magazine The Suffragette was turned into the pro war Britannia • Suffragists tended to be more critical of the war than followers of the WSPU • A Marwick (Historian) takes the view that the war helped bring about the electoral reform of 1918 which gave women over 30 the vote. • M Pugh is more cautious commenting that “ careful study tends to show how little change resulted from the war, not how much”