‘Winning the vote made little difference to women’s status in political life.’ Discuss.
It is true that the mere winning of the vote for women made little immediate difference to their status in political life, and yet, it was a necessary beginning to establishing and later asserting their power. As the great suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett stated, women’s suffrage did ‘not in itself represent any extensive change for it would come as a necessary corollary of other changes’. From 1918 onwards, while the limited suffrage opened by the Representation of the People Act provided the vehicle for the changes British women desired to see in their society, feminists and people with an interest in women’s issues were well aware that much work had to be done in order to contribute to their progression in political life.
This essay will begin with a brief summary of the state of women prior to 1918, as well as the aspirations and expectations of suffragists and anti-suffragists. Following this, it will describe how women were subsequently viewed as voters and political leaders by others of their sex, men, and the various political parties. The essay will assess how women sought to secure their interests, both politically and socially, and which methods were most effective. While significant changes for women did not happen quickly or immediately, this essay seeks to communicate the optimistic view that with time and the on-going determined efforts of feminists and other interested parties, women’s status in political life is becoming increasingly stronger, accepted, and respected.
To understand the effectiveness of the vote it is necessary to first establish what women’s political status was prior to 1918, and identify why so many fought to change the status quo. Before the passing of the Representation of the People Act, despite having no formal voice in central politics, many women were highly active in the public sphere, most especially at a local level. Some women chose to involve themselves in party organizations, and indeed by 1891, the Conservative’s Primrose League boasted of more than a million members. As Pugh explains, ‘party leaders seemed well satisfied with this system which allowed women to participate but left men in control of policy and government.’ These women volunteered their time and in return, it was understood that men would look after their interests on a larger scale. It was also acceptable to anti-suffragists that a women’s sphere of the domestic extend from the home to local government. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, single and married rate-paying women found themselves gradually enfranchised to oversee School Boards, Poor Law Boards, County Councils, and Parish and District Councils and remarkably, by 1907, women with the vote at these levels were officially allowed to be elected.
A limited local representation in politics, however, does not equate the widespread change that was necessary to addressing women’s issues nationwide—only with an official political status could women begin to assert their wants and needs. It is for this reason that feminists concentrated on suffrage as their main objective. Organisations such as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and the more militant and historically less effective Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by the sisters Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, through their respective means, gathered the interest of Members of Parliament, political parties, and enfranchised and disenfranchised citizens. The onset of the war, however, put an immediate stop to increasingly discussed women’s agenda of suffrage and began a thorough dedication towards supporting their country in the harsh conditions of war. Both suffragists and suffragettes of all walks of life offered their voices and hard work towards backing the war effort, proving throughout that they could be relied upon to perform their duties as citizens socially and within the labour force. While 3687 women joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WIL) by 1918, they represented only a very small number who prioritised individual opinion over the nation’s unified functionality. When criticised for completely halting all efforts towards attaining the vote during the First World War, Fawcett responded by pointing out that doing so was actually in women’s best interests: ‘Let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship whether our claim to it be recognised or not.’
In 1918, the reactions towards married or independently wealthy women over the age of thirty gaining the vote spanned a broad spectrum. A noted historian, Martin Pugh’s analysis of why women were included in the Fourth Reform Act is very revealing of the male and male politician’s point of view. He suggests a combination of four reasons for the passing of the act: firstly, the momentum of the suffrage movement established prior to the war; secondly, the patient and un-provoking pressure of a somewhat revived though muted suffrage movement during the war; thirdly, the oft cited newly gained respect for women after their splendid wartime work; and fourthly, the necessity of expanding the electorate after the losses of the war. As Pugh shrewdly points out, however, given that the act stipulates an age limit and places a heavy importance on marriage, the passing of this reform does not necessarily imply an approval or even happy acceptance of women’s new role in politics. Under the guise of recognising the suffragist effort, it was a solution to the problem of expanding the electorate. More than anything, it suggests that male MPs believed married women of a certain age would be less volatile and less likely to demand a change to the status quo.
Historian David Jarvis’ study on how the Conservatives appealed to the female electorate in the interwar years furthers the notion that many men still feared women’s political status. While the Conservative party rightly recognised that women are a valuable source of support, the means through which they attempted to rally it reveal that their faith in women was not nearly as progressive. To Conservatives, male and female alike, the political duties of women should always come second to her domestic priorities. The party’s publication for ladies, Home and Politics, pandered to women’s domestic role by comparing politics to household duties. In 1928, when the vote for both men and women was to be open from the age of twenty-one, it introduced a series of stories wherein the wise and maternal Mrs. Maggs helped the impressionable and confused Betty understand what was what in politics. Even when running a female candidate for a Parliamentary seat, which they did do rather consistently, the Conservatives still upheld the traditional role of women by informally using the tactic of ‘male equivalence’. That is to say, female candidates were not presented as individuals with their own ideas and abilities, but rather, as the daughter, sister, or wife of a man with good ideas and abilities. As Melville Currell writes, ‘the implication, then, is an ‘inherited’ role, a carry-over from the male to the female, almost an imitative role.’ Even as political figures within the Conservative party, women’s status did not belong uniquely to them.
In relation to Labour’s view of women, Brian Harrison adds more flippantly, ‘Labour women often entered parliament because they had married their party, Conservative women often entered because they had married their husbands’. The Labour party, surprisingly, was not the ally it could have been. While it did pursue issues, social welfare for example, which were of women’s interest, despite—or perhaps, because of— its dedication to matters of human dignity, under which gender and class were undistinguishable, beyond equal enfranchisement the party never adopted a feminist agenda and never singled out women as a cause to rally around. Martin Francis points out ‘that the Labour Party had been founded primarily not to advance feminism, nor socialism for that matter, but to defend the interests of male manual workers’. While women found that they could not (easily) be elected into Parliament without subscribing to party politics, the relationship was not an even one as parties obviously held no special regard for a women’s agenda, despite of women counting for fifty per cent of their electorate.
According to Harrison, women in Parliament did not necessarily band together, but more often than not, stood with their parties. Although party politics were not always friendly to women, between 1918 and 1928, Pugh counted at least twenty major acts of legislation directly relating to women’s interests. As Eleanor Rathbone reflected in the mid-1930s, ‘these periods of action and reaction are common to all great movements. The only way to meet them is to take full advantage of every favourable wind and tide in public opinion.’ Public opinion is the key to party politics and it is for this reason women’s organisations were and are so very much important to the female agenda. Groups such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), formerly NUWSS, aimed to support any candidate willing to publicly work towards their interests. Their agenda, along with that of the Six Point Group, concentrated on putting women and men on an equal level by means of reformative legislation. Among the issues was equal pay for equal work, equal moral standard, pensions for widows and children, equalisation of franchise, equal guardianship over children. It is interesting to note that when it became difficult to get women involved at a political level, it was because ‘women were giving their energies to the Women’s Citizens Associations or Women’s Institutes’.
In 1992, Pugh, stated that it was still too early to tell whether winning the vote was a victory for women and predicted that as with other newly enfranchised groups, it would take roughly sixty years for their influence to be obvious. His long term approach to assessing the oft debated question is one that Pat Thane applauds writing in 2001. Thane believes that historians have been traditionally too narrow when analysing whether the vote made much different to women’s status in political life. While other historians have often attributed the lack of sweeping changes in the years following enfranchisement, Thane asserts that this cannot be seen as a failure if the suffragists of the time did not themselves expect immediate change. Their course of action was to create societies like NUSEC and the Six Point group to promote women’s interests in as wide a way as possible. In referring to feminism and women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, Joyce Gelb discusses how British political, economic, and societal structures are reflective of traditional philosophies and values, ineffective bureaucratic systems, and a non-progressive economy. This implies a rooted issue in society that must be addressed, and such changes do not occur over a short period of time.
As many suffragists and feminists discovered after attaining the vote in 1918, and indeed, as women’s interest individuals and groups in the contemporary twenty first century understand, women’s full status in political life can only be attained when men and women enjoy the same opportunities and expectations. That is to say, only when women and men earn identical salaries for the same job description, hold a similar number of high status, high paying careers, or each represent roughly fifty per cent of government (including cabinet and ministry positions), can women be said to command full political status. In the 94 years since 1918, the vote has made much significant difference to women’s status in political life.

Bibliography
Alberti, Johanna, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914-1928, (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1989).
Currell, Melville, Political Women, (London: Croom Helm, 1974).
Francis, Martin, ‘Labour and Gender’, in Duncan Tanner, Path Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo (eds.), Labour’s First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 191-220.
Gelb, Joyce, ‘Feminism in Britain: Politics Without Power?’, in Drude Dahlerup (ed.), The New Women’s Movement: Feminism and Political Power in Europe and the USA (London: Sage Publications, 1986), pp. 103-121.
Harrison, Brian, ‘Women in a Men’s House: The Women M.P.s, 1919-1945’, The Historical Journal, 29:3 (1986), pp. 623-654.
Jarvis, David, ‘Mrs. Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History 5:2 (1994), pp. 129-52.
Pugh, Martin, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914-1959 (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1992).
----- Women’s Suffrage in Britain 1867-1928 (London: The Historical Association, 1980, rev. bibl. 1986).
Thane, Pat, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 253-288.