Source I
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... to Success
Victory
In
February 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst had fallen out with her mother and sister,
and formed her own East London Federation of Suffragettes.
Unlike the WSPU, it was working class, and wanted the vote as just
one way to improve the condition of poor women.
On 20 June, she took a deputation of East London working-class
women to see Asquith: Source J
Stout
old Mrs Savoy, the brush-maker, jolly and brave…
In spite of her poverty she was ever ready to share her last
crust… Motherly,
anxious Mrs Payne. Mrs
Bird, the wife of a transport worker… Mrs Parsons, a frail little woman Mrs Watkins.
Mrs Scarr, who till the advent of the Suffragettes in 1905–6
had been a ‘quiet housewife’…
They
brought before the Prime Minister, in simple, moving phrases, the
toilsome life of poor women.
Always they returned to their demand for a place in the
constitution – a vote for every woman over 21.
Each woman repeated and emphasized the demand in her own fashion.
Asquith’s
reply revealed an unmistakable softening in his long hostility; almost
he seemed to declare himself a convert! Sylvia
Pankhurst, The
Suffragette Movement (1931). Asquith
was not converted – what he said was that ‘I have listened with the
greatest interest…
if [women’s suffrage] has to come, we must face it boldly’.
However, it was the beginning of a change in his attitudes to
women’s suffrage.
During
the First World War, women worked alongside men to defeated the enemy. They joined the armed forces as cook, carpenters and
drivers. They served as
nurses on the Western Front. At
home, they worked in arms factories, and as firemen, bus drivers and
navvies. Politicians,
including Asquith, lined up to praise them (Source J).
1917
was a year of crisis for the government.
The battle of Passchendaele was going badly, and the French
soldiers mutinied, threatening to take the French out of the war
altogether. People – particularly those men soldiers who did
not have the vote because they were not ratepayers – were asking what
was in the war for them.
The government had to look to maintaining morale, and began to
speak about making ‘a land fit for heroes’ when the war was over.
In 1917, the government decided to give the soldiers the vote. The women suffragist societies demanded that they, too, be included. In May 1917 the Representation of the People Bill was debated in the Commons and passed by a large majority, and in 1918 it became law, giving the vote to women over the age of 30. Historians debate whether the war was instrumental in gaining women the vote.
Source dMen
and women united in a common cause
The
cover of the War Worker magazine, June 1917 Source eMale
attitudes to women workers during the First World War Attitudes to women workers remained, in many cases, negative. The ability of women to take on that had been men’s work meant that increasing numbers of males were vulnerable to conscription. Some women doing skilled work had the full co-operation of male employees. Many other women were restricted to less skilled work and were victims of hostility and even of sabotage. From
War and Society in Britain 1899–1948, by Rex Pope, an
historian, 1991.
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