Women Flashcards
Political advancements 1918-39
- Vote 1918
- Vote 1928
- Constance Markievcz (SInn Fein MP 1918)
- Nancy Astor (GB Parliment 1919)
- Margaret Bonfield (first woman cabinet minister 1929)
BUT
-underrepresented as only 15 Con, 16 Lab, 4 Lib, 1 indep and 1 SF elected and this did not affect the party political balance.
Economic advances for women 1918-39
- Industrial courts act 1919 appointed women to work in newely established courts of arbitration pay and working condidtions.
- Pensions for widowed mothers and orphans 1925
- Young women made up 45% of female workforce (22% in personal service in 1921)
- Sectional? Northumberland 48% of girls worked, Blackburn 79%.
- was this just men faceing the finanicial realities after WW1 with more women in the workforce… if so.. is this really ‘change’?
Social change for women 1918-39
didn’t, wasnt until Attlee’s Welfare state that it changed.
Sexuality for women in the interwar period
1] The Eugenics Society was founded in 1907 and its view was that women as guardians of the future of the British ‘race’ should be both chaste and fruitful some arguing that the employment of married women led to a decline in virility and high infant mortality rates
2] The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 gave local authorities powers over pregnant women who were homeless, destitute or ‘immoral’
3] There was an attempt in 1921 to criminalise lesbianism. The Obscene Publications legislation was used to repress Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness written in 1928
4] the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 made adultery the sole grounds of divorce for either spouse. Further grounds were added in 1937 including a wife’s right to divorce her husband for rape.
5] Marie Stopes founded a birth control clinic but contraception was controversial and its availability largely confined to middle and upper class women. Abortion remained illegal although in 1929 legislation was passed making it legal to abort if the mother’s life was in danger. The Abortion Law Reform Association was formed in 1936 and a government committee was created to review the legislation in 1
