The late 19th Century saw women alienated from men; they were repressed by church, marriage and traditional values. In the 1880’s women emerged objecting to the traditional balance of the sexes. Feminist ideas gained ground and spread, and a movement was being born. This movement mainly consisted of upper and middle class women due to its bourgeois origins. Viola Klein described it as starting in “ middle class drawing rooms ” . Industrialization multiplied the number of underpaid women, “ at every level of work, in the town as well as country, the economic exploitation of women aggravated the social inferiority of their sex” . Year by year the struggle for emancipation grew and grew, as new industries took women out of the home they were seen to be more valuable hence oppression grew smaller. However barriers to women’s freedoms still remained, although they were earning a wage men still held the power. Marriage was the key to this as John Short Mill described, “ No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word as a wife is ” . This image of women was slowly being dissolved though towards the end of the 19th century as concessions were being made. In 1870 and again in 1882 Property Acts were announced to give women the right to belongings after divorce, and in 1884 women could no longer be put in prison for not returning to the conjugal home. However authors like Cicely Hamilton were still talking about “marriage as a trade” it was really only until the next century by 1914 that aid was given so that all women could divorce. The transition between the 18th and 19th century was to be aided by changes in family life, including marriage and birth, the industrial context and of apparent significance World War One
In 1903 the Women’s Social and Political Union was formed. With cries of “ Votes for Women” the WSPU acted as a pressure group and claimed lots of publicity. However there was little real success and the group split in to two. One of these was the suffragette who started to use illegal violent methods, hence making more impact. The idea of a family wage was being dispersed as women went out to earn wages primarily for themselves. Women soon occupied 27 % of the labour force, and with a greater increase during World War One feminist’s hoped this signaled long-term change. Married life still remained a constant burden though, George Orwell in 1937 describes events when he offered to help a women, her reaction was to tell him “ lads up here expect to be waited on ” females in many regions maintained the mother and wife persona. Half as many married women worked as those who were single. However there was also a different view that could be taken as Ivy Penchbeck writing in the 1930s illustrated that behind men, better wages freed women from the, “ burden of work inside the home ”. This is could be seen as being due to a family now being able to afford a maid. In the interwar period working class women could hope to have gas, or think about moving to a home with a bathroom. Whilst middle class women could expect to have many labor saving devices, allowing them to have much more leisure time. As well as this factor birthrates were also going down due to a demographic transition, so this meant that women had in general more free time in which they could go out and pursue a job, or promote feminist ideas. Yet it is easy to think that women were active and making new demands but there were still those who were loyal to their husbands and really only wanted to acquire respectability. It was respectable for married women not to work, and to keep the house tidy, and those that did acquire jobs had to have respectable ones like factory work. World War One can be seen as a point in which many women were forced in to the workplace and help the effort, this to had been respectable.
The Great War of 1914 had huge consequences on the domestic population. As brave men went abroad to fight women were left to take their places, which allowed them to strengthen their emancipation. Jobs provided them with money, freedom and a general feeling of helping the cause. Thus war lead to a great expansion of female employment. Large numbers were drawn into war work, agricultural and clerical roles. Some women wanted even more, calling for ‘rights to serve’. Emmeline Pankhurst one of these supporters’ organized demonstrations in July of 1915. 1914 saw 212,000 women employed in engineering and munitions factories; by 1918 this had escalated to almost 1 million. War had accelerated female roles in the workplace, pre war 3 million had been employed in commerce and industry, and by 1918 this had reached 5 million . However as men returned when the war finished they took back their old jobs, meaning that many women lost their jobs and returned to their traditional roles. Therefore the war can be seen as only a temporary effect on women’s roles in society. In reality they had been given a taste of work and individual freedom. Women’s status improved as men gained respect for them as they had been of great value to the effort. Although immediately after the war female employment went down, between 1911 and 1921 female workers had gone up by a quarter of a million. In the short-term war appeared to have had a great effect on women’s lives, yet in the long term it had little real significance. In reality as John Stevenson points out, “ the war only accelerated and intensified the movement towards the emancipation of women” , as there were no real lasting affects.
Change for women had been moving at a great pace well before world War one however, Edwardian women were more politically aware, and active in relation to this. Education had also proved important to women, yet old boy networks still maintained an upper lip towards women in schools. However the increasing number of women being taught in these proprietary girls schools was creating a new breed of ambitious girls, who easily loosened family ties and were strong feminists. Opposition was always evident though, a prominent educationalist in 1911 described that girls need to be taught “ gentleness, and care for the young and helpless ” however opposition was being gradually worn down. Gradually women were being better heard in the house of commons, with men like George Butler talking about women’s suffrage bills in the house of commons between 1907 and 1912. Militant suffragettes and groups like the mother’s union became intent on protecting the status and dignity of women, and with involvements in trade unionism men could not ignore the plight of them. By the 1900s women had acquired the beginning of an equal legal framework to men, they could now divorce, or enter in to contracts at work, no longer having an obligation to the husband. It is right to believe that many women became individualistic working for their own satisfaction. However there were still a large number of unskilled poorly paid women in 1940 and so not all saw significant changes in the period.
