During the war almost 60,000 women also volunteered to serve in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. They were employed as clerks, mechanics, nurses and munitions workers at home, or sent to the Western Front to work as cooks and medical personnel. The Corps was directed by the physician Mona Chalmers Watson, who believed it represented ‘an advance of the women’s movement’ that softened the frontiers of gender. The ‘war-working type of woman’ appeared on the home front, sporting cropped hair, overalls and boots. Given the nature of their work, and the wartime fabric shortages, their attire had to be plain and practical. Frilly Edwardian dresses were replaced by short skirts, trousers or shorts. Along with the new jobs, clothes and freedom came a new confidence, which bred a determination never to return to the old dispensation.
The male establishment was fulsome in its praise of the women’s war effort. ‘How could we have carried on the war without them?’ Asquith remarked. ‘Short of actually bearing arms in the field, there is hardly a service … in which women have not been as active and as efficient as men.’ The former prime minister now declared himself a convert to the cause of women’s enfranchisement. As the fighting came to an end, many politicians agreed that granting women the vote might be a ‘fitting recognition’ of their contribution to the war. In private they admitted to other, more pragmatic reasons for extending the franchise: ‘As the atmosphere after the conclusion of the war cannot be calm,’ remarked one Liberal peer, there might be a return to pre-war suffragette agitation ‘if the grant of the vote is refused’. When a law conceding the vote to women over thirty reached the statute book in 1918, the victory belonged to the suffragettes who had campaigned before the war as well as to the women who had served during it.
The 1918 Representation of the People Act enfranchised over 8 million women, yet it was hardly a fitting recognition of women’s great wartime contribution, let alone an adequate response to suffragette calls for electoral equality. Under the terms of the act younger women were still denied the vote. As for parity with men, it preserved the gender gap by enfranchising all men over twenty-one years of age and all servicemen over nineteen, regardless of property qualification. In contrast, women over thirty received the vote only if they were either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register, a property owner or a graduate voting in a university constituency. The extension of the male franchise added over 5 million men to the electorate, and meant that women accounted for approximately 35 per cent of all voters, despite outnumbering men by almost 2 million.
The 1918 Representation of the People Act set the tone of post-war legislation relating to women. New laws promised great steps forward, but equality remained distant. As a result of the 1919 Sexual Disqualification Act and the Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children Act 1920, women could no longer be sacked because of their sex, while they were also permitted to become MPs, university students, architects and lawyers. Yet they were still barred from Cambridge University and the Stock Exchange, while their entry into medical professions was severely restricted.
One of the biggest blows to the cause of female equality was the dismissal of 750,000 women who had worked in factories on the home front, which left the proportion of females in employment lower than it had been before the war. The 1918 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act effectively re-established women as second-class workers, much to the relief of the overwhelmingly male trade unions who were anxious to secure work for male members returning from the front. Many on the left preached equality, but only for men. Labour was still a masculine party, despite the fact that work was no longer an exclusively male preserve. Some Labour MPs joined Unionists and right-wing male journalists in blaming the widespread male unemployment of the early Twenties on women. Few now spoke of women as the ‘saviours of the nation’.
During the Twenties, the attacks on women’s independence continued. Legislation specifically aimed at women tended to identify them as wives and mothers by concentrating on maternity or widowhood. A marriage bar was also introduced in professions such as the civil service and teaching, which meant that the many women who had been employed in these sectors in wartime now had to choose between work and marriage, with the implicit encouragement to select the latter.
Yet veteran feminists were on hand to protect the younger generation of women from the propaganda. The British author Rebecca West explained to her young ‘sisters’ that ‘the woman who does not realize that by reason of her sex she lives in a beleaguered city, is a fool who deserves to lose (as she certainly will) all the privileges that have been won for her by her more robustly minded sisters’. Guided by the old guard, many young women were able to lead confident and independent lives, despite the male establishment. The self-assurance of the young women of the decade seemed so radical to contemporaries that they were given a new name: ‘flappers’. In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute; in Edwardian England it was applied to young women who enjoyed the latest dances. The post-war flapper came to denote a young, zesty and sexually confident girl. By the early Twenties the term would imply all of these elements, and more – youth, unconventionality, impetuousness, independence, sexual heterodoxy, hedonism, confidence, high-spiritedness, a passion for fashion and the mimicking of masculinity.
The word ‘flapper’ was uttered by middle-aged men in a tone of stern disapproval. In a public lecture, one physician, Dr R. Murray-Leslie, condemned ‘the social butterfly type … the frivolous, irresponsible, undisciplined, scantily clad, jazzing “flapper”’. Yet demographics were against these male critics, since women now outnumbered men, especially among the younger sections of the population. The spirit of the age also favoured the flappers. In the Twenties young people were determined to drink and dance away the searing memories of war, while the old men who had brought about the carnage were to be laughed at, lambasted or ignored. Young women proudly appropriated the word flapper, using it to describe themselves and their sisters.
Some flappers came from the lower middle classes. Secretaries, waitresses, journalists, receptionists, teachers and shop assistants worked hard by day and caroused by night. Many of these ‘career girls’ were able to maintain independence from their families. Even if most could not afford to live away from their parents, they insisted on having a key to let themselves in after a ‘night on the tiles’. Yet it was mainly upper-middle-class or upper-class flappers who attracted the eye of novelists and journalists in the Twenties. Nina Blount, the daughter of a wealthy colonel in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (1930), offers a glorious archetype. On being asked if she’d ‘mind’ being seduced, she replies ‘not as much as all that’. The sexual experience following this exchange was probably unsatisfactory, to judge by a comment Nina makes later in the noveclass="underline" ‘All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure, I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.’