The Missing Two Million: The Exclusion of Working-class Women from the 1918 Representation of the People Act

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the extent to which the extension of the franchise to some women in 1918 resulted in a measureable change in attitudes towards women, and particularly working-class women. This article will demonstrate that roughly two million women over the age of 30 continue to be disenfranchised by the 1918 Representation of the People Act, the vast majority of them working-class women who were unable to ‘buy into’ the franchise through property ownership or local rates payments. The suffragists working on the extension of the franchise between 1918 and 1928 focused almost exclusively on the younger unenfranchised women, with almost no attention paid to the two million women over 30 who were still excluded from the franchise on the basis of their class. It will therefore argue that although partial enfranchisement did result in progress being made in (some) women’s legal status, many working-class women continue to be denied citizenship until 1928, while the class bias of the pre-war suffrage movement continued to pervade inter-war feminism.

Keywords

• gender
• feminism
• class
• women’s suffrage
• 1918
• Representation of the People Act