Elite women became professional nurses, progressing naturally from part-time voluntary work. A separate training programme for ‘lady’ probationers began in 1860, requiring an elite woman to complete her training in one year, rather than the two or three years for working-class recruits, and housed lady probationers in their own exclusive halls of residence.305 The Royal College of Nursing (for training nurses) was founded during the war, in 1916.

  After centuries of criticism, midwives received official training in 1902, and in 1910 those who were not certified were banned from practising.306 This represented a further attack on experienced but unqualified women healers and had the effect of medicalising birth and driving pregnant women from their homes and into hospitals to give birth. But midwives who could afford the training and gain the qualification won professional status and membership of a professional association.

  But women doctors were excluded from training and work after the war, in order to accommodate men who wanted to return to medicine or train as doctors. St George’s Hospital, London, stopped admitting women as clinical students in 1919, fearful that new male doctors would have to work under a better-qualified woman: an ‘intolerable’ position for ‘an ex-Service man who has, perhaps, as his House Surgeon over him, a girl of twenty-two’, according to medical students complaining of the competition. The London Hospital promoted a woman doctor to a residency in 1922 and her male colleagues threatened to resign. Hospitals all around the country refused to train women, explaining that women would marry and give up their practice, and that the course covered topics inappropriate for them.307

  Part 8

  1928–1945

  Into the World

  Women Get the Vote

  For the first time in England, in May 1929, all women over the age of 21 had the right to vote in the general election. Nicknamed the ‘flapper election’ by the popular press, denigrating the seriousness of the young female vote, the three parties – Conservative, Liberal and Labour – specifically campaigned to young women. Labour and Liberal emphasised equality for women in their posters, while Conservatives offered welfare for mothers and families and dedicated an entire poster campaign to cheaper tea.

  The 1929 Conservative Party poster campaign calling women to show their gratitude for the suspension of tax on tea

  ‘What do the Tea Leaves Say?’, Conservative Party poster, 1929 (Public domain)

  Some women who had spent their lives campaigning for the vote believed they had won it for their war service; others thought they had only been given it so that no working-class men would have a vote when elite women did not – a bitter victory. Votes from the newly enfranchised men and women were spread across the three parties, and the Labour Party formed a minority government, with 14 women MPs – only 2.3 per cent of the whole. One was Ellen Wilkinson, who called herself a ‘flaming socialist’.

  She believed that class not sex caused working women’s suffering: ‘The woman who earns her living, whether as a wife or a wage earner . . . is suffering mainly from the wrongs that afflict all her class,’ she wrote. Wilkinson, and many post-campaign women, wanted an improvement for all working and poor people.1

  Women found it hard to identify and campaign for women’s causes – there was rarely a united female response to any single question. Class remained deeply divisive: upper-class ladies had little in common with working-class women; middle-class women measured their social rise by leaving their working-class roots behind.2 Women employers, landowners and business people had a vested interest in keeping wages down and rents up. Even when feminists demanded equal wages for equal work, they favoured single women as the surviving marriage bars in some professions put wives out of work. Ironically, when feminists called for a benefit to be paid to mothers, it only rewarded married women who stayed at home.3

  The Great Depression stalled discussion about working women’s rights, causing devastating unemployment, which fell hard on women workers. Britain’s world trade halved, and in 1932, 3.5 million people (of a population of 18 million) found themselves out of work. Heavy industries, mostly sited in northern England, were hit the worst, with unemployment reaching 70 per cent in some regions. People went hungry and childhood malnutrition became common. The counties around London avoided the worst poverty, thanks to the development of new light industries of electrical goods and cars, and a boom in house-building.

  Poor women grew poorer as wealthy women maintained their high standards of living. The defeat of the trade unions in the General Strike meant they were too weakened to defend the poor and unemployed against economic collapse and new laws. Jean Edmonds, daughter of a Liverpool docker, remembered: ‘Poverty was all around us and it was only later that I was to discover the reason for my own father’s irregular and low paid work. In 1926 during the General Strike in support of the locked-out miners, my father had been involved in active strike action and as such, had been a marked man ever since . . . It was that huge defeat and betrayal of the 1926 General Strike that made it so hard for us to fight against the most horrible mass unemployment, hunger and poverty in the 1930s.’4

  Marjorie Broad, a schoolgirl in Yorkshire, remembered the miners’ children: ‘Our village school also took pupils from the nearby mining village of Moorends; they often came to school shoeless, even in winter . . . I recall there was a “Poor Law” official who, if you applied for help, would come to the house and assess your request. But you’d have had to sell your furniture to raise funds first, only being allowed to retain the beds.’5

  The Labour Party was anxious not to appear radical. A woman minister of labour and former trade union leader, Margaret Bondfield, passed the Anomalies Act of 1931, disqualifying 180,000 wives from a benefits scheme even though they had paid contributions. Welfare payments were set below the minimum amount required to buy food and maintain health, according to the British Medical Association in 1933.6

  The Means Test of 1931 gave inspectors the right to examine the finances of the whole household before granting any benefits to wives, mothers or children. Jean Edmonds in Liverpool remembered ‘the neighbouring family being visited by a means test inspector on the eve of their baby son’s funeral and told that they would have to pawn the table under the coffin, before they could qualify for unemployment relief’.7

  In October 1936, Ellen Wilkinson led 200 unemployed men on a march from the town of Jarrow in Tyneside, north-east England. Eighty per cent of the workforce in the steel and shipyard town were unemployed; child mortality was double the national average.8 The unemployed men marched nearly 300 miles to the House of Commons, with a 12,000-name petition, begging for help. Official trade unions refused to support the march, and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would not meet them. After the marchers had delivered the petition, it was promptly lost – the matter was not debated in the Houses of Parliament, and the government offered no assistance.9 It was a dramatic demonstration of the indifference of the wealthy men and women in government to the want and despair of the working classes.

  Nora Boswell, a girl of the middle classes, said: ‘Aged 24, my mother went to see the Jarrow marchers at Covent Garden. When she saw students throwing cabbages at them, she laughed. Years later, she told me she had never ceased to feel guilty for that laugh. It was, I think, a moment that began a change in her view of others.’10

  ‘Jarrow’s plight, is not a local problem. It is the symptom of a national evil.’ Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947), Labour MP on the hunger march of 1936

  [And Cover] Ellen Wilkinson by unknown photographer, Hyde Park, 1 November 1936 (Daily Herald Archive/Getty Images)

  The Great Depression divided politicians proposing political and economic solutions from the left and right wings. Women also joined both political extremes, as shown in women’s response to the Spanish Civil War when they volunteered on both sides. Edith Pye from the Society of Friends, the Quakers, brought 4,000 refugees from Bilbao into England.11 The Communist Party of Great Britain recruited women into leadership roles but had no specific policies on women’s rights or sexism.

  The British Fascisti, Britain’s first fascist organisation, was formed by former Scout and ex-servicewoman Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman (1895–1935) in 1923,12 but her movement lost members to the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under Sir Oswald Mosley. Lady Maud Mosley (Sir Oswald’s mother) launched a women’s section, with some confusion over fascist policy on women, some of whom expected equality in the front line of the struggle, while other women recruits rather hoped that they would be paid to stay at home.13 Lady Mosley handed over leadership to activist Mary Richardson, who had slashed a famous painting, the Rokeby Venus, in a suffragette protest in 1914. She wrote in The Blackshirt, the movement’s magazine: ‘I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffragette movement.’14

  Fascist women supported male political campaigners and acted directly, stewarding meetings, where they targeted women demonstrators, campaigning on the streets and standing for Parliament: 10 per cent of BUF candidates were women, a proportion that would not be achieved by other parties until the 1980s.15 The BUF produced feminist policies: Anne Brock-Giggs explained that housewives would have proper representation, there would be equal pay and higher wages, and the bar on married women working would be abolished in order to free women to work for the nation. Women would be helped with families too – financial and medical assistance would improve the health of the nation’s poor, and contraception would be available in the hope of reducing the family sizes among those considered inferior.16 Fascists believed that women should ‘fulfil their nature’: Oswald Mosley wrote, ‘We want men who are men, and women who are women.’17 So that’s clear.

  Antisemitism was introduced into the BUF’s rhetoric from German Nazis and the fascists started to attack Jewish people. In Stepney, London, there were frequent attacks on the streets,18 and a mob stoned the windows of a laundry to prevent Jewish girls attending a laundry class.19 The BUF planned a huge march through London’s East End, but the display of militaristic power, which they hoped would overawe people, actually united the poor, working class, immigrants and Jewish people of the area into determined opposition to the march. Local people acting in spontaneous self-defence, blocked the proposed route and fought hand-to-hand with the police who attempted to clear the way for the fascist parade. Later named the Battle of Cable Street, it proved a turning point for British fascism, which found working people, Jewish and Irish people united against it.20

  Women joined in the battle: of 79 anti-fascist protesters arrested at Cable Street, 8 were women. Local communist activist Phil Piratin recalled: ‘It was along Cable Street that from the roofs and the upper floors, people, ordinary housewives, and elderly women too, were throwing down milk bottles and other weapons and all kinds of refuse that they didn’t any longer want in the house onto the police.’21 Women were on the street as well. Sarah Wesker, a Jewish trade union organiser, led protests, and Jewish 12-year-old Joyce Rosenthal said: ‘The police . . . were just hitting everyone. There were women going down under the horses hooves.’22

  Rosenthal saw a 16-year-old boy climb a lamppost and shout to the crowd: ‘Don’t be yellow bellies, forward, we are winning!’ Four years later they met, and she asked him if ‘“he was the nutcase up the lamp post?” . . . he was just her type’.23

  Another eyewitness at the police station said he saw ‘a huge policeman drag in a young woman, rip off her blouse and hold his truncheon as if to strike her in the face. She stared straight at him and, with defiance in her voice, said: “I am not afraid of you.” As the room went quiet, the policeman called her a Jewish bitch and put her in a cell.’24

  The people who protested at their neighbourhood being cleared so that a militaristic parade could be marched through their streets found themselves accused by the pro-fascist newspapers of leaderless riot. Time magazine wrote: ‘Ignoring orders from the Labour Party and prominent British Labour leaders, half a million British proletarians liberally sprinkled with Jews went on an anti-fascist rampage last week which turned out to be London’s biggest riot in years.’25 It was the traditional complaint that a spontaneous uprising of poor people was a ‘riot’.

  As tensions grew in Europe, preparation for another war stimulated the economy with increased demand for munitions, and sidelined the debate over feminism and women’s rights. Women divided into those who were for and against the coming war. Even women pacifists were not united, as some called for peace despite the defeat of the Spanish government and the rise of Nazi Germany, and some supported rearmament to enforce peace from a strong negotiating position.26

  Work

  The Great Depression drove more women out of work and contributed to a sense that they should not be employed. Nostalgia – for the time before the First World War – rekindled the separate spheres dream of a breadwinning father successful in the wider world and a wife and mother providing a nurturing, spiritual home. No longer were men idolised as adventurers, explorers and soldiers; doubts about empire and the horror of the war inspired an appreciation of peaceful domestic lives, ‘family’ men, good husbands, fathers and fair-playing sportsmen.27 The separate spheres ideal evolved into an imaginary partnership where an ideal husband was still the chief breadwinner but now he participated in family life. The wife and mother was still the creator of the home, managing ethics and appearances, but this ought not to be self-sacrifice – now the stay-at-home wife was supposed to find her home a source of emotional satisfaction and pride.

  The falling birth rate meant smaller families and higher expectations of mothering. Children – now banned from work – should be at home and school, being improved rather than exploited. Mothering – defined as natural to all women – was heavily promoted as a ‘noble calling’. Although childcare was supposed to come naturally to women, and all women instinctively know how to care for a baby and child, there was a rapid expansion of expert advisors and child psychologists who taught that babies and children needed firm discipline, clear boundaries and a regular timetable. Mothers were expected to know by their nature what they should do, but natural informal spontaneous behaviour was wrong. Childcare required a strict timetable, just like industrial work. Children should be prepared for the working world.

  The war raised questions about the quality of men available to serve as soldiers. Many conscripted men were rejected by the army for disabilities and poor health, and this was believed to be the fault of inadequate mothering. It was widely agreed that women must leave the jobs that should only ever have been temporary, get back into the house and make good homes for working men and healthy children.28

  Housework too must be made more efficient and scientific. Specialists in housework, now rebranded as ‘Domestic Science’, advised women in magazines, and girls at school, that it was a serious profession, suitable for an educated woman.29 But the equipment for housework and cooking, built in factories and serviced and maintained by specialists, did not empower housewives – it turned them into workers who operated machines, without knowing how they worked, or even what was the value of their work.

  Whatever they were called, housewives were not ‘home-makers’, ‘domestic scientists’ or ‘home technicians’ – they were consumers, working unpaid, buying kit to do simple tasks, using chemicals as instructed on the packets. Traditional skills of baking and brewing, cleaning and textile work were lost from women and passed from the kitchen to the factory. New gadgets may have been ‘labour-saving’ – doing work faster or more efficiently – but the time saved was not taken by women for leisure. The gadgets raised standards and so created more work, and longer hours for women.30

  The expansion of light industry and the invention of the assembly line suited women workers and the new factories paid better wages to attract all women without a marriage bar. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, some families were wholly dependent on the woman’s wage. But unions tried to preserve jobs for men and maintain unequal wages to advantage men: ‘Most of our present ills are traceable to the policy of employing less men and more women,’ wrote the general secretary of the Post Office Workers’ Union in 1931.31

  Women managed to get a ‘Domestic Servant Charter’ and a ‘Nurse Charter’ on the trade union demands, but they were opposing a mood – supported by fascist propaganda, plus the new fashion for domesticity, plus the old breadwinner wage argument, plus the separate spheres ideology, plus the new science of mothering – that women should be at home. It was a perfect storm that blew women back into unpaid domestic work in their homes.

  The Married Women’s Property Acts of the nineteenth century had created, by accident, a situation in which wives might control their own wealth but husbands were still liable for their wives’ debts. ‘In this case we ought to consider the rights of husbands,’ said Lord Chancellor Viscount Cave in 1925. Husbands – who had enjoyed the wealth of their wives for more than 800 years – rushed to resolve injustice when it went against them, and got the anomaly fixed in a record 50 years.32

  The Married Women’s Property Acts left some women’s fortune in trusts controlled by male trustees. Edwina Mountbatten (1901–60), one of the richest women in Britain, heiress to the financier Sir Ernest Cassel, ran up tens of thousands of pounds in debt as Vicereine of India (wife to Earl Mountbatten of Burma), and brought a private bill to Parliament to allow her to break the restraint on her inheritance. The government introduced its own bill and the Law Reform Act of 1935 abolished trusts to serve as restraints on heiresses and ended the liability of husbands for their wives’ debts.33