From the 1870s to the 1930s women went through different situations, during that period women contributed to society changes, started movements for their beliefs, and started a new era for women. Women were ready for a change in society. Women did not want to be known as weak anymore, they did not want to be known as having to depend on anyone. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s (WCTU) president Francis Willard was to make the idea the women no longer exist. Frances Willard said, a wider freedom is coming to the women of America.
Source 34 is an extract from the ‘Manchester Guardian’ on the 6th August, 1929. It says “Without the faithful preparation of the ground over many years by Dame Millicent Fawcett and her colleagues, neither militancy nor the war could have produced the crop”. This shows that the suffragist movement was key to women achieving the vote. The suffragettes were another group protesting for votes for women; however they used active protesting, and were open only to women. Suffragettes were founded by suffragists who had become frustrated with the suffragists’ slow pace.
CHAPLIN TO CHURCHILL INTRODUCTION There was a time when women used to face many problems while living in the society. However, this trend has been changed but women have to follow various tactics in order to maintain harmony in the society and to stay at par with men. It took a lot for them to resolve the struggles of equal rights and to implement the same in real world without giving rise to any controversy. A few years ago women were never seen in influential roles due to many discriminatory factors but now the whole era has been changed and many women can be seen performing really well even better than men. This only has become possible due to the hardships faced by women in old times and how they fought for their rights
The lives of women on the home front were greatly changed by World War 1 How useful and reliable are these sources in explaining how women’s lives were changed by World War 1? In the beginning on the 20th century lives of women greatly changed women had a specific role of society which was to take care of the children and the husband. Most women were in domestic service but some during the war would take over their husband’s jobs but after the war four million servicemen came back and women were forced to resign but if they didn’t go back to the domestic service then the benefits would drop to try and force the women to work. There had been limited progress for women before 1914 so women decided to join groups like the suffragettes to protest for the right to vote. Giving the women right to vote had been a disaster that some had predicted.
A widespread attitude was that women’s roles and men’s roles did not overlap. This idea of “separate spheres” held that women should concern themselves with home, children, and religion, while men took care of business and politics. North Carolina opponents of woman suffrage, or voting, claimed that “women are not the equal of men mentally” and being able to vote “would take them out of their proper sphere of life.” Though slow to use their newly won voting rights, by the end of the decade, women were represented on local, state, and national political committees and were influencing the political agenda of the federal government. More emphasis began to be put on social improvement, such as protective laws for child labor and prison reform. Women active in politics in 1929 still had little power, but they had begun the journey to actual political equality.
He warns women against vocations of preaching or politics, explaining that they can influence public opinion in their homes and communities.” They were strictly housewives and were destined to raise children. As the Industrial Revolution began, the women became more active in the labor force. The Industrial Revolution seemed to be a turning point for many women. Due to the Civil War and the start of the Industrial Revolution, women became involved in more labor-intensive jobs. Although the Industrial Revolution started before the war, with men leaving to fight for the Confederacy or the Union, women needed to start taking the places of men.
This provides your essay with a clear, structured argument. In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave women over 30 the vote, if they owned property or were married to a property owner. The major reason for women receiving the vote has been a fundamental source of debate amongst historians. Whilst traditional schools of thought argue that women’s work during WWI radically changed male ideas about their role in society with traditional historians such as Ray suggesting that giving women the vote in 1918 was almost a ‘thank you’ for their efforts, revisionist historians, however, find this analysis too simplistic. AJP Taylor, for example, argues that the war ‘smoothed the way for democracy’ and so there are other factors of significance, such as, suffrage campaign groups (WSPU & NUWSS) and growing equality with men.
Using my own research i will discover whether the World War One had a positive effect on the role of women. After the immediate rise in female unemployment at the beginning of the war due to the ‘middle-classes wish to economise’ (first world war, accessed 07/01/09), the only option to replace the volunteers gone to front was to employ women in the jobs they had left behind. This was supported by all the major feminist groups, who suddenly ‘became avid patriots and organisers of the women in support of the war effort’ (war and gender, accessed 22/01/09). Overall women’s employment increased from ‘three million in 1914 to five million in 1918’ (Murphy, p373, 2000). For many of the women the war was ‘a genuinely liberating experience’ (first world war, accessed 07/01/09), and made the women feel useful as citizens.
Throughout the 1900s females were able to gain the status of a person and in turn get the right to vote. From this it is evident that females are able to diminish their past stereotype and be seen as equals. In a conflict theory perspective females are currently seeking to be treated as equals by challenging the social norms of our culture. Even though women are given the opportunity to strive in our society they are still being undermined. For instance in a workplace setting, females are not given equal support from employers as they assume women
The suffragette movement gave rise in Britain in 1860 by mainly middleclass women and it was a political struggle for women to be given the right to vote. The exclusion of women from the right to vote in parliamentary elections was the most striking example of inequality between men and women. In the 1860’s there were many ways in which women suffered inequality and discrimination such as married women not legally having the right to an independent existence. However this was mainly middle and upper class women as working class women due to daily struggles had to take on paid employment as well as her usual duties. However it is important to make clear that the women’s suffrage was not unique to Britain, similar movements had emerged in other countries in the second half of the nineteenth century.