20th Century Britain: The Woman's Hour

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• 1. Introduction
• 2. Women at war
• 3. 1944 Education Act
• 4. Late 60s and early 70s
• 5. The f-word
• 6. Find out more
• Print entire article

Introduction

The twentieth century will, without doubt, be viewed by historians as the Woman's Hour. A girl born in 1899, as my grandmother was, had little chance of evading the role that was considered her destiny - to marry young, stay home and raise a family. Her forbears in the late nineteenth century had struggled hard to improve her chances of an education. Campaigners like Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garret Anderson had carried out a personal and largely peaceful struggle to open professions like medicine to women. Yet still, only the privileged few, whose fathers or husbands were enlightened enough to permit it, got a foot on the ladder of opportunity. In the early part of the century the suffragists argued powerfully, but peacefully for the vote. They were unsuccessful in their immediate objective, although they still exist in the form of one of the country's main research and lobbying groups working on behalf of women, the Fawcett Society.

It was the suffragettes who would really make a difference. The term was first employed in the Daily Mail on the 10th January 1906 and by March of that year it was in general use as a means of differentiating the militant campaigners of the Women's Social and Political Union from the suffragists. The WSPU was formed in Manchester in 1903 by a small group of women led by Emmeline Pankhurst. When a London office was opened in 1906, her daughters Sylvia and Christabel joined her as leaders of a movement which dedicated itself to securing the vote for women to enable them to take full part in the democratic process. They were to achieve this by any militant means, drawing the line at any threat to human life. So they would break windows, throw stones, burn slogans on putting greens, cut telephone and telegraph wires, destroy pillar boxes and burn or bomb empty buildings. Emily Wilding Davison was the martyr of the movement, prepared to give her life for women's rights. Like many of the arrested suffragettes she went on hunger strike in Holloway prison and in 1912 she tried to kill herself by leaping over a stair railing there.

Her death came a year later when, with the WSPU flag sewn into her coat, she threw herself in front of the King's Horse at Epsom and died from her injuries. Her coffin, draped in the suffragette colours of white, green and purple, was followed by 2,000 uniformed suffragettes. She was buried near her home in Morpeth in Northumberland and inscribed on her gravestone was 'Deeds not Words'.

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Published: 2001-01-01