Attitudes towards women and their right to vote had changed by 1918. How important was World War One in bringing about this change? Explain your answer.
Before the start of the First World War women had failed to gain the vote. This was because of a number of reasons including the Suffragettes being too violent, attitudes at the time and the way hat not all women supported woman’s suffrage. In 1914 World War one broke out in France between the Allies (Britain, France and Russia) and the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey) In response to this the Suffragettes and Suffragists called off their campaigns. By 1918 women had gained the vote in this essay I will look at some of the reasons why women had gained the vote by 1918.
One of the reasons that women were able to gain the vote by 1918 was the way that women were able to work during the war. This was because a lot of men were called up to fight in France. This allowed women to work in such jobs as munitions factory workers, bus conductors and any other jobs that men had left vacant after going of to war. During the war women worked in all kinds of jobs that men had done before the war and did courses to improve their engineering skills. At some of these jobs women were better than men because these jobs were more demanding and better paid than jobs such as domestic service and because women wanted to work hard to impress the government and men they were working with. On the other hand women had held factory jobs before the war but men hadn’t taken so much notice of them then and they were paid very low wages compared to men. Also these jobs did not become available until 1916 when conscription was introduced. Also not all men were conscripted in 1916 because some men had jobs that were seen as essential to the war effort including coal and iron ore mining because these raw materials were so essential to the war effort.
