Explain The Reasons Why Women’s Movements Failed To Win The Vote Before 1914

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Explain The Reasons Why Women's Movements Failed To Win The Vote Before 1914

By 1900, the attitude towards women was still the very traditional view that women were the homemakers and belonged in the running of the household, bearing and bringing up of children and the supporting of their husbands. Women were regarded as morally superior to their male counterparts and had to be protected from the rough world of politics. Domestic service continued to be the most common occupation for working-class women and so women were still working as servants, which supported the view that their best qualities lay with household management, and not in the running of the country.

Even though suffrage eventually became headline news, no party was willing to adopt women's suffrage before 1918. The suffrage bills in Parliament were put forward by sympathetic MPs as private members' bills, which meant they had little chance of success because they did not have majority party backing. One of the main problems with women not being enfranchised before 1914 was that the Liberal government was not willing to give them the vote. The Liberals had won a landslide victory in the General election of 1906 and needed