Working class women already needed to work but the war changed the nature of their occupation as it offered an alternative to domestic service. Women worked as porters, ticket collectors and guards at railway stations and there were female bus drivers, window cleaners, chimney sweeps, street sweepers, electricians and fire fighters. Munitions showed the biggest increase in female labour - in 1914, 125 women were employed by Woolwich Arsenal and, by 1917, over 25,000 women worked there.
This work invalidated one of the anti-suffragists key arguments as it proved women were capable of defending their country and led to a change in male attitudes as women had shown they were responsible and deserving of the vote.
However, some historians believe the war may have delayed reform as key MPs such as Asquith, Lloyd George and Sir John Simon had shown a willingness to enter into negotiations which was stopped by the war.
War was a catalyst for change rather than the main cause as there was already a need for general franchise reform as large numbers of the armed forces were unable to vote under the existing legislation. In 1916 the Speakers Conference was held to draft a proposal on the franchise and registration and, although there were no official female contributors, there were many supporters of women within the conference. Although only a limited number of women were granted the vote, there were fears they would swamp the male electorate as over 8 million women were enfranchised.
There were also a number of changes in Parliament which altered the balance between those who opposed and those who supported women’s suffrage. Several suffragist MPs such as Balfour, Bonar Law and Arthur Henderson were promoted to the cabinet replacing antagonistic men, and Lloyd George, who was sympathetic to women’s suffrage, replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in 1916 which bode well for the success of future women’s suffrage amendments. The war also gave hostile MPs an excuse to change their position on women’s suffrage as opposition was now indefensible.
In May 1915 the Liberal Government became a Coalition government which resulted in the decline of party divisions and made possible an all party agreement on women’s suffrage. The fears that one party may benefit from suffrage reform were laid to rest as the enfranchisement of 8 million women no longer presented an advantage to any one political party. Labour and the Liberals realised that the new proposed female electorate was to socially mixed to give the Conservatives a significant advantage and the exclusion of the predominantly working class munitions workers gained Conservative support as the working classes were likely to vote Labour. Women’s suffrage was a compromise as, in the end, no party got what it wanted.
Fifty years of campaigning by the NUWSS, ELFS and WSPU prior to the war had resulted in an awareness of women’s rights which was also significant in the decision to grant women the vote. The NUWSS was a primarily middle class society which, although it claimed to be non-party affiliated, had strong links with the Liberal Party. The NUWSS used peaceful and legal techniques to publicise the issue of votes for women such as organising marches, demonstrations or public meetings, distributing leaflets or magazines, lobbying MPs and petitioning Parliament. The WSPU formed in 1903 as it was annoyed at the lack of progress made by the NUWSS and other suffrage societies at that point. It was a more radical organisation with a number of northern and working class members. It used similar campaigning techniques to the NUWSS but later adopted more militant techniques such as smashing windows, arson attacks, harassing MPs and interrupting the speeches of male politicians.
It is clear that women’s role on the Home Front helped to lead Asquith and other previous anti-suffragists to ask “How could we have carried on the war without them?” persuading them to reward some women with the vote in 1918. However without the political changes which occurred in the war and the fifty years of campaigning which preceded it, there is much evidence to suggest women would not have been granted the vote so rapidly after the war. French women, for example, aided the war effort but were not enfranchised until 1948 largely due to the fact there was no women’s suffrage movement before the war.
