195. Empires collapsing, women voting, a coalition campaigning

The return of peace after the First World War might have heralded the arrival of a time of tranquillity. Sadly, it didn’t. Too much had changed. Four empires, three venerable and one an unpstart, had collapsed: Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the longstanding ones, and the German Empire, most powerful of all four, was the upstart that had shared the same fate.

In Britain, Lloyd George, basking in his reputation as ‘the man who won the war’, was nonetheless in a precarious position as the Liberal leader of a Conservative-dominated government. He decided to bring in a major electoral reform, the Representation of the People Act of 1918, and then go to the country at the head of his coalition – that is, the two parties in the coalition campaigning together, rather than as separate organisations which might well form a coalition afterwards, if the election results made that necessary.

The electorate he faced had been greatly increased by his reform, including over five million more men but also, and this was the major innovation, for the first time, over eight million women. At last, the suffrage movement had broken through, but no thanks to the Suffragettes – Emmeline Pankhurst’s WSPU had stopped campaigning for the vote when war broke out. The much bigger organisation, of Suffragists, the NUWSS led by Millicent Fawcett, played a much more significant role. It too, though, had been convulsed by the war, breaking with the peace movement to retain the support of more nationalist individuals, in particular in the Conservative party. At the same time, I had severed its electoral links to the Labour Party.

It had paid off. Enough Conservatives voted for emancipation for the vote to be granted to women aged 30 or over and meeting a property qualification – not universal adult suffrage as granted to men but a big step all the same. So at the December 1918 general election, women could vote, and indeed stand, for the first time ever.

Illustration: The WSPU in action: Millicent Austen addressing a rally in Hyde Park on 26 July 1913. Image from the library of the London School of Economics, which knows of no copyright restrictions on it.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.