More Than the Vote

The suffragists’ struggle produced undaunted trailblazers, Black and white, who continued to pursue social reform.

- Deborah Cohen

Women’s-suffrage campaigners and their equally adamant opponents were in full agreement on one fundamental point: Giving women the vote would change everything. It would end poverty, and wars, too! So promised Britain’s militant suffragists, envisioning a civilization in which the patriarchy was upended and society’s evils were largely vanquished. A Greek chorus of “antis” foretold a different future. The death of the family! The destruction of morality! After most British women over the age of 30 won the vote, in 1918, the Liberal politician and diplomat Lord Esher saw a watershed moment at hand. An “avalanche of women has been hurled into the political chaos,” he wrote. “Institutions as well as ideas will have to be re-sorted.”

Twenty years later, on the brink of the Second World War, the surprise was how little women’s suffrage had disturbed the status quo, either at home or abroad. In Britain, the Conservative Party’s substantial parliamentary majorities were likely undergirded by the women’s vote. In the United States, where female turnout was low, if women voted at all they tended to vote like their husbands. The sense that the franchise was an anticlimax, even a disappointment, was widespread among those who had taken part in the cause, like Virginia Woolf. She’d gotten the right to vote at the same time that she’d inherited a legacy from her aunt. “Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important,” Woolf reflected.