KS3 / KS4 / GCSE History: How women won the right to vote in 1918

As the 1st World War neared its end, women were involved in almost every area of life on the Home Front. But Britain’s women were still denied the right to vote.

The very issue that sat at the heart of the Suffragettes’ campaigning.

Deep within the all-male Parliament, there existed a place which epitomised the status of women in public life: the Ladies’ Gallery.

The original Ladies’ Gallery was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, but today’s press gallery occupies a similar position.

It was a cramped space; hot and stuffy. And there was a metal lattice grille which obstructed the view of the House of Commons below. Though it was originally installed so that the men below would not be distracted by the ladies above. The Suffragettes regarded it as a symbolic cage, which separated them from the business of politics.

In 1908 Suffrage Campaigners padlocked themselves to the gallery’s grille in protest at their exclusion from parliament. The grille was removed with the women still attached. After their release it was immediately reinstalled and there it remained, physically and symbolically excluding women from the world of politics.

Before the war, Winston Churchill argued that “women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands”.

But many of those men were overseas now and potentially ineligible to vote. The Government contemplated changing the law on voting qualifications.

And the suffrage campaigners scented a chance to press their case to include women.

The new Prime Minister was David Lloyd George. He offered a more sympathetic ear to the campaigners – no-one knew better what invaluable work they’d done in the factories. Emmeline Pankhurst was pragmatic. She urged him to speed the legislation and said “whatever can be passed in war circumstances, we are ready to accept”.

On the 19th of June 1917, the Ladies’ Gallery was packed with women eager to hear the Commons debating a new bill:The Representation of the People.

Even the most optimistic couldn’t have predicted the outcome of the vote…

55 against. 385 in favour.

The tide had finally turned.

The Representation of the People Act became law in 1918.

It granted the vote to women over thirty who were householders or the wives of householders, or graduates.

The First World War had delivered a partial victory for Britain’s women.

There’s no escaping the fact that MPs saw the vote for women as a prize rather than a right.

As one woman put it, “Rather like a biscuit given to a performing dog that has just done its tricks particularly well." The majority of the women who worked in the factories were under thirty and not householders, so they remained without a vote.

One reminder of that tumultuous time is hidden away in the basement of the Houses of Parliament.

A few weeks after the vote, the notorious grille which had caged in women in the Ladies Gallery was quietly removed.

Here’s a section of it – a symbol of the struggle by women to achieve their rights.