WOMEN IN EUROPE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

European men and women were alike sensitive to the cultural currents of the age, but they could differ importantly in their responses. In the first place, although it is virtually impossible to measure, it is likely that fewer women than men were affected by growing and conscious uncertainty about old assumptions. Those people who showed such uncertainty were an educated minority, and among them the traditional shape of education for women almost certainly meant that most of them were men. Church-going provides a guide to the prevalence of conservative attitudes among women; in all denominations and churches, pews and seats were more usually occupied by women than men. In considering that fact, too, the focus shifts away from the educated minority, and it is hard to believe that most girls and women, whether in the industrial towns or the countryside, were likely to question traditional and customary views about their roles, potential and, above all, standing in relation to the other sex.

Yet important changes can be discerned at the same time as, at least, qualifying old rigidities and restrictions. They were to be of slowly growing but eventually gigantic importance in undermining many of women's practical servitudes. Long ago, the earliest days of modern industrial society had seen the creation of new wage-earning jobs (notably in textile mills) which gave women incomes potentially, at least, their own. A woman able to earn her own living could take a small step down the road to freedom from other constraints laid on her by tradition; marriage was no longer essential to economic survival. Economic development thereafter brought about a major, if quiet and unthreatening practical shift of economic power. The maturing in scale and complexity of the advanced capitalist economy was providing by 1914 great numbers of new jobs – as typists, secretaries, telephone operators, factory hands, department store assistants and teachers – for women in some European countries (and North America) almost none of which had existed a century earlier. Women, of course, have long been deeply involved in the daily labour of society, even in simple agricultural systems, and there is nothing new in the gainful employment of women as such. But in India, or Africa, a country woman is even today likely to toil as a field labourer on the family plot, very much under the control of the menfolk of her family, and exploited in the interests of others. For growing numbers of girls in a few European countries even at the beginning of the century, a job as secretary or shop assistant already offered a chance of liberation from parental regulation and the trap of married drudgery. Most European women still had not so benefited by 1914, but there was an accelerating process at work, and such developments were already stimulating other demands (for example for education and professional training).

A second great transforming force even further from showing its full potential to change European women's lives by 1914 was contraception. Early in this century, though little discussed, it had already begun to affect demography in a few countries even if, perhaps, not more than abstention from sexual activity. What lay ahead was a revolution in power and status as more women took in the idea that they might resist the demands of bearing and rearing children which had throughout history dominated most women's lives; beyond that lay an even deeper change, hardly discerned in 1901, as some women came to see that they could seek sexually satisfying lives without necessarily entering the obligation of lifelong marriage.

To the third great tendency moving women imperceptibly but irresistibly towards liberation from ancient ways and assumptions it is much harder to give an identifying single name, but if one force drove it, it was technology. It was not quite confined to the developed economies though most apparent in them and, therefore, a phenomenon common to Europe and the USA. A vast number of innovations, some of them slowly accumulating already for decades, all tended to cut into the iron timetables of domestic routine and drudgery. Their effect was for a long time little more than marginal. The coming of piped water, or of gas for heating and lighting, reduced drudgery in the home; electricity's cleanliness and flexibility was later to have even more obvious effects.

The great stores which made their appearance in the nineteenth-century cities, as well as smaller shops able to offer wider ranges of choice, had been the advance guards of big changes in retail distribution providing a notion of luxury to people other than the rich, and making it easier to meet household needs. As refrigerated, imported food, and better processing and preserving became available, they changed patterns of family catering once based – as they are still often based in Asia or Africa – on daily or twice-daily visits to the market. The world of detergents and easily cleaned artificial fibres still lay in the future in 1901, but soap and washing soda were available far more easily and cheaply then than 100 years earlier, while the first domestic machines – gas cookers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines – had begun to appear in the homes of the rich.

All such developments foreshadowed an often almost silent revolution for millions of women. The gap between the ways in which women are treated in the developed world and those countries where tradition retained its grip was, in fact, to widen enormously in this century. It was one of many reflexions of the growing differences in wealth between two sorts of society. Even in western countries, too, the implications of such humble household instruments as cookers and washing-machines did not strike many people at the beginning of this century (and perhaps still do not strike many historians sufficiently); labour was still cheap. More attention was given to the noisy campaigning of ‘suffragettes’, as women who sought the vote were called in England (but they were to be found in other countries, too). There were heroines among them, but fanatics, too; they attracted ridicule, as well as hatred and fear. The evident liberalization and democratization of political institutions in the interest of men argued powerfully for them, though.

Logically, democracy could hardly fail to cross the boundaries of sex when France, Germany and several smaller European countries had universal adult male suffrage, and Great Britain and Italy had mass electorates of many millions. The question was bound to be brought forward: if uneducated men could do so, should not women vote in national politics? Soon after 1901, the issue was causing uproar in England. But by 1914 only Finland (then part of the Russian empire) and Norway had admitted women to Europe's parliamentary electorates. The issue was to remain open in Switzerland for another sixty years. But there were other signs of change. In 1913, only a few weeks after the rejection by the House of Commons of a bill to give women the vote, the first woman magistrate in the United Kingdom was appointed.

By J. M. Roberts in "The Penguin History of the Twentieth Century", Penguin Books,London, 2000, excerpts chapter 5. Adapted and illustrated do be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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