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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 247

Citizenship and feminism
For the purposes of this extract we are focusing on just one ideological element
in relation to women—that of citizenship. It is a theme which spans a range of
social practices, is present in some women’s writing and plays an important role
in delimiting the ground of feminist practice in the thirties. Citizenship is a
concept which suggests equality of rights and opportunity under the law. As such
it refers to both men and women, although, as we have shown, wherever it
occurs within ideological practices in the thirties it is applied in a gender-specific
way. Feminists, however, did not accept that citizenship was necessarily a
gendered concept, and much of the feminist struggle at the time was aimed at
establishing rights of citizenship for women on the same basis as for men:

while the inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied
to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist with the motto
Equality First. And I shan’t be happy till I get…a society in which men and
women work together for the good of all mankind, a society in which there
is no respect of persons, either male or female, but a supreme regard for the
importance of the human being. 58

The granting of full female suffrage in 1928 and women’s determination to use
their hard-won constitutional rights located women’s politics within
parliamentary boundaries. The numerous struggles that followed were directed
towards social change through legislation under the broad heading of equal rights
for women, as citizens, to material welfare, equal pay and opportunities. Much
attention was paid to the new female voter, both in the form of propaganda from
the three main political parties and in a spate of ‘New Voter’s Guides’. The
struggle for sex equality moved into existing political parties, especially the
Labour Party Women’s Section, the Co-op Women’s Guilds, the Independent
Labour Party and the Communist Party. For example, Stella Browne conducted
her campaign for contraception and abortion through the political institutions of
the labour movement. These campaigns did include consideration of women’s
special needs and offered some challenge to existing social structures on the
grounds of their blindness to those needs.
In the writings of such feminists as Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain and in
the programme of women’s organizations, struggle is focused on the realization
of equal citizenship. The Six Point Group demanded:

abolition of the present solicitation laws and the passing of the Public
Places Order Bill—equal moral standards: more women police: peeresses
in the House of Lords: the right of married women to engage in paid work
if they want to…[women should be] separately assessed and taxed and free
to retain their own nationality. And all this to be established by