By the 1930s, a third of women in the UK worked outside the home – mainly in low-paid “women’s jobs”, such as caring and cooking. Economic depression reinforced the idea that well-paid work should primarily be for men and that the proper place for women was in the family home, as unpaid workers.
In 1928, Stanley Baldwin and his Conservative government had allowed all women to vote when they reached the age of 21 – the same age as for men. “The subjection of women, if there be such a thing, will not now depend on any creation of the law,” he said. “It will never again be possible to blame the sovereign state for any position of inequality. Women will have with us the fullest rights. The ground and justification for the old agitation is gone.”
Perhaps he knew his words were rhetorical. Certainly there was no shift in the assumption of male superiority and power, and, in the 30s, grounds for the “old agitation” were as strong as ever. To have legislation is not at all the same as to have the state of affairs that the legislation claims to achieve. It is easier to campaign for tangible objectives, such as the vote, than to fight to eradicate the prejudice underpinning the initial denial. There is tokenism to equality legislation if the society implementing it has no real commitment to equality.
Women’s wages were meagre compared with those of men. The civil service, the education sector and nursing all operated a “marriage bar”, which meant women had to resign when they married. Unmarried women were “spinsters”, a disparaging term. Same-sex relationships were not to be mentioned. Another piece of 1928 legislation bannned Radclyffe Hall’s anodyne lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel,” wrote the editor of the Sunday Express. “Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” Censoring this book caused a pall of embarrassment to shroud same-sex relationships between women, which until then had not interested the lawmakers, and closed down acceptance of expressions of diversity.
But the first world war equivalent of Rosie the Riveter was not going to revert, submissively, to being the Angel in the House. The old agitation went on. Women had the vote, education and divorce reforms and at least the right to be lawyers and MPs. Skirts got shorter and so did hair. Women smoked cigarettes, danced the jitterbug and – those who could afford it – drove motor cars.
In Paris, there began a liberation movement out of the reach of the lawmakers and enforcers, the grand old men of England. In the City of Light, expatriate creative women from the UK and the US, many of them lesbian, escaped the repressions of patriarchy, took their freedom, formed their own society and lived and worked as they chose. The modernist revolution between the wars would not have happened without their contribution.
•Diana Souhami is a writer of biographies, including Gluck: Her Biography, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall and Gertrude and Alice