Women's rights

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A is the founding of the Women's Social and Political Union (the suffragettes) by Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903. B is the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which gave the vote to women over 30 who met a property qualification.

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Source A is useful because it shows the importance of women's war work, which is often seen as a key reason why some women were given the vote in 1918. The poster praises women for 'doing their bit' alongside soldiers and asks more to work in munitions factories. By 1918 about 900,000 women were making munitions, and many others worked on the land, on public transport and in the new women's services. This work changed attitudes: it became much harder to argue that women were unfit for public life when the war effort depended on them. In 1917 even Asquith, who had opposed women's suffrage, changed his mind and pointed to women's war service.

The provenance also helps. It is a government poster, so it shows that the state itself was publicly praising women's contribution, which made it difficult for politicians to refuse women a say after the war.

However, the source has important limits for this enquiry. Its purpose was to recruit workers, not to discuss the vote, so it does not show any direct link between war work and the 1918 Act. My knowledge suggests the link was weaker than the poster implies: the women in munitions factories were mostly young and working-class, yet the Act gave the vote only to women over 30 who met a property qualification, so most munitions workers did not get the vote. The age limit was set partly so that women, after the huge male losses of the war, would not become a majority of voters.

The poster also leaves out other reasons. The franchise had to be reformed anyway because soldiers serving abroad had lost the residence qualification, and the Speaker's Conference of 1916-17 recommended including some women. Lloyd George, more sympathetic than Asquith, became Prime Minister in 1916, and many politicians feared that suffragette militancy would return. The pre-war campaign had already made votes for women a major issue.

Overall, Source A is useful for showing how the war changed the image of women, one important reason for the 1918 Act, but an historian would need other evidence to explain why only older, propertied women were given the vote.

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The Equal Pay Act of 1970 was significant because, for the first time, it made it illegal for employers to pay women less than men for the same or broadly similar work. Before this, it was normal for women to be paid less, often on separate 'women's rates'. The Act grew directly out of women's own protest: in 1968 about 187 women machinists at Ford's Dagenham factory went on strike because their work was graded as less skilled. Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment, met the strikers and then introduced the Equal Pay Act, so it showed that protest by ordinary working women could change the law.

It was also significant as part of a wider wave of reform in the 1970s. It was followed by the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, which banned discrimination in employment, education and services and set up the Equal Opportunities Commission, and by the Employment Protection Act of 1975, which gave women maternity rights. Together these laws gave women legal protection against unequal treatment, and women's average pay rose compared with men's during the 1970s.

However, the significance of the Act was limited in the short term. Employers were given until December 1975 to comply, and some used the time to regrade jobs so that men and women were not doing 'the same work'. The Act did not cover jobs of equal value, so women in mainly female jobs gained little until the law was changed in 1983 after the European Court of Justice ruled against Britain. Even the Dagenham machinists were not regraded as skilled until another strike in 1984.

In the long term the Act is seen as a vital first step rather than a solution. It allowed thousands of women to bring equal pay claims in later decades, and it led to the Equality Act of 2010 and to the requirement from 2017 for large employers to publish their gender pay gap. Yet a gap between men's and women's average pay remains, showing that the law alone could not bring full equality.

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Ideas such as equality and democracy have often shaped the demands of people who challenged authority, but I do not think they have usually been the main reason why people challenged authority. In most cases the challenge was sparked by economic hardship, religious change or the actions of rulers. Ideas became more important over time, especially from the seventeenth century, but even then they usually worked together with other grievances.

In the Middle Ages challenges to authority were mainly caused by money and the behaviour of kings. The barons who rebelled against King John in 1215 were angry about heavy taxes such as scutage, the cost of his failed wars in France and his arbitrary treatment of them. Magna Carta defended their rights and set out the principle that the king was under the law, but it was not based on ideas of equality or democracy. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 did involve ideas: John Ball preached 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?', and the rebels demanded an end to serfdom. Yet the revolt was triggered by economic grievances: the Statute of Labourers of 1351 had tried to hold down wages after the Black Death, and the third poll tax of 1380 was the final straw.

In the Tudor period religion and the economy were more important than ideas of equality. The Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was caused by the dissolution of the monasteries and changes to religion, together with taxes, enclosure and bad harvests, and hatred of Thomas Cromwell. The rebels, led by Robert Aske, saw themselves as loyal subjects asking Henry VIII to remove evil advisers, not as challengers of the social order.

Ideas became much more important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The English Revolution began over money, religion and power: Ship Money, Laud's religious reforms and Charles I's belief in the Divine Right of Kings. But the war produced radical ideas: the Levellers, led by John Lilburne, argued in the Agreement of the People and the Putney Debates of 1647 that power came from the people and that most men should vote. In America, the slogan 'no taxation without representation' and Thomas Paine's Common Sense turned a quarrel over taxes into a revolution based on the idea that all men are created equal, which in turn inspired British radicals.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ideas of democracy were central to the great campaigns, but economic hardship usually drove mass support. The radicals at Peterloo in 1819 demanded parliamentary reform, but the crowd of about 60,000 was swollen by poverty and high bread prices after the Corn Law of 1815. The Chartists' six points were a democratic programme, yet Chartism was strongest in years of depression, such as 1839 and 1842, and one Chartist called it a 'knife and fork question'. The suffrage movement is the clearest case of a challenge driven mainly by ideas: the suffragists and suffragettes demanded equal political rights for women, and their motive was principle rather than hunger. By contrast, the General Strike of 1926 was mainly about miners' wages and hours, and the Brixton riots of 1981 grew out of unemployment, poor housing and resentment of heavy-handed policing, although ideas of racial equality shaped the response.

In conclusion, ideas such as equality and democracy have been very important in giving challenges to authority their aims and in turning protests into movements, from John Ball to the Levellers, the Chartists and the suffragettes. However, they were the main factor only in some cases, especially the campaign for votes for women. More often people challenged authority because of economic hardship, religious change or the actions of rulers, and ideas gave shape to anger that these grievances had created.