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4. The Aftermath of War: Gender and Agriculture in the Interwar Years
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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93 The “seeds of reform” planted by international women’s leaders sprouted in the years after the First World War. Though the outcomes varied from the expectations of the reformers, a harvest of new perspectives on women’s roles proceeded in the years following the Treaty of Versailles. In the initial years following the war, women in Great Britain and the United States gained considerable ground in political and social rights as a result of the recognition for wartime service. After both peaceful and aggressive attempts at political and social change, it was the wartime defense work of women, so willingly provided, that elicited change. Women in England found increased appreciation for their work efforts in the form of media attention and the opportunity to engage in politics by means of the limited vote bestowed upon them in 1918 through the Representation of the People Act. This act gave the vote to women who either met certain property qualifications or were married to men who held those property qualifications or by means of a university constituency . In this way, Parliament approved female suffrage for the middle and upper classes only and denied the vote to women of lesser means. Women also gained the opportunity to serve in British Parliament with the Eligibility of Women Act in 1918, and wider representation in suffrage came to the women jChapter 4 The Aftermath of War Gender and Agriculture in the Interwar Years If many of the seeds of reform planted before the war are not left unwatered [sic] to die, that is the most weary humanity can hope for. —Harriot Stanton Blatch, A Woman’s Point of View: Some Roads to Peace, 1920 94 the aftermath of war of Great Britain in 1928 with the Representation of the People Act, which granted women over the age of twenty-one the same enfranchisement as men. In the United States, the suffrage parades, soap box orations, and daily picketing of the White House initiated by Harriot Stanton Blatch kept the spirit of the movement alive for women and visibly present for male politicians who might otherwise have ignored it in the years leading to war. Despite public criticism of the work of the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA) and labeling the female laborers as “farmerettes,” in many ways Blatch’s direction of the WLAA changed the dynamic of the suffrage movement from one of speeches and dissent to one of patriotic action. In recognition of the tenacity and commitment of women in peacetime as well as war, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting the right to vote to all women in 1920, which was then ratified by the necessary number of states (thirty-six). The enfranchisement brought more than just the vote for women; for many it brought the opportunity to serve as elected representatives in state and federal government. In 1920, Blatch commented on the international success of women’s suffrage as a result of their leadership in wartime service: “The spread of self-government for women was not checked by the war. In fact, the vote was the prize won by women for unquestioning service. Their ideals as giver and protector of life were sacrificed and defeated, but they achieved a political revolution.”1 For many women, the fight for an equal political voice ended as they gained victory over unequal representation . For others, however, the fight had just begun as the new position of women in labor and politics, presented by years of wartime service, elicited political and social concerns. Though the movement for female suffrage in America began in the mid-nineteenth century, few women of the initial fight lived to see the fruits of their labor. American women of the 1920s faced varied and competing roles, ranging from those based upon nineteenth-century traditions to those presented in film and media as the “New Woman.” The New Woman was a woman of independent thought and a representation of women’s political and social liberation. Style of dress, changes in norms for education and courtship , and the lifting of social restrictions such as gendered bans on smoking all contributed to a new sense of liberation for many women. Combined with the era of affluence espoused by many Americans in the 1920s, this new social and political freedom for women provided the opportunity to express themselves through their social behaviors. This new freedom encouraged women to find opportunities in education and in labor, a declining agricultural economy...