ABSTRACT
By 1945, most women in western Europe had won the right to vote and to contest elections on equal terms with men. In some countries, such as Norway and Denmark, political equality had been secured as early as 1907-15; in Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain, female suffrage was conceded at the end of the First World War. The new German Weimar Republic granted women equal political rights with men from the outset, while the short-lived Spanish Republic also gave women political equality, though changes of regime soon reversed the political advances which women in those two countries had made. It was not until the end of the Second World War that German women regained political equality and that French and Italian women were finally able to join with women in most other western European countries in participating in elections on the same terms as men (see Table 1). But while western European women had finally won their long and
hard-fought struggle for political emancipation, the battle to gain a share of real political power was only just beginning, and it was to be a long-drawn-out process. As the leader of the Women’s Co-operative Guild noted so perceptively in 1920, two years after women over 30 gained the vote in Britain, ‘It is always said that there is equality for men and women in the [Co-operative] movement. Certainly most of the doors are open. But the seats are full and possession is ninetenths of the law so in reality the opportunity is not equal and seats are hard to win.’1 Forty years later, Conservative MP Evelyn Emmet echoed the same sentiment, when she commented sharply that men were ‘reluctant to see a woman fill any place which might be theirs’.2
