ABSTRACT
While most adult women in western Europe were able to vote and to participate fully in public life from 1945, relatively few succeeded in becoming representatives at either national or local level in the following 25 years. This chapter looks at some of the reasons which have been suggested for this painfully slow progress, and also at some of the underlying factors which in the longer term laid the foundations for change. We shall start by looking at the impact of the Second World War, at prevailing social and economic attitudes in the 1950s and at the provisions of the new constitutions that were adopted in Germany, France and Italy immediately after the war. We shall then consider the extent to which women voted disproportionately for right-wing parties in this period, yet paradoxically were more likely to be adopted as candidates by parties of the left. In his classic study, The Political Role of Women, published in 1955, the French political scientist Maurice Duverger claimed that women showed significantly less interest in politics than men. We clearly need to consider the extent to which, and the reasons why, this was the case. None the less, by the end of the period, we shall find women campaigning actively in a number of countries for equal pay and for laws to legalise birth control and abortion. To what extent were these campaigns led by female members of parliament, and how great was the influence women representatives wielded at government level by the end of 1960s?
