Quick questions on Women and social change in interwar Europe and America 1918-1939: VCE Modern History Unit 3

WWI accelerated women's suffrage. Between 1917 and 1920, around 30 states extended the vote to women. The most significant:

The "New Woman" of the 1920s was an urban figure: bobbed hair, shorter skirts, lipstick, cigarettes, paid work and increasingly access to contraception. The figure had different national versions.

WWI had drawn women into munitions, transport and clerical work. After demobilisation, most lost industrial jobs, but the longer trend was towards clerical and service work, which remained female after 1918.

Mussolini's regime treated the "New Woman" as a symptom of liberal decadence. In the May 1927 Ascension Day Speech, Mussolini launched the "demographic battle" to raise the Italian birth rate from 27 to 60 per thousand. Policies included:

Soviet policy after 1917 was officially the most radical. The 1918 Family Code allowed civil marriage and easy divorce; the Bolsheviks legalised abortion in 1920 (the first state in the world to do so); the 1936 Constitution declared women equal in employment, pay, social insurance and education.

The Great Depression hit American women's work hard. Married women in paid work were attacked as "taking jobs from men"; 26 states passed laws between 1932 and 1936 restricting married women in the federal civil service.

Catholic and Protestant institutions resisted feminist change. Pius XI's encyclical Casti Connubii (31 December 1930) condemned contraception and abortion and reaffirmed wifely subordination. Anglican opinion shifted: the Lambeth Conference (1930) cautiously accepted contraception within marriage.

Susan Kingsley Kent (Making Peace, 1993) emphasises that British post-WWI culture restored gendered expectations after wartime disruption: women's vote was conceded but the cultural separation of public male and private female spheres returned.

She was urban, middle-class and culturally visible. Working-class and rural women's lives changed much less.

In Britain, France and the United States, married women were often legally or contractually barred from teaching and the civil service. The interwar gain in women's work was largely among unmarried women.

Stalinist policy banned abortion in 1936, made divorce expensive, and overlaid the "double burden" on women.

Initially yes, but labour shortages reversed the policy from 1938. Pin the chronology.