the experience of women between 1918 and 1939, including the expansion of suffrage, women's work and the New Woman, the reversal of gains under fascist and Nazi regimes, and women in Stalin's USSR and the United States

What this dot point is asking

VCAA expects you to explain how women's lives changed between 1918 and 1939 across the major case studies (Britain, Weimar and Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the USSR, the United States), and to weigh political, economic and cultural change against continuity. Strong responses pair dated state policies with cultural figures and cite a named historian.

The answer

The political legacy of WWI

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

• Russia (March 1917, Provisional Government decree)
• Germany (12 November 1918, Council of People's Deputies)
• Austria (1918)
• Czechoslovakia (1918)
• Britain (Representation of the People Act 1918, women over 30; Equal Franchise Act 1928, equal franchise at 21)
• United States (19th Amendment, ratified 18 August 1920)
• Italy (limited local franchise 1925; full suffrage only 1945)
• France (only 1944)

Women entered legislatures for the first time. By 1923, around 36 women sat in the German Reichstag. Nancy Astor took the first seat held by a woman in the British House of Commons in November 1919 (Constance Markievicz had been elected first in 1918 but did not take her seat).

The New Woman

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.

In Weimar Berlin, the Neue Frau was the most visible. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (founded 1919) supplied contraception. The Reichstag legalised abortion in cases of medical danger in 1927. Around one-third of German university students by 1930 were women.

In Paris, Victor Margueritte's bestselling novel La Garconne (1922) gave the figure a French name. The novel sold around a million copies and was banned in some places.

In the United States, the flapper became a cultural icon (F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories, the Charleston, Hollywood comedies). The 19th Amendment (1920) gave women the federal vote. The first woman elected to the US Senate in her own right was Hattie Caraway (Arkansas, 1932). Eleanor Roosevelt's public role from 1933 made the First Lady a political figure.

In Britain, the "Bright Young Things" of London and the Lady Astor parliamentary precedent had cultural weight. Married women in the civil service still faced the marriage bar (lifted only in 1946); teaching marriage bars persisted to the 1940s.

Women's work

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.

By the late 1920s, around 30 per cent of the British workforce was female. In Germany, around 35 per cent of women aged 16 to 60 were in paid work in 1925 (the highest level in Europe outside the USSR), mostly in light industry, retail and clerical work. In the United States, female labour force participation rose from 21 per cent in 1920 to 27 per cent in 1940; the rise was concentrated among married women in clerical work.

Marriage bars in teaching and the civil service remained widespread in Britain, France and the United States; many married women left paid work. Equal pay was absent in almost every sector.

Fascist and Nazi reversal

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:

• A tax on bachelors (1926).
• Marriage loans (1937).
• Women excluded from senior teaching and from professional school examinations (1933 to 1938).
• Maternity hospitals and Opera Nazionale Maternita e Infanzia (ONMI, founded 1925).

The Italian birth rate did not rise materially; the policy was more rhetorical than effective.

The Nazi regime was more systematic. The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage (1 June 1933) offered 1,000 Reichsmark loans to "Aryan" couples on condition the wife left the workforce; each child reduced repayment by a quarter. Female access to higher education was capped (10 per cent of university places from 1934). The Mother's Cross (Mutterkreuz, 16 December 1938) honoured Aryan women with four or more children: bronze for four, silver for six, gold for eight.

By 1938, however, labour shortages forced the Nazi regime to draw women back into the workforce. By 1939, around 14.5 million German women were in paid work, a higher absolute number than in 1933. The earlier "back to the home" policy gave way to wartime mobilisation.

Soviet women under Stalin

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.

In practice, the Stalin Revolution produced contradictory results. Women's share of the industrial workforce rose from 24 per cent (1928) to 41 per cent (1939). Female literacy rose from 42 per cent (1926) to 81 per cent (1939). Childcare and communal dining expanded.

But the 1936 Family Code reversed earlier liberalism. Abortion was banned by decree on 27 June 1936 except where the mother's life was endangered. Divorce was made expensive. Adultery and absent fathers were attacked. The "double burden" (paid work plus household labour) became permanent.

American women in the Depression and New Deal

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.

The New Deal had a contradictory effect. Frances Perkins became Secretary of Labor in March 1933, the first female US cabinet member, and held the post until 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt expanded the public role of the First Lady. The Social Security Act (1935) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) included millions of women. But the National Recovery Administration codes set female pay at 80 per cent of male pay in many sectors.

African American women faced the New Deal's exclusions most sharply. Domestic service and agricultural labour, where most Black women worked, were excluded from Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Religion, family and population

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.

Birth rates fell in interwar Europe even where state policy pushed pronatalism, because economic conditions and contraception spread faster than ideology. By 1939, the average French, British and German woman had around two children, well below the wartime generation's families.

Historiography

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.

Mary Nolan (Visions of Modernity, 1994) treats the "New Woman" as class- and country-specific: real for urban middle-class German women, rhetorical for rural and working-class women elsewhere.

Claudia Koonz (Mothers in the Fatherland, 1987) shows that many German women actively supported Nazi family policy and the BDM. The Nazi reversal had female collaboration.

Wendy Goldman (Women, the State and Revolution, 1993) is the standard on Soviet women, emphasising the 1936 reversal and the limits of Bolshevik feminism.

Common exam traps

Treating the New Woman as universal. She was urban, middle-class and culturally visible. Working-class and rural women's lives changed much less.

Forgetting the marriage bar. 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.

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

Saying Nazi policy successfully removed women from work. Initially yes, but labour shortages reversed the policy from 1938. Pin the chronology.

In one sentence

Between 1918 and 1939, women won the vote across most of Europe and in the United States and became visible as the "New Woman" in cabaret Berlin, flapper New York and the French Garconne, but professional advance was confined largely to urban middle classes, fascist and Nazi regimes deliberately reversed cultural and educational gains while pushing pronatalism, the Soviet Union drove women into industrial work and literacy alongside a 1936 reversal of liberal family policy, and most working-class and rural women's domestic lives changed little.