The background to modern feminism

Abstract

By 1945, women in most of Europe and America had won a high degree of political and legal equality with men. No longer were they excluded from political participation, education and employment and no longer did they lose all autonomy upon marriage; even in France, where the earlier feminist movement had been particularly unsuccessful, women were finally enfranchised in 1944, and the Code Napoleon, which explicitly subordinated women to their husbands, was gradually modified. In America, the traditions of welfare feminism had been continued in the 1930s when a network of influential women led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s wife, were able to make an important contribution to the planning and administration of the New Deal; although women did not receive state aid to anything like the same extent as men, their needs could no longer be ignored, and Ware claims therefore that ‘It is in the 1930s that many of women’s expectations beyond suffrage finally found fulfilment’ (Ware, 1981, p. 2). In England, the new welfare provision based on the 1942 Beveridge Report included the payment of state allowances to mothers for their second and subsequent children; although they fell far short of full economic independence, such measures did much to ease the burdens of ill-health and poverty.