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Women's rights took a major step forward about this time. In 1920 women were allowed to become members of Oxford University after they graduated. Before that they could take the exams but not gain a degree.
But the major change occurred two years before. After the war ended, Britain needed a general election. They were supposed to be held every 5 years but the war had meant that was not possible. Because of the old system of who could vote, which was set in place in 1884 (go and have a look at the last calendar), most of the soldiers who survived the war and now returned home would not have been able to vote.
Parliament introduced a new act, called the Representation of the People Act 1918, which gave new rules on who could vote. The act got royal assent, which means it became a law, on February 6th 1918. The act said that all men over 21 could vote in the constituency where they lived. There was no longer any need to pay a certain amount of rent or own land. It also said that any men who reached the age of 19 while serving during the war could also vote. This was a big change.
However, the biggest change was that women could now vote. Wait, not the same rules as for men, but they could vote. Women over 30 could vote if they were a property owner or married to a property owner. They could also vote if they were a graduate of a university that had its own constituency. Oxford and Cambridge elected 2 MPs right up to 1950, London 1 and the Combined Universities of England 2, both also till 1950. Scottish, Irish and Welsh universities did the same. The act also said that elections now had to take place on just one day; earlier ones had been spread over months sometimes.
This partial victory for women in some of them getting the vote had taken a long time and been a hard struggle. You may remember it started in the last century with various organisations being set up. The suffragettes were the name given to women who campaigned for equality in voting rights. They held protests, got arrested, went to prison, went on hunger-strike, were forcibly fed and, in 1913, a young lady called Emily Wilding Davison had run out of the crowd in front of the horse owned by the King at the annual Derby race at Epsom. Sadly she was killed but, of course, it did draw attention to the cause. It would be 1928 before women had equal rights as men when it came to voting in parliamentary elections.
In 1919 the first woman MP took her seat in the House of Commons, Her name was Nancy Astor and she was actually born in the United States of America but came to England in 1905. She later married a man called Waldorf Astor who was also an American but in 1910 he became MP for Plymouth. In 1919 Waldorf's father died and he took his father's title as Viscount Astor and, as he was now in the House of Lords, he had to give up his parliamentary seat. His wife then successfully won it and became an MP where she remained until 1945.
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