Economic and Social Instability 979and France, had been impressed by the degree of wartime cooperation
between state, business, and labor. They now believed these arrangements
should be permanent. They hoped that corporate entities could be estab
lished in each major industry to coordinate production, ending competi
tion between companies. They called themselves “corporatists” and their
ideas “corporatism.” Corporatists in Germany, France, and Italy believed
that by creating cartel-like corporations that joined all people dependent
on one industry, ruinous competition between companies and conflict
between bosses and workers could be eliminated in the interest and pros
perity of the “national economic community.” Such cartel arrangements
might well reduce or even eliminate the social and political tensions inher
ent in capitalist economies by forging an organized alliance of interests,
including those of the state, big business, and labor.
However, Europe’s business elite greeted the post-war era with some anx
iety. For more than a half century, European economic elites had worked to
preserve their power against the mounting challenge of organized labor and
the political parties of the left. They did so, for example, by trying to main
tain the elite character of higher education, pressuring governments to
maintain high tariff barriers at the expense of consumers, seeking to limit
government intervention in factory conditions, or trying to maintain legisla
tion that restricted the right to strike. Above all, many people of means had
wanted to keep their countries from adopting universal male suffrage or
becoming democracies. Despite their efforts, however, the role of parlia
mentary bodies had expanded in every Western country during the last de
cades before the war, as universal male suffrage had come to France, Italy,
Belgium, Norway, Sweden, and even imperial Germany.
Women’s movements were one of the forces for democratization that
gained considerably during the war. Having suspended their suffrage cam
paigns for the duration of the conflict, women’s groups now demanded
recognition for their wartime contributions—when they had taken the place
of conscripts in factories and fields. After the war, women won the right to
vote in Germany, Sweden, and several other countries in Western Europe,
as well as in the newly created Eastern European states of Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and Hungary. The legal position of women was probably strongest
in Britain. Women voted for the first time in the British elections of
December 1918, and the first woman was elected to the House of Com
mons soon after. The Sex Disqualification Act of 1919 opened the way for
women to enter professions from which they had previously been excluded.
However, women who had taken men’s jobs during the war gradually lost or
abandoned their employment, many returning to domestic service. During
the 1920s, the percentage of British working women declined for the first
time in many decades. Nonetheless, a greater variety of jobs became avail
able to women. During the next two decades, many women found work in
textile factories, commerce, transport, and in new jobs within the service sec
tor (as hairdressers, department store clerks, or telephone operators). For