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One mother
reported feeling
miserable and
“worn out with
struggling in
these wretched
rooms”
living conditions in Britain’s inner-city slums
remained, for the most part, grim. One
London mother reported feeling disheart-
ened, miserable and “worn out with strug-
gling in these wretched rooms”. A woman
from south Wales told the Trades Union
Congress that “she would like to hand over all
my family for a while to those in power to see
if they could feed them on the money I get”.
The waning of traditional heavy industry
and rising foreign competition inevitably led
to unemployment in key sectors – and that
triggered widespread industrial unrest.
Coal mining had been a staple industry of
prewar Britain and the main source of
employment in parts of the north-east of
England, Yorkshire, south Wales and Scot-
land. By the early 1920s, a deeply uncomfort-
able truth was dawning on the industry: it
was clearly struggling to replicate its
19th-century success.
During the First World War, the govern-
ment had nationalised the mining industry,
deeming coal production essential to the
nation’s survival. On 31 March 1921, howev-
er, it placed mining back in the hands of
private owners – a move that had dire
consequences for industrial relations. Miners’
wages were cut, the Miners’ Federation of
Great Britain called for a strike and, faced
with the prospect of the National Union of
Railwaymen and the National Transport
Workers’ Federation also striking in sympa-
thy, David Lloyd George employed the
Emergency Powers Act to recall troops.
In the end, transport workers and railway-
men chose not to join the strike, and a mass
walk-out of more than 2 million workers
didn’t materialise. The nightmare scenario of
a general strike in 1921 never came to pass,
but the threat of mass disruption had impli-
cations for the timing of the census, which
was postponed from April to June.The party decade?
When the census did eventually go ahead, it
revealed an “excess of women”. Given the
huge death toll of the First World War, thisTRAILBLAZERS OF 1921The political leader
The second woman to take up a
parliamentary seat in the House of
Commons was elected on 22 Septem-
ber 1921 at a by-election in Louth,
Lincolnshire. MARGARET
WINTRINGHAMYCUVJGTUV
British-born woman to sit in the
Commons, as Sinn Fein member
Constance Markievicz abstained from
taking her seat and Nancy Astor
hailed from Virginia, USA.
Wintringham was active in both
the Liberal party and the women’s
movement, using her position to
lobby for equal franchise, equal pay
and widows’ pensions. In her maiden
speech to parliament, she argued that
women “feel that the best investment
for the nation at the present time is
good education and good health”.was hardly surprising. All the same, to
reporters and establishment figures alike,
this was a cause of great concern. In fact, so
worried was the political establishment by
the prospect of female voters being in the
majority that, in 1918, it had seen to it that
the franchise was limited to women over
the age of 30.
Despite such moves, suffragists were
determined to build on the hard-earned
gains of the war years, and continued to
lobby MPs to extend the franchise to all
women, demanding “that they should now
be allowed their share of the responsibilities
of citizenship”.
Suffragists remained a force to be reck-
oned with in 1921 and would continue to be
so throughout the twenties. But if one group
of women was to come to epitomise the
decade more than any other, it was surely the
“flappers”. Casting off the limitations of the