Editorial Comment:

It is easily forgotten what a big moment it was, 100 years ago today, when women were given the right to vote. Just a few years earlier, the government and most MPS were implacably opposed to extending the franchise, which was why many women felt compelled to campaign vociferously, even violently, for their rights. But, as Melanie Mcdonagh reminds us on the page opposite, it was by no means all. Arguably, there was a majority against suffrage.

The First World War changed everything. While men fought and died in the trenches on the Western Front, women took the jobs they had left behind and joined the industrial workforce in large numbers for the first time. The right to vote was the corollary of that cataclysm. Even so, resistance continued almost until the day the Representation of the People Act became law on February 6 1918.

During a debate in the Commons a few weeks earlier, Col Richard Chaloner, MP for Liverpool Abercromby, said: “I do not see what war work done by women – and no one admits more willingly than I do the magnificent work that has been done – has to do with the question whether or not they should have votes. Is it for the good of the country that women should be included in the franchise? My opinion is that it is not … it would be the most disastrous and revolutionary measure that could be conceived, let alone introduced into the House of Commons.”

By 1917 this was a dwindling, but by no means isolated, view. David Lloyd George, the prime minister, reflected a majority opinion when he said: “The war has had an enormous effect upon public opinion so far as this question is concerned … The facts have altered public opinion completely. Women’s work has been a vital contribution to our success.”

Even so stalwart a supporter of universal suffrage as Lloyd George saw the extension of the franchise principally in terms of a reward for services rendered during the war. In a similar vein, this newspaper supported the Bill in an editorial, stating that “the work of women during the war … has effected a sweeping change in public opinion on this great matter and it is plain that a measure of woman suffrage [sic] must be included in any reform that is seriously meant”.

The war had, indeed, created an unstoppable momentum. Before 1914 a majority of both men and women were probably against extending the franchise. By 1917 a line had been crossed and there would be no going back. We are seeing something similar today on the issues of sexual harassment of women and gender pay equality. Attitudes once considered acceptable are no longer tolerated and never will be again.

Even so, the Act passed 100 years ago today gave the vote only to women aged over 30, with certain property qualifications. Not until 1928 were women placed on an equal footing with men. For decades after, representation of women in politics remained vanishingly small.

Even the election of the country’s first female prime minister failed to further their advancement. In her 11 years in office, Margaret Thatcher put just one other woman into her Cabinet. The second female prime minister, Theresa May, has only five in hers.

After the Second World War at no election until 1987 were more than 30 women elected to Parliament. Today there are 208 women MPS, a third of the total, with 210 women in the House of Lords, or 25 per cent. One hundred years after what this newspaper called “a tall landmark in our political history” we are still a long way from equality of representation in public life. One hundred years on, suffragettes remain convicted criminals. Is, as Ruth Davidson suggests, pardon overdue?

It took a bloody European conflict to give women the vote. Then Col Chaloner worried about the “state to which this country would be reduced” were it ruled by women. Today, we can at least surmise what might have happened had women been in a position to influence the course of political events earlier than they eventually were. Would there have been a war at all?

In 11 years, Margaret Thatcher put just one woman into her Cabinet, Theresa May has only five in hers