‘Building a New and Better Order’? Women and Jury Service in England and Wales, c.1920–70

Abstract

The 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act extended women's citizenship by enabling them to serve as magistrates and jurors in the country's law courts. Yet while the proportion of women magistrates rose steadily over the next fifty years to reach almost half, even in the 1960s juries remained overwhelmingly male, largely as a result of the continuation of outdated rules concerning jury qualification which remained unreformed until the 1970s. This article analyses the reasons for the delay in reforming the law on jury composition and examines attempts by feminists to bring about change. It argues that the continued tendency among the legal profession and others to regard the criminal law as ‘a man's world’ was especially salient in delaying further reform of juries, but that by the 1960s a combination of efforts by women's organisations and changing cultural attitudes enabled the achievement of gender equality on juries. It also contends that the eventual reform was a success for women's organisations associated with ‘first-wave’ feminism which highlighted the jury issue in the early 1960s.