Introduction: The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies before the First World War

Abstract

By the time the First World War broke out, the eventual winning of the vote for women within a few years had become inevitable, although those who wanted this to be so knew they had to keep up the struggle, and those who hoped otherwise still thought they might stave it off. In any event, the impact of the war altered the trajectory of the women’s suffrage movement in ways that profoundly affected the outcome, and the nature of the feminism that prevailed. In the immediate pre-war years, new young leadership within the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS, NU), the major non-militant women’s suffrage organization, was embracing a fresh vision of democratic polity, going beyond middle-class women’s drive to obtain the vote for themselves. The theme of this book will be the way in which the potential for realization of this vision would be a casualty of the war. This introduction will briefly review significant factors and events in the pre-war history of the NUWSS.1