The early years of the twentieth century were significant for the movement for women’s rights.

 “The early years of the twentieth century were significant for the movement for women’s rights.” Discuss how the literary texts that you have studied in this course, reflect the developments in the contemporary movement for women’s rights.

Ans –The early years of the twentieth century were significant for the movements for women’s rights, especially for voting rights. The figure of the “New Woman who defied socially accepted constructs of gender roles, and had gained much prominence during the later years of the nineteenth century. The 1870 Education Act had made elementary education accessible to large sections of society.

lan notes how both middle class and upper class women benefitted from expansion in educational provision; working class girls usually learnt cooking, needlework etc. Which would prepare them for domestic service, while some middle class girls studied subjects like Mathematics and Science, and went on to university. Working class girlsusually found low paid unskilled work, such as domestic service, while nursing, teaching etc. were opening up new opportunities for middle class women. Women had some voting rights in local elections, but were still demanding the right to vote in the national elections, at the beginning of the century (Cawood 8).

Though women taxpayers won the right to vote in municipal elections during the later nineteenth century, and later to sit on county and city councils, they were still denied the right to vote in national parliamentary elections Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst were the prominent leaders of the movement for women’s suffrage. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Many sufiiragists became involved in increasingly violent actions as ime went on. These women militants, or suffragettes, as they were known, were sent to prison and continued their protests there by engaging in hunger strikes... When World War I began, the shifted their energies to aiding the war effort, and their effectiveness did much to win the public wholeheartedly to the cause of woman suffrage. The need for the enfranchisement of women was finally recognized by most members of Parliament from all three major parties, and the resulting Representation of the People Act was passed by the House of Commons in June 1917 and by the House of Lords in February, 1918. Under this act, all women age 30 or over received the complete franchise” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Perhaps one of the most enduring statements of resistance to patriarchal cultural values during the early twentieth century, was Virginia Woolf's essay “A Room of one’s Own” (1929). The character of the “New woman’ was g common one in early twentieth century literature. In D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers, the character Clara is a suffragette, and there are some references in the novel to the women’s movement. Ursula Brangwen in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow, is a ‘New Woman® who seeks to be independent and enters the world of work as a school teacher.

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