Commemorating the Equal Franchise Act and Historicising Women's Social and Political Lives at National Trust Properties in 1920s Britain

In early twentieth century Britain, the predominant form of employment for women was domestic service, and at the time of full enfranchisement some women worked in the homes of early feminists now owned by the National Trust. This thesis will analyse both the women who lived and worked in selected Trust properties to assess the worker-employer relationship, how this affected women's campaigning for further socio-political and economic opportunities, and the ways this changed during the 1920s.

The private sphere of the home provides a key domestic site, not only for female activism and political networks, but as a site which facilitated or complicated the relationships between activists and the women who worked for them. As the centenary of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act nears, this project will examine how propertied women manifested their new political emancipation, and consider how their disenfranchised live-in servants facilitated their activism, as well as developing their own political ideologies.

I will consider:

To what extent did the domestic space of a grand home enable feminist interactions that provoked a solidarity that cut across class? Did unequal political opportunities create competing class interests within the private sphere of these homes?

Furthermore, if domestic servants facilitated the activism of their employer, does this suggest that this was actually the activism of the employee?

The chosen National Trust properties will constitute a key location and archival base. They housed feminists such as Eleanor Acland from Killerton House, Exeter, President of the Women's National Liberal Federation for two years from 1929. Florence Mander similarly was active in the movement, at her home Wightwick Manor, from which she held meetings on behalf of the Wolverhampton Women's Suffrage Society.

Diaries, pamphlets and political speeches will demonstrate how upper-class women exercised their socio-political status from within the home, however this study will also make use of domestic materials to contextualise the lives of the servants. Staff lists, shopping lists and household management books can establish the daily working lives these women experienced, yet it can also demonstrate if and how domestic servants assisted the activism of their employer.

Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, for example, founded the Women's Legion in 1915, and its emblem was embossed on butter stamps at her home, Mount Stewart, ostensibly bought and used by her staff to promote her cause.

Developing the literature of Light (2008), Delap (2011), Schwartz (2019) and Elmari Whyte (2020) who have analysed domestic workers beyond the Victorian era in relation to labour and women's history, this study will instead consider the long history of suffrage beyond 1918 and activism after the suffrage movement. The activism of women in the 1920s is a largely underdeveloped field, and the extent to which domestic servants played a role in the new socio-political and economic opportunities of the 1920s has been overlooked in the historiography(Purvis and Hannam, 2020).

This project will contribute to a fuller understanding of women's lives in the 1920s,considering age, ethnicity and region in a long-form study.