What Happened When British Women Voted in a General Election for the First Time

Just three days after World War I ended on Armistice Day, 1918, Bonar Law, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, announced that a general election would be held on December 14.

It would be no ordinary election—for the first time in British history, women over the age of 30 who met a minimum property requirement could vote in a parliamentary election.

This election came at “a time of considerable confusion in British politics,” wrote historian Trevor Wilson. David Lloyd George, the Liberal prime minister, had risen to power based on conservative support during the war and would have to reassemble a coalition to stay in power.

His task was made even more confusing because demographics and voting rights were in profound flux in Britain. Eight hundred and eighty thousand British combatants died during the war, a whopping 6 percent of the adult male population. To compensate, the Representation of the People Act of February 6 abolished almost all property qualifications for male voters over 21.

The effect of this new law was stunning. The electorate nearly tripled from 7.7 million voters to 21.4 million. With the stroke of a pen, women had become 43 percent of the electorate.

The same year also saw the passage of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, which allowed women to run as candidates for members of Parliament for the first time. Of the 17 women who stood for this historic election, 15 had backgrounds in the suffrage movement.

“How the women's vote will go, whether the married women voters will be swayed by their husband's political views or not, are all matters of speculation,” the Evening Express wrote shortly after the general election was announced.

But though popular politics were spreading across the British Isles, party leaders made crucial decisions about the election behind closed doors. As historian Matthew Johnson notes, during the war in 1916, Lloyd George and Law had executed what was “effectively a political coup d’état” against H.H. Asquith, the incumbent Liberal prime minister, forcing him out of office and consigning him to a political wilderness when Lloyd George took over as premier.

Although he was a Liberal just like Asquith, Lloyd George cozied up to the Conservatives in a state of what Wilson called “open hostility to the party of which he still claimed to be a member.”

Because this coalition was now more important than party designations, Lloyd George and Law officially endorsed their preferred candidates with a signed letter known as a coupon. Consequently, the 1918 general election became known as the “Coupon Election.”

In total, the leaders gave coupons to 364 Conservative candidates, 159 Liberals, 20 members of the short-lived National Democratic and Labour Party (not to be confused with the modern-day Labour Party), and two Coalition Labour candidates. There were now, in effect, two Liberal parties. One, led by Lloyd George, supported the coalition with the Tories and had coupons to prove it. The other, led by Asquith, neither supported the coalition nor had coupons. 

By the time the election took place this day in 1918, the coupon coalition was so electorally strong that the result was already “certain,” according to the Bristol Times and Mirror. Only 63 recipients of the coupon lost a race. The coalition sailed into power with a 283-seat majority, and Lloyd George stayed on as prime minister.

Constance Markievicz was the only woman elected of the 17 female candidates who ran. But as a member of Sinn Fein, an Irish nationalist party, she refused to take her seat in Westminster. (Nancy Astor, who ran for her husband’s old seat in 1919, would later become the first woman to be seated in Parliament.)

More shocking, however, was the revelation that a historically low 57 percent of the eligible electorate voted in the 1918 general election. “Rain—and to some extent apathy—kept polling slow and low,” the Sunday Mirror reported, likely reflecting a deep malaise and trauma settling over the war-torn country.

Still, the nation’s newest constituency was the most enthusiastic in this historic election. Eagerly arriving to exercise their new franchise at polling stations, the Sunday Mirror commented, women were “obviously determined to show that they were not apathetic towards the great issues of the election.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.