King's College London

Politically engaged interwar women writers redefined the female citizen in the wake of 1928 electoral reform by interrogating her perceived intelligence. This research demonstrates that a study of this process reveals the origins of a new form of politics that influenced Britain: meritocracy. In partnership with external stakeholders, the project reframes knowledge of women’s role in meritocracy and illuminates how education informs democratic inclusion today.

The 1928 Equal Franchise Act gave British women the vote on equal terms with men and removed the property qualification, newly enfranchising 5 million women. Public debate suggested that the new female citizen was part of an imagined intelligent elite, implying that it was women’s intelligence that made them worthy voters. Interwar women writers troubled this idea. Author-activists including Vera Brittain considered how the idea of female intelligence was used to restrict access to education, the professions and political participation. For Marie Stopes and Naomi Mitchison, intelligence was embedded in the eugenicist and biomedical. In their fictional and non-fictional works, these women showed how intelligence was a concept shrouded in gender, class and racial hierarchies, cast light on these prejudices, and negotiated women’s new relationship to the state.

Previous work has examined interwar women in the private sphere as domestic citizens. This project focuses instead on how these women were activists in organisations that influenced women’s new identities as female citizens. Interwar women writers’ interrogation of the perceived intelligence of the female citizen demonstrates how women became a testing ground for Britain’s new political story: meritocracy. Meritocracy claimed to make a person’s mental ability, not their family background, shape their future. The intelligence test was first discussed as a tool for organising a secondary education system in 1924. Women’s new civic identity therefore coincided with a period of educational reform that promised to make meritocracy possible by offering a seemingly objective measurement of intelligence. The project shows that women writers were at the frontline of debates surrounding how far mental ability should determine access to the public sphere.

In modern Britain, voting habits divide along educational lines and lowering the voting age is a matter of political debate. Partnerships with the Pankhurst Centre and LSE Women’s Library will influence public understanding of how education shapes democratic participation. The project will enable both partners to reach new audiences and bring the project to beneficiaries in centenary exhibitions, schools’ workshops and teaching materials that meet criteria on the GCSE Citizenship and A-Level History curricula.