Women march for the "right to serve"

On Saturday 17 July 1915 a great procession of women passed through the streets of London under the slogan of the “right to serve” (Women’s Right to Serve). It was organised by the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and at the request of the Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, no less. Women who only a year earlier had been smashing windows and setting fire to pillar boxes to win the vote were now demanding something else: to be admitted to work in the war industry. Despite pouring rain, crowds gathered in the procession and along its route. Estimates of the number of marchers varied, usually putting it at several tens of thousands. The Museum of London even speaks of 50,000 participants.

The road to that day began in August 1914. The militant suffragette organisation led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), then suspended its campaign and sided with the government. In return the authorities released all imprisoned activists. Mother and daughter exchanged the struggle for the vote for patriotic agitation, and in April 1915 they began publishing the paper Britannia in place of The Suffragette. In the spring of 1915 Britain was shaken by the shell crisis. The front was short of ammunition and the factories short of hands, because hundreds of thousands of workers had joined the army. Lloyd George, who had taken charge of the new Ministry of Munitions, needed women at the machine tools. The Munitions of War Act, passed two weeks earlier, had suspended in the armament works the trade-union rules that closed many jobs to unskilled workers, and so also to women.

The procession set off after 3.30 p.m. from the Victoria Embankment and passed through Whitehall, Pall Mall, Piccadilly, Park Lane, Oxford Street and Regent Street before returning to the Thames. At its head went a “pageant of the Allies”: women in the national dress of Russia, Poland, France, Belgium and Italy, followed by representatives of Great Britain, Ireland and the colonies. Behind them marched further sections with banners, among them munitions workers and land girls. Fifty tables were set up along the route bearing the sign “Women! Stop and sign on here for munition work”, where volunteers could enrol for war industry on the spot.

At the end of the route, at the ministry’s offices in Whitehall Gardens, a deputation of women met Lloyd George. The minister then spoke to the crowd from a balcony and outlined plans for employing women on a large scale in the war industry. The campaign suited the government, which according to some accounts supported the WSPU’s agitation with a grant of £2,000. Not all suffragettes took this path. Part of the movement, including Emmeline’s other daughter, Sylvia, condemned the war and the alliance with a government that had previously thrown them into prison.

The march of 17 July became one of the symbols of the wartime transformation of women’s position in Britain. In the following years hundreds of thousands of them took jobs in munitions factories, in transport and in offices, replacing men who had gone to the front. Their part in the war effort was one of the arguments that in 1918 persuaded Parliament to give women the vote.