The battle for the right to vote was fought by the ‘Suffragettes’ or Women’s Suffrage Movement, led by Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst. They wanted equal political rights for women and many of them were sent to prison.
In 1918 for the first time, all men aged twenty-one, and women over thirty, were allowed to vote. In 1924 the first Labour government was created. The Labour Party has never been totally identified with Socialism or Communism,but it was more in line with working-class aspirations.
New living conditions and new habits set the tone of the age: cigarette smoking, cinema going, a less regular attendance at church, more liberal attitudes in sexual matters, the obsessive search for fun, for this reason these years were called the Roaring Twenties; also the vision of family changed : they became smaller and there was a reduction in the number of children.
New technology evolved very rapidly: the telephone and electricity, the cinema and the radio. The most significant advance in technology was the spread of the automobile which thanks to Henry Ford's use of the assembly- line technique, could now be produced cheaply.
After the years of technological progress and economic development, in l929 there was a sudden and dramatic crash in the
American stock market, the so-called Wall Street Crash. In Britain, the economic decline brought to a high increase of unemployed.