Women's Liberation

Gender Inequality from Suffrage to Austerity

Pat Thane

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781509566594
  9781509566587
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509566600
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the populist right gains political legitimacy and the backlash against feminist movements grows, pay and health inequalities are worsening, and misogyny has taken on new insidious digital forms, gender equality is as contested and uncertain as it has ever been. How did we get here? And why, despite over a century of protest, has more progress not been made?

In this book, acclaimed historian Pat Thane offers a clear-eyed introduction to the key forces that have driven as well as limited the pursuit of gender equality in Britain over the last century. From the fight for enfranchisement to the election of Margaret Thatcher, the rise of New Labour and the impact of austerity, she reveals that gender inequalities have always intersected with inequalities of class, income, disability and ethnicity. With examples spanning education, employment, political representation, health and sexual violence, she explores how and why such profound inequalities have survived and pervaded every area of our lives.

Women's Liberation addresses the fundamental question at the heart of this long fight for change: is gender inequality a mainstay of our social, economic and political fabric or is a more hopeful future possible? This lucid and accessible book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary debates about gender in Britain, as well as twentieth-century social and political history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Women Fighting for a Political Voice, 1900–1918
• 2 What Difference Did the Vote Make? 1918–1939
• 3 Gender in Wartime, 1939–1945
• 4 Making the ‘Welfare State’, 1945–1951
• 5 ‘Never Had It So Good’? 1951–1964
• 6 A Permissive Society? 1964–1970
• 7 The Seventies, 1970–1979
• 8 The Lady’s Not for Equality, 1979–1997
• 9 Things Can Only Get Better? New Labour, 1997–2010
• 10 Austerity, 2010–2024
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement