In a period when the possibilities of social progress and the practicability of applied social science are being questioned, it is a source of satisfaction to recall some of the achievements of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain. The development of the personal, legal and political liberties of half the population of the country within the span of less than eighty years stands as one of the supreme examples of consciously directed social change.

There have been numerous historical and biographical studies of the Movement and of Millicent Fawcett and its other leaders. Many of these studies have analysed the political, legal and vocational consequences, though largely within a middle-class ethos. Few have been concerned with the working-class woman and particularly with the conditions of life of the working-class mother (McGregor, 1955). Yet, during the 20th century, far-reaching changes, social, economic and technological, affected her status and role as a wife and mother, as a home-maker, as a contributor to the economy of the family, and in a variety of situations in the cycle of married life. Social historians and sociologists have been curiously neglectful of such studies and have allowed the subject of the position of women in modern society to be dominated by the psychologist, the psychiatrist and the sexologist.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to draw together some of the vital statistics of birth, marriage and death for the light they shed on the changes that have taken place since the beginning of the 20th century in the social position of women; and secondly, to suggest that the accumulated effect of these changes now presents the makers of social policy with some new and fundamental problems.

The fall in the birth rate in Western societies is one of the dominating biological facts of the 20th century. Commenting on the British statistics, the 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population noted the rapidity of the decline in family size after 1900. Viewed within the context of the long period of industrial change since the 17th century, it is the rapidity of this fall which is as remarkable as the extent of the fall since 1900. By and large, these trends have been shaped by changes in family building habits of the working-classes in the 20th century.