'Stop the Flapper Vote Folly': Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise 1927-28 |
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Authors: | Bingham Adrian |
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1 Merton College, Oxford
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Abstract: | This essay re-examines the Daily Mail's campaign in 19278against the Baldwin government's decision to equalize the franchiseby lowering the female voting age to 21. It argues that theMail's hostility to the flapper vote was largelya product of the passionate anti-socialism of its proprietor,Lord Rothermere, and not, as has been suggested, the culminationof a decade of anti-feminism. Rothermere was convinced thatyoung women would vote overwhelmingly for the Labour Party andentrench it in government for a generation. But attacks on theflapper in 19278 were generally confinedto the paper's editorial and political columns, and contrastedwith the much more positive portrayal of young women that hadbeen typical of the Mail's output since 1918. The example ofthe Daily Express, which supported franchise equalization, isused to demonstrate that it was Rothermere's idiosyncratic politicalpinions, rather than the typical anti-feminismof the Conservative press, that explained the Mail's stance.The article concludes that the gender discourse of interwarnewspapers has been unfairly stereotyped by historians, andthat media hostility to young, unmarried women in these yearshas been exaggerated. |
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