‘It would be a great saving of effort to work for one Blanket Bill remedying all the remaining injustices, designed to abolish sex discrimination in law and to establish and maintain equality before the law for all citizens without distinctions based on sex.’ [1]
-Dorothy Evans
Rather than slowly chipping away at individual pieces of legislation, the proposed Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill was designed to eradicate all gender discrimination in British law. Following the success of the Equal Compensation for War Injury campaign in 1943, the Bill was a focal point of feminist activity during the Second World War.
The mastermind of the Bill was Miss Dorothy Evans. Evans was a suffragette, who was known to have participated in numerous militant activities including window smashing and hunger striking, and she was arrested in 1913 for possessing explosives in an unsuccessful attempt to blow up Lisburn Castle.[2] She was an active member in a number of feminist organisations after the First World War; she was, for instance, a founder of the Married Women’s Organisation, which promoted financial and legal equality between husband and wife, and secretary for Women for Westminster, which sought to see more women elected as MPs. Evans was also active in the campaign for equal war compensation which was achieved in April 1943.
The Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill was her brainchild. She surveyed the statute books and found over thirty laws that discriminated between men and women. She painstakingly proposed written changes to every discrimination she found, in a pamphlet of sixty-eight pages. The inequalities found included legislation on social security, family life and criminal law. It was one of two booklets published by the Women’s Publicity Planning Association (WPPA) that outlined sex inequalities in British law. The second of these was The Lesser Half (1943) by Vera Douie, which highlighted laws that had been established during the Second World War.
Evans was particularly concerned with the rights of married women and housewives. She never married herself, but she was in long-term relationships with the father of her daughter, and fellow feminist activist Sybil Morrison. She sought to overturn the cliché that ‘Married women are the spoilt darlings of the law’. The Bill, for instance, included changes to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 to clarify women’s rights in jointly owned business.[3] Likewise it included changes to the Guardianship of Infants Act of 1925 to recognise the parental authority of both husband and wife.[4]
The WPPA held meetings and demonstrations to raise awareness of the Bill in the period 1943-4. Speakers included Evans and other prominent women’s activists including Rebecca Sieff, (chairman of the WWPA), Dr Edith Summerskill (MP and physician) and Margery Corbett-Ashby (suffragist and liberal politician).
Evans died suddenly at the age of fifty-five in August 1944. After her death, the push for the Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill lost momentum and it was never passed. The modifications that Evans proposed, however, foreshadowed changes to come in British law. In 1975, the Sex Discrimination Act protected men and women by eliminating sex discrimination in areas such as employment and education. It did not, however, fully implement all of changes suggested by Evans. For instance, Evans proposed changes to the Succession of the Crown Act of 1543, which gave men priority for succeeding to the throne. This was finally achieved in March 2015 when male priority for succession to the crown was finally removed.
Evans continued campaigning for women’s rights up until the very end of her life; the day before her death she spoke at a public meeting in Glasgow. In Rebecca Sieff’s words: ‘Her memory will be an inspiration to all who ever knew or met her, for her whole life was a symbol of the inescapable truth that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’[5]
By Katie Carpenter.
Katie is a Citizens Project intern and a PhD researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London.
[1] Dorothy Evans, Citizenship: One Class Only (Women’s Publicity Planning Association, [1943]), Women’s Library Collection, LSE Library, 5/WPP/F4/1
[2] Catherine Blackford, ‘Evans, Dorothy (1888–1944)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63844, accessed 15 Aug 2017]
[3] Dorothy Evans, The Equal Citizenship (Blanket) Bill (Third Edition. London: Women’s publicity Planning Association, 1944), p. 48, Women’s Library Collection, LSE Library, 5/WPP/F4/2.
[4] Ibid., 45
[5] Rebecca Sieff, cited in ‘Obituary: Miss Dorothy Evans’, The Manchester Guardian, 6 September 1944.
