The Expansion of Democracy

THE INTERWAR PERIOD HIST 1301 | History The Expansion of Democracy The American and British suffrage movements had been underway for several decades when the war ended. Sufragists, or those who advocated for women's voting rights, occasionally used extreme measures to draw attention to their cause. One such example is Emily Davison, who was murdered in 1913 when she pushed herself in front of the King of England's horse during a derby. Leaders of the suffragist movements in both nations were frequently jailed; many of them staged hunger strikes and endured forced feedings while behind bars in an effort to raise awareness of the cause. Politicians began to view women's voting more favourably as a result of the women's support for the war and their actual employment in the medical corps and war industries. In 1920, women in the US were granted the ability to vote, albeit under the guise of compensation for their wartime duty. Britain went with a phase-in strategy. In 1918, women over thirty who satisfied certain property requirements were granted the right to vote. In 1928, women who were twenty-one years of age or older were granted the right to vote. In 1918, the property requirements for males were eliminated, and men who were twenty-one years of age or older were eligible to vote. The age restriction was dropped to nineteen for individuals in the military. Other nations adopted the pattern. 1918 saw the granting of the vote to German women. Women were immediately granted the right to vote when Poland became a nation. Certain nations continued to apply restrictions, including property requirements or the requirement to be a widow of a war to be eligible to vote. France and Italy fell behind; no nation granted women the right to vote until 1945. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, female activist groups in Japan campaigned for women to be included in politics. Women were given the opportunity to attend political rallies thanks to a reform in Japanese legislation, but they were not granted the right to vote until after World War II. Growing feminism in China along with the May Fourth Movement enabled women to legally acquire individual property rights. There were also distinct female voices audible. In 1923, Huda Sha'arawi ceased donning her headscarf and veil and established the Egyptian Feminist Union. She was already actively involved in the Egyptian independence struggle and had been teaching females. In the 1930s, she was elected vice president of the International Women's Union. In 1936, Zaynab al-Ghazali established the Muslim Women's Society in Europe. Al-Ghazali argued that Islamic women might be active in politics outside the house and still maintain their religious beliefs. A number of minority groups in the US believed that enlisting in the military would increase their acceptability and privileges. During the war, over 11,000 Native Americans volunteered for the military, with many of them expecting to be granted U.S. citizenship as a result. In 1924, Native Americans did receive citizenship. The African Americans were another group seeking for change. African Americans, who had long been the targets of racial segregation and discriminatory legislation, believed that World War I gave them a chance to establish their loyalty as citizens. Because the US military was segregated, Black service members serving abroad had a rare opportunity to see how other countries handled them. The freedom of mobility and welcome they discovered in France, in particular, astounded them. They were mostly used in support duties by US soldiers, but they were permitted to participate in combat. There was sincere hope that after the war, life in the US will be different. After 1918, many discovered, nevertheless, that not much had changed. Laws that discriminated against people continued to be in effect, and mistreatment of veterans was widespread. The potential for movement was novel. African American labourers and their families started moving north in 1917, drawn by the promise of well-paying industrial employment creating goods for the war effort. After the war, as manufacturers started to produce more and more consumer goods, this movement persisted. A Great Migration of over a million African Americans had fled the South by 1920, and it carried on for several more decades. The North was not exempt from racism. Racial unrest erupted in several places during the summer of 1919, and the Ku Klux Klan—a White supremacist organisation founded during the Civil War—grew across the country in the 1920s. However, compared to what African Americans had endured in the South, racism in the North looked moderate, and more chances for employment and education kept luring individuals to the Midwest and North's cities. Many were drawn to the New Negro movement in the 1920s by new means of subsistence and involvement in civil rights organisations like the NAACP. "A renewed sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics" were the goals of this campaign. The movement's first goal was to push for a federal anti-lynching statute. The majority of victims of lynchings as vigilante crimes were African Americans. Southern state courts would not prosecute White males for killing African Americans, as antilynching campaigners were aware of. But they thought they might get more justice by designating lynching as a federal offence that would be prosecuted in a federal court. Congress first considered a law prohibiting lynching in 1922 but again rejected it in 1935. Even when it came to humanitarian issues, white southern leaders opposed any federal intervention. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of African American literature, art, and music named for a New York City neighbourhood where many African Americans who took part in the Great Migration lived, were also affected by racial pride. Several African American writers, including poet Langston Hughes and playwright Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote about the racial struggles of twentieth-century African Americans in her plays, novels, and short stories, found widespread recognition during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. The unique blues and jazz forms played by African American communities in Harlem and other became international genres and served as the soundtrack for the decade of post-World War I changes in dynamics. The Harlem Renaissance, particularly the writings of Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born author, served as a major influence on the Négritude literary movement, which originated in French-speaking regions of Africa and the Americas. Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and university lecturer, started the movement. Aimé Césaire, a poet and playwright from the Caribbean island of Martinique (which was then a French colony), invented the word "négritude," which exhorted Black people to reject European culture and values in favour of African ones.