The women's movement from the late Victorian period to the 1930s should be seen, more than it has been, as part of the broad ferment of discussion among radicals about how a viable democracy was to be achieved and practised in advanced industrial society; how the growing body of individuals who were acquiring or demanding rights of full citizenship could actively participate in the decision-making of an increasingly powerful and centralised state; and how that power and centralisation could be controlled.

For women such issues took on greatest saliency after 1918 when most women over thirty gained the national vote. They had now to face the question of the roles women could and should play within the political system and how women were to be mobilised to play them. This imagining of a democratic political system in which women participated fully, and attempts to bring it into being, were widespread over a range of women's organisations, yet its language, concepts and ideals have hardly begun to be explored.

In general women's achievements, if not their efforts, have been judged negatively. Pugh recognises some of the effort and enthusiasm with which some women sought to embrace their new opportunities, at least in the 1920s, but is inclined to believe that their impact was dissipated by the division of effort across a range of causes and organisations. Harrison gives more positive stress to the large amount of legislation which activists regarded as favourable to women which was passed in the ten years after 1918.