'Stop the Flapper Vote Folly': Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail, and the Equalization of the Franchise 1927-28

This essay re‐examines the Daily Mail's campaign in 1927–8 against the Baldwin government's decision to equalize the franchise by lowering the female voting age to 21. It argues that the Mail's hostility to the ‘flapper vote’ was largely a product of the passionate anti‐socialism of its proprietor, Lord Rothermere, and not, as has been suggested, the culmination of a decade of anti‐feminism. Rothermere was convinced that young women would vote overwhelmingly for the Labour Party and entrench it in government for a generation. But attacks on the ‘flapper’ in 1927–8 were generally confined to the paper's editorial and political columns, and contrasted with the much more positive portrayal of young women that had been typical of the Mail's output since 1918. The example of the Daily Express, which supported franchise equalization, is used to demonstrate that it was Rothermere's idiosyncratic political pinions, rather than the ‘typical’ anti‐feminism of the Conservative press, that explained the Mail's stance. The article concludes that the gender discourse of interwar newspapers has been unfairly stereotyped by historians, and that media hostility to young, unmarried women in these years has been exaggerated.