Women magistrates, ministers and municipal councillors in the West Riding of Yorkshire : 1918-1939.

In the two decades after the partial enfranchisement of
women in 1918 and the removal of legal disabilities which
excluded them from the magistracy, women in the West
Riding of Yorkshire were mobilized to seek a new civic
role as councillors and as justices of the peace through
membership of women's organisations, of the women's
sections of political parties and to a lesser extent as a
consequence of their widespread involvement in charity
work. By the post-war period, too, traditional arguments
against the ordination of women in the Free Churches had
lost credibility and a number of women became church
ministers in the strongly Nonconformist West Riding.
Women magistrates were rapidly accepted on equal terms
and from the start shared duties equally with their male
colleagues. Ordination of women in the Free Churches was
premissed on the principle of complementarity and,
although usually obliged to accept the less desirable
churches, women ministers experienced little hostility.
The majority of women councillors, however, justified the
need for their election on the grounds of the distinctive
contribution that women could make to local government.
By identifying only certain issues on which women's views
should be sought and concentrating on areas of local
government which only affected the lives of women and
children their contribution was seen to be limited.
Individual women's influence over their appointment as
magistrates was minimal and their numbers remained low
primarily because local advisory committees failed to
adopt progressive criteria for their recommendations.
Traditional attitudes were still too deeply entrenched to
allow many women to seek ordination and it was the
identification of a limited role for women, together with
social, cultural and economic factors, which militated
against any significant increase in their representation
on local councils in the West Riding throughout the
period.