On February 6th Britain will celebrate a century of female suffrage. The movement had a cautious beginning. In 1918 voting rights were extended only to women over 30 who owned property or were married to a man who did. Universal suffrage came a decade later. The conservative men who passed the law of 1918 feared electoral defeat if they opened the ballot boxes to “flappers”, the young women who wore short dresses, heavy make-up and bob haircuts and had scandalously liberal social attitudes. In reality, women’s voting habits turned out to be more conservative than men’s—and more or less stayed that way until last year. If men alone had voted, Labour would have won the elections in 1955, 1959 and 1970. The Tories prevailed in all three because they won the female vote by a margin wider than the tasselled hem of a flapper’s skirt.