Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919

Provisions of the act

The basic purpose of the act was, as stated in its long title, "... to amend the Law with respect to disqualification on account of sex", which it achieved in four short sections and one schedule. Its broad aim was achieved by section 1, which stated that:

The Crown was given the power to regulate the admission of women to the civil service by Orders in Council, and judges were permitted to control the gender composition of juries. By section 2, women were to be admitted as solicitors after serving three years only if they possessed a University degree which would have qualified them if male, or if they had fulfilled all the requirements of a degree at a University which did not, at the time, admit women to degrees. By section 3, no statute or charter of a University was to preclude University authorities from regulating the admission of women to membership or degrees. By section 4, any orders in council, royal charters, or statutory provisions which were inconsistent with this Act were to cease to have effect.

Effects of the act

Women had previously been given a (limited) right to vote by the Representation of the People Act 1918, and had been able to stand for Parliament, but most of the less high-profile restrictions on women participating in civil life remained. In effect, this act lifted most of the existing common-law restrictions on women; they were now able, for example to serve as magistrates or jurors, or enter the professions. Marriage was no longer legally considered a bar to a woman's ability to work in these spheres.

The act came into force on the day it became law, 23 December 1919; the first female Justice of the Peace - Ada Summers, ex officio a Justice by virtue of being the Mayor of Stalybridge - was sworn in a week later, on 31 December. However, it took until December 1922 for a female solicitor to be appointed.

The act was, by the standards of its time, astonishingly broad. It only addressed three areas specifically - the Civil Service, the courts, and the Universities - leaving all other areas to the sweeping alterations made by section 1. Francis Bennion later described it as "splendidly general", arguing that it went "further in emancipating women than [did] the Sex Discrimination Act 1975".

However, the act was rarely invoked by the courts—the first court case to rule based on it was Nagle v Feilden in 1966, in a case brought by female horse trainer Florence Nagle against the Jockey Club's refusal to grant her a training licence on grounds of her sex. The one significant ruling as to the extent of the Act was not in a court of law, but rather in the House of Lords, where the Committee for Privileges was asked by Margaret Mackworth, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda to rule if the Act's provisions for exercising "any public function" extended to permitting a woman to sit in the House as a peeress in her own right. After some debate, it was held 22-4 that it did not. Women would not be permitted to sit in the Lords until 1958, when appointed female life peers were expressly permitted by the Life Peerages Act 1958, whilst hereditary peeresses gained the right to take their seats after the passage of the Peerage Act 1963.

Much of the act has been repealed, although the first part of section 1 remains in force (in Scotland it was repealed in relation to criminal proceedings by the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1975), as well as the whole of section 3.

A 2016 study of the inclusion of females to British juries finds that "the inclusion of females had little effect on overall conviction rates but resulted in a large and significant increase in convictions for sex offences and on the conviction rate differential between violent crime cases with female versus male victims. The inclusion of women also increased the likelihood of juries being discharged without reaching a verdict on all charges and the average time taken to reach a verdict. A complementary analysis of cases in which the jury was carried over from a previous trial also implies that the inclusion of female jurors on the seated jury sharply increased conviction rates for violent crimes against women versus men."

First 100 years

The act is being commemorated by Obelisk Legal Support Solutions and the First 100 Years project to recognise the impact of women in law since the removal of the act.