Considering Conservative Women in the Gendering of Modern British Politics

Clarisse Berthezène, Julie V. Gottlieb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367569662
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000225426
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume examines how the British Conservative Party has appealed to women, the roles that women have played in the party, and the tense relationship between women's activism on the Right and feminism. Covering the period since the early 20th century, the contributions each question assumptions about the reactionary response of the British Right, Margaret Thatcher's party, to women's issues and to their political aspirations.

How have women been mobilized by the Conservative Party? What kind of party appeals has the British Conservative Party designed to attract women as party workers and as voters? Developing successful strategies to attract women voters since 1918, and appealing to certain notional women's issues, and having produced the only two women Prime Minters of the UK, the Conservative Party has its own special relationship with women in the modern period. The shifting status of women and opportunities for women in politics in modern Britain has been garnering more scholarly attention recently, and the centenary of women's partial suffrage in 2018 and Astor 100 in 2019 has done much to excite wider attention and public interest in these debates. However, the role of Conservative women has too often been seen as problematic, especially because of general assumption that feminism is only allied to leftist movements and political positions. This volume explores these themes through a range of case studies, covering the period from the early 20th to the 21st century.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Women's History Review.

‘Does the right hon. Gentleman mean equal votes at 21?’ Conservative women and equal franchise, 1919-1928

Mari Takayanagi

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of Conservative women in the controversial decision by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government to support equal franchise, placing it in the context of campaigns by Conservative women inside and outside Parliament between 1919 and 1928. It evaluates the role of female MPs including Nancy Astor and the Duchess of Atholl, Caroline Bridgeman and the Women’s Unionist Organisation, pressure groups and local organisations. It gives an account of the issues debated, including whether the franchise should be equalised at age twenty-five or twenty-one. It sheds light not only on the subject of equal franchise, but also on the relationship between Conservative women and their party in this period.

Introduction: Conservative women and equal franchise

In 1918, the Representation of the People Act gave the Parliamentary franchise to virtually all men and to women over the age of 30 who met (or whose husbands met) the property qualification for the local government franchise. Ten years later, following a raft of unsuccessful attempts to achieve equal franchise via private members’ bills, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government finally passed the Equal Franchise Act 1928, which gave women the vote on the same terms as men.¹ The Equal Franchise Act was a milestone in equality legislation. Ray Strachey declared, ‘With the passage of this Act the last glaring inequality in the legal position of women was abolished.’² Men and women now had the same qualifications to vote, based on residence, business premises, or being the husband or wife of a person with a business premise qualification. Women were also entitled to the university franchise if they had passed the examinations required, even if the university did not admit women to degrees.³ The Act also equalised the local government franchise and other consequential issues.⁴

Historians of women’s suffrage between 1918 and 1928 have tended to concentrate on the actions of non-party feminist groups.⁵ There has also been work on the Conservative government’s gradual acceptance of the need for equal franchise, despite press opposition to the ‘flapper’ vote.⁶ Recent scholarship has examined the parliamentary process, placing equal franchise in the context of other legislation, including the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, and the role played by the various private members’ bills.⁷ And there have been studies of Conservative women, and the Conservative party including their attitude to women, covering this period.⁸ Mitzi Auchterionie’s analysis of Conservative suffragists stops in 1914, however. Other relevant works such as Julia Bush’s study of anti-suffragists, and Nicoletta Gullace’s work on suffrage in the First World War, largely end with the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918.⁹ Studies of the early women MPs are also limited.¹⁰

An analysis of the role of Conservative women in relation to the specific issue of equal franchise, inside and outside Parliament, is lacking. This despite the crucial political and symbolic significance of the 1928 Act, which moved the female electorate from an apparently conservative-leaning group bound by age and property restrictions, to the unfettered femininity of all women, everywhere. The decision by the Conservative government to support equal franchise in 1927 was made in the absence of an official election manifesto commitment, amidst press hysteria about the ‘flapper’ vote, and in the teeth of opposition from many Cabinet ministers including Winston Churchill, who feared it meant the end of the Conservative party.¹¹ It hinged on the personal election pledge of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to Dame Caroline Bridgeman, Chair of the Women’s Unionist Organisation in 1924; and a commitment made by the Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks during an exchange with Nancy Astor in the House of Commons in 1925.

This paper will explore the role played by Conservative women in the path to equal franchise. It will consider in particular the contrasting positions of Astor and the Duchess of Atholl; the Women’s Unionist Organisation; the role of Caroline Bridgeman; and follow Parliamentary progress towards the 1928 Act from 1925 onwards.

Astor in Parliament, 1920-1923

Of the 12 women elected to Parliament before 1929, one third were Conservatives.¹² These four were Nancy, Viscountess Astor, the first woman to take her seat in Parliament, MP for Plymouth Sutton 1919–1945; Mabel Philipson, MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed 1923-1929; Katharine, Duchess of Atholl, MP for Perth and Kinross 1923–1938; and Gwendolen, Countess of Iveagh, MP for Southend-upon-Sea 1927–1935. All four were elected for seats previously held by their husbands, although Atholl did not directly ‘inherit’ hers and in fact won it from a sitting Liberal MP.¹³

Of the four, only Astor was whole-heartedly in favour of equal franchise throughout the period up to 1928. In all the various debates and divisions on private members’ bills on equal franchise between 1920 and 1928, Astor was consistently present, speaking and voting in favour every time, regardless of which party the bill had come from. This is particularly apparent in the early period up until 1923, when she was very much on her own as a Conservative woman in Parliament. As an American divorcee, a Christian Scientist, and a passionate advocate of temperance, Astor was also a very unusual Conservative woman, less inclined to toe the party line. She had no record of supporting women’s suffrage before her election to Parliament, but once she was elected she found women wrote to her from all over the country, seeing her as ‘their’ MP, and unfailingly supported causes affecting women, children and equality throughout her long Parliamentary career.

The first occasion she supported equal franchise was during the debate on Labour MP Thomas Grundy’s private member’s bill on 27 February 1920.¹⁴ It took place during the period of Conservative-dominated coalition government led by Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, just a few days after Astor’s maiden speech. She had not intended to speak, but she did:

I only wish hon. Members could see the letters I have received since my maiden speech. It would be an eye-opener. There were thousands of them, and they were on a high level, and of such hope, both spiritual and material … I would like to tell them that there is no reason to fear us. We are reasonable and we are not fanatics, and the people that fear us I cannot understand where they get it from. Fear never won anything.¹⁵

The Times recorded, ‘she must have been glad that the House took her speech not as a curiosity but on its merits … there was wit and some shrewd observation.’¹⁶ The Vote was enthusiastic:

All right-minded women will feel grateful to their spirited and fearless champion who, in these early days of her political experience, while still, in a sense, on trial in the House, sprang to her feet because she felt that she must.¹⁷

In the following division, the government allowed a free vote,¹⁸ although they would have preferred it to be talked out.¹⁹ Astor went into the lobby with Grundy, even at this early date not afraid to support a Labour MP’s bill—a bold action for such a new Member. The bill was subsequently killed by hostile MPs in Standing Committee using wrecking amendments; Astor referred to this as, ‘A most unnatural death!’²⁰

The next opportunity came on a bill brought by a fellow independent-minded Conservative, Lord Robert Cecil, on 8 March 1922. As Cecil explained in the House:

I have ventured to … introduce the Bill under what is called the Ten Minutes Rule in order to give the House an opportunity of expressing in the Division Lobby who are for and who are against this proposal, and I have done so for this reason, that the Government has expressed great reluctance to put forward this reform.²¹

Cecil was a long-standing supporter of women’s suffrage, and other women’s equality issues.²² Astor was not able to make a speech, as the Ten Minute Rule procedure only allows for one speech for and one against, but she still played a part by heckling Cecil’s opponent Lieutenant-Colonel Archer-Shee, making four interjections in the space of the twenty minute debate. In the division the motion for the bill was passed by 208 votes to 60, with Astor voting in favour.²³ A year later, during Baldwin’s Conservative administration, Astor was one of a cross-party group of named supporters of another Ten Minute Rule bill in April 1923, on which there was no division.²⁴ Astor was still the only Conservative woman MP at this point, before Mabel Philipson was elected in a by-election the following month.

Astor versus Atholl: Conservative women MPs, 1924

At the general election in December 1923 eight women were elected, including Astor, Philipson and the Duchess of Atholl. In the wake of the results, Astor described her previous five lonely years:

I have tried for five years to get the Conservative Party right about the position of women. I have never been to a Conference where I have not been treated more like a poor relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Considering conservative women in the gendering of modern British politics
• 1 ‘Does the right hon. Gentleman mean equal votes at 21?’ Conservative women and equal franchise, 1919-1928
• 2 The Elusive Lady Apsley
• 3 Women in the organisation of the Conservative Party in Wales, 1945-1979
• 4 Diana Spearman’s role within the post-war Conservative Party and in the ‘battle of ideas’ (1945-1965)
• 5 Housewives having a go: Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and the appeal of the Right Wing Woman in late twentieth-century Britain
• 6 Free markets and feminism: the neo-liberal defence of the male breadwinner model in Britain, c. 1980-1997
• 7 From ‘I’m not a feminist, but ...’ to ‘Call me an old-fashioned feminist ...’: conservative women in parliament and feminism, 1979-2017
• 8 The Iron Ladies revisited: Julie Gottlieb interview with journalist, writer and political activist Beatrix Campbell
• Index