Labour Women in Power

Cabinet Ministers in the Twentieth Century

Paula Bartley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030142872
• eBook ISBN: 9783030142889
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book examines the political lives and contributions of Margaret Bondfield, Ellen Wilkinson, Barbara Castle, Judith Hart and Shirley Williams, the only five women to achieve Cabinet rank in a Labour Government from the party's creation until Blair became Prime Minister. Paula Bartley brings together newly discovered archival material and published work to provide a survey of these women, all of whom managed to make a mark out of all proportion to their numbers. Charting their ideas, characters, and formative influences, Bartley provides an account of their rise to power, analysing their contribution to policy making, and assessing their significance and reputation. She shows that these women were not a homogeneous group, but came from diverse family backgrounds, entered politics in their own discrete way, and rose to power at different times. Some were more successful than others, but despite their diversity these women shared one thing in common: they all functioned in a male world.

© The Author(s) 2019

Paula BartleyLabour Women in Powerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14288-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paula Bartley¹

(1)

Stratford-upon-Avon, UK

Paula Bartley

End Abstract

In 1997, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister , he appointed as many women to his first Cabinet as there had been in all previous Labour Governments . ¹ Until then only five Labour women had attained Cabinet status: Margaret Bondfield , Ellen Wilkinson, Barbara Castle , Judith Hart and Shirley Williams . During the same period, nearly one hundred men were appointed to Labour Cabinets . ² This is a lamentable statistic. Why did this happen? In her spirited manifesto, Women and Power, Mary Beard argues that it was generally believed that women had no right to occupy powerful positions and that the ‘shared metaphors we use of female access to power – “knocking on the door”, “storming the citadel”, “smashing the glass ceiling”, or just giving them a “leg up”’ underline women’s lack of entitlement. ³ Beard’s judgement may strike a chord, though one needs to look at women’s lack of power with a more focussed historical lens: there are specific reasons why women found it hard to achieve high political status in the twentieth century. Labour Party women aspiring to reach the pinnacle of Cabinet Minister faced a triple handicap: they had to be elected as MPs; they needed a Labour Party in government; and they needed a Prime Minister sympathetic to women’s advancement. The combined impact of these three obstacles made it tough for Labour women to reach high office for most of the twentieth century. ⁴ Conservative women politicians faced similar obstacles but fared worse: until 1979, only two women , Florence Horsburgh and Margaret Thatcher , were appointed to Cabinet posts. ⁵

Fig. 1.1

Women MPs in twentieth-century Britain

As Krista Cowman and others point out, women came to the parliamentary scene very much later than men. ⁶ For hundreds of years, Parliament had consisted of men only: well over 600 of them in each House of Commons . In 1918, women won the right to stand for Parliament but few chose to do so. As the above chart shows, throughout the twentieth-century women from all political parties were seriously under-represented in the House of Commons : until the late 1980s, they consisted of fewer than 5% of all MPs (Fig. 1.1).

There were a number of reasons for the scarcity of women MPs. First of all, as the charts below show, only a small number of women from across the political spectrum ever stood as parliamentary candidates in all the 23 general elections in the twentieth century. ⁷ In December 1918, the first election where women were eligible to stand, only 17 women out of a total of 1623 candidates put themselves forward. ⁸ Four were Labour. It did not improve significantly until the 1990s (Figs. 1.2 and 1.3).

Fig. 1.2

Number of female and male candidates standing for election from all parties

Fig. 1.3

Number of labour women and men standing for election (Compiled from David Butler and Gareth Butler’s Twentieth Century British Political Facts, 1900–2000, Macmillan, 2000)

Out of these candidates, only one woman was elected: Constance Markievicz who had won her seat in a Dublin constituency for Sinn Fein , a party campaigning for Irish independence. ⁹ However, Sinn Fein refused to recognise the authority of the British Parliament and Markievicz declined to take her seat in the House of Commons . In November 28, 1919, the American born Nancy Astor became the first woman to take her seat in Parliament when she was elected Conservative MP for Plymouth. In 1923, the first three Labour women were elected: they were the first women who had either not replaced their husbands or were unmarried to sit in Parliament. ¹⁰ At the next general election in October 1924, all three were defeated. A new Labour woman—Ellen Wilkinson —was elected, the only woman on the opposition benches. ¹¹ In the 1929 general election, just after women over 21 were enfranchised, nine Labour women won seats, only to lose them two years later in a catastrophic electoral defeat. ¹² In 1935, only one Labour woman was returned. ¹³ The general election which was due to take place in 1940 was not held because of the Second World War .

In the post-war general election of 1945, the twenty-one Labour women who were elected entered Parliament on a wave of optimism. ¹⁴ Labour had won more seats than ever before in its history and many looked forward to a smooth upward rise of women politicians. The success of 1945 was not repeated. ¹⁵ When the Suffrage Act 1969 gave votes to those over 18, there were high hopes that more Labour women might be elected by a younger electorate but it in fact the number of women dropped to ten in the subsequent election. ¹⁶

Why was it so difficult for a woman—whatever her political persuasion—to become an MP and take the first step towards being a Cabinet Minister ? Was it merely social convention? Certainly, there was a strong conviction that women should not take part in public life: Britain in the twentieth century was a much more masculine-dominated country than that of the early twenty-first century. For much of the last century, women were expected to be in their own house—with a small h—looking after their families not in the House of Commons —with a big H—looking after the country. Whether they were Tory, Liberal or Labour, women were expected to marry, take care of their husbands, run the household, do the shopping, cook, make the beds and clean the house, or else supervise others to do so. Trade unions even campaigned for the family wage—that is a man’s wage high enough to support his wife and children—to enable wives to stay at home. Undoubtedly, large numbers of men were chauvinistic, reluctant to encourage women to join their public sphere of work, reluctant to share political power. There were of course exceptions: several Labour MPs such as Keir Hardie , Arthur Henderson , George Lansbury , Herbert Morrison , and Harold Wilson were committed to women’s equality and helped boost their careers. Nonetheless, women needed to be particularly brave to stand for Parliament as they were, after all, challenging the prevailing norms of domesticity and maternity. Only a very few exceptional women were confident or committed enough to overcome these conventional expectations. Predictably, the early women MPs were often single and if married, child-free; those who married stressed how important it was to have a supportive husband.

It was doubly difficult for women with children, trying to balance their role as a mother with parliamentary responsibilities and not feel guilty either of neglecting their children or of neglecting their constituents. ¹⁷ In the mid-twentieth century, a leading child psychologist John Bowlby suggested that a warm and continuous relationship with a mother was esse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Woman in a Man’s World: Margaret Bondfield’s Early Career, 1873–1929
• 3. Over the Glass Cliff: The First Female Cabinet Minister, 1929–1953
• 4. The Mighty Atom: Ellen Wilkinson, 1891–1945
• 5. The First Female Minister of Education, 1945–1947
• 6. A Political Apprenticeship: Barbara Castle, 1910–1964
• 7. In and Out of Cabinet, 1964–2002
• 8. From Burnley to Lanark: Judith Hart, 1924–1968
• 9. The First Woman Paymaster General and Beyond, 1968–1991
• 10. Climbing the Parliamentary Ladder: Shirley Williams, 1930–1974
• 11. In the Cabinet and Out of Labour, 1974–2018
• 12. Conclusion: From 1997 Onwards
• Back Matter