From 1918, with a manifesto claiming ‘The Labour party is the women’s party. Woman is the chancellor of the exchequer in the home’, women very gradually entered parliament. However, with full equal voting rights only in 1929, hence ‘flapper election’, despite being able to stand from 1918, Jennie Lee became a member of parliament before she was old enough to vote.
The party’s view of women as home maker, reflected in a 1928 poster: ‘Give the young couple a chance to start married life happily with a house to themselves – that is Labour’s policy’, also led women to demand their input into house design and planning, so not just ‘homes fit for heroes’ but fit for women to run. Many early interests seem familiar today: work, welfare, education, widow’s pensions, free nursery care, and peace and internationalism.
Despite grassroot demands, female MPs faced great difficulty in articulating their support for birth control due to catholic and constituency opposition. Indeed, it was the Lords who first voted to allow local authorities to provide information to married women. Meanwhile, a vignette about non-Labour but leftwing MP Eleanor Rathbone shows her campaigning against female genital mutilation in 1929.
The impact of first world war carnage on those women who lost fathers, brothers, husbands and sons seared this generation of Labour women, though the subsequent rise of fascism, and events in Spain and in Hitler’s Germany, turned many away from an early pacifism, and with some – particularly Mary Agnes Hamilton, later a BBC governor and presenter of ‘the Week in Westminster’ – becoming very active on the international scene.
Some 1918-45 MPs left an enduring reputation, notably Margaret Bondfield, first woman TUC chair and cabinet member – though it was not until 1968 that a mother, Judith Hart, sat there – Susan Lawrence, Ellen Wilkinson, Jennie Lee and Dr Edith Summerskill. But the book delves into the moving history of other remarkable MPs: Dorothy Jewson, Agnes Hardie, Jennie Adamson, Dr Ethel Bentham, Leah Manning – mostly working class, some rich, many Scottish – but none Welsh.
Many sat in marginal seats – the 1931 disaster for Labour being less well known for every woman having lost her seat, including Jennie Lee, Lucy Noel-Buxton, Ruth Dalton, Marion Phillips and Ellen Wilkinson.
Honeyball’s insights into role of women in parliament and in the party, whether to get proper loos, or break away from women-only committees and conferences, reminds us of progress yet to be made. Fewer than 40 women have ever served in the cabinet, and only 370 have been MPs. Indeed, until 1997 women never comprised more than 10 per cent of MPs, and until the 1980s the proportion was always below 5 per cent.
The book, well written with enough facts, figures and dates to surprise and inform and enough colour and personal stories to engage and enjoy, is a timely reminder of the importance of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, unions and the Fabians in harnessing, developing and enabling the extraordinary talents of this group of pioneers.
Mary Honeyball has done women and the party a great service – celebrating the achievements of some outstanding MPs, while showing it is Labour which promotes the interests of women, their families, their jobs and their health.
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Dianne Hayter is a former chair of the National Executive Committee
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Parliamentary Pioneers: Labour Women MPs 1918-1945
Mary Honeyball
Urbane Publications | 192pp | £16.99