Women in Parliament: Lady Magazine

21 Oct 2009

Lady Magazine
We are coming up to the 90th anniversary of the election of the first woman to take her seat in Parliament, Vicountess Astor.

So it is a good time to contemplate what progress has been made. In some ways the startling thing is how slow progress has been. Vicountess Astor felt obliged to end one of her early speeches (on the perils of binge drinking) with the words “I do not want you to look on your lady member as a fanatic or a lunatic. I am simply trying to speak for hundreds of women and children throughout the country who cannot speak for themselves”

Then as now, there were only two stereotypes of the female politician. You are either a “battleaxe” in the manner of the late Gwyneth Dunwoody or Ann Widdecombe. Or you are a “fanatic” like my colleagues Clare Short and Harriet Harman.  The battleaxe is patronised. And the fanatic is derided. Until of course the fanatic’s causes become mainstream, like violence against women. Then male commentators forget that they ever thought such matters trivial.

And heaven help the female politician who is too young to be a battleaxe and too quietly spoken to be written off as a fanatic. Both the Labour Minister Jackie Smith and the Conservative Shadow Minister Theresa have had to put up extensive press coverage of their cleavage. It did not seem to occur to drooling male political commentators that the only reason they could spy any cleavage at all, was because the press gallery looks directly down on ministers. Viewed head on both the lady’s necklines were perfectly modest.

And it is noticeable that male ministers are allowed to be quietly mediocre without criticism. The approved phrase is “safe pair of hands”. But mediocre female ministers are subject to excoriating criticism.

Perhaps it is not surprising that male members of the Westminster Village have difficulty coping with women. Until recently numbers had crept up extremely slowly. In 1983 there were still only twenty three women out of a total of six hundred and fifty Members of Parliament. When I was elected in 1987 there were forty two of us.

But many of my female colleagues were older women, who had entered Parliament after a lifetime in local government. Their children were often grown up or they were childless. There was a tacit understanding that family life was the sacrifice that a woman had to make if she wanted a political career. There was a whole generation of high flying labour women who did not have children. Women like Margaret Beckett and Clare Short. I remember bringing my baby son into Parliament when he was just a few weeks old in order to cast my vote. Anonymous male MPs complained to the authorities. It was perfectly OK for David Blunkett to bring his guide dog into the voting lobby. But a baby was unthinkable. On another occasion a particularly grand Tory MP looked at the baby in my arms in horror as I walked to my office. “Don’t you have a nanny!” he exclaimed.

The numbers of women MPs, particularly younger women of childbearing age, exploded in 1997 with the election of a Labour government. Labour went from ten women MPs in 1983 to one hundred and one in 1997. Initially it was exhilarating. But, as an ardent feminist, I have to admit I found the 1997 intake of Labour women disappointing. For instance almost all of them voted for cuts in benefit for single parent mothers in the early months of the Blair administration. I have to confess that I found the willingness of relatively comfortably off female colleagues (who nonetheless called themselves socialists) to vote to take money away from some of the poorest women in society very disillusioning. Curiously, although the 1997 intake of labour women were the direct beneficiaries of the feminist campaigning of the eighties, they were almost all leadership loyalists and more likely to vote with the leadership (no matter what the cost to working class women) than male labour MPs.

But one woman MP stands out from my time in parliament and that is, of course, Margaret Thatcher. I disagreed with almost everything she stood for, but you cannot deny that she had an impact. My friend Harriet Harman has been much criticised for not mentioning Thatcher by name in a checklist of “Women in Power” produced by her office. Poor Harriet has been accused by zealous Tories of trying to airbrush Thatcher out of history.  In fact the checklist actually does refer to the election in 1979 of the UK’s first woman Prime Minister. Maybe the compilers though that nobody needed reminding of the name! Margaret Thatcher’s name certainly burned itself into people’s consciousness. I remember a doctor once told me that the standard test for senility used to include asking people what the name of the prime minister was. If you could not remember that, it was an indicator you were losing your faculties. But they had to drop that part of the test when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister. No matter how senile you were, everyone remembered her name.

If Vicountess Astor returned to Parliament today, some things would be different. There are many more women. But some things would be surprisingly familiar to her; ritual, trappings, procedures and architecture of Parliament have altered little in a century. The language has hardly changed. Despite the recent expenses scandal, we still refer to each other gravely as “honourable members” And women Members of Parliament still have to fight the presumption that we are either “lunatics or fanatics”.

But despite the scrutiny of the press and the cynicism of the public, I will never cease to be grateful  for the chance to serve.   

 



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