Introduction
Historians and political scientists have deemed the twentieth century ‘the Conservative Century’, owing to the electoral and cultural dominance of the Conservative Party in Britain. While the turn of the twenty-first century portended something rather different, as a Cool Britannia-Blairite-New Labourite political class inaugurated the new millennium, and the Labour Party governed from 1997 to 2010, since then, and even more so in the fallout of Britain’s recent EU Referendum (June 2016), it looks increasingly likely that the twenty-first century may also be a ‘Conservative Century’. There are many historical, political, sociological and cultural explanations for the hegemony of the Conservative Party. One aspect that has been under-explored, however, is the party’s mobilisation of women and its positioning on gender issues. By any measure, the Conservative Party has been successful at organising women and engaging them at the grass roots, and women have supported the party at and between elections....