Modes and models of Conservative women’s leadership in the 1930s

Women came into their own in the Conservative Party in the aftermath of suffrage as party workers, as MPs, as local and national leaders, and as part of a notional women’s bloc of voters that Conservatives felt they could rely on at election time. The valuable work performed by Conservative women at grass roots has been acknowledged in the scholarship, as have the strategies developed by the party to mobilise women as both party workers and voters. Much less attention has been conferred on those Conservative women who became virtual national celebrities. By the late 1930s the two women Conservative MPs to achieve this celebrity and notoriety were Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to take her seat, a committed feminist, and hostess of the so-called Cliveden Set, and the Duchess of Atholl, the first woman MP from Scotland, an avowed anti-(non) feminist, and the Chamberlain scourge at the height of appeasement. Both defied stereotypes of Tory femininity with their own personal styles, by taking an abiding interest in international affairs when most Conservative women were expected to be focused on the local and parochial, and by engaging with women across party lines to advance their favoured policies. They are contrasted with Irene Ward MP whose long Parliamentary career offers a different perspective on where a Conservative MP stood on women’s issues.

Churchill, women and the politics of gender

This chapter investigates how Churchill related to women at the political level, and how women voters in turn related to him. Churchill had a blurred Conservative-Liberal identity, and this affected his approach to ‘the woman question’. Hostile to female enfranchisement at the start of his career, he became a reluctant convert during his Edwardian Liberal phase, provided that it could be done in such a way as to benefit his own party electorally. As a renegade Tory during the 1930s he drew on the services of a range of female anti-appeasers such as Shiela Grant Duff. During World War II, however, he controversially opposed equal pay for women teachers. It is well-established that, in the post-war years, the Conservative Party benefitted from its gendered approach to rationing and austerity, Churchill himself did little to appeal explicitly to women voters. Although he did accept a role for a limited number of ‘exceptional’ women in the public sphere, he was never an enthusiast for substantive gender equality.

The (feminised) contemporary Conservative Party

This chapter argues that party feminization – the integration of women and women’s issues– is best understood as a process rather than an end point; as such we explore continuity and change in the extent to which the UK Conservative party has incorporated women’s bodies and concerns into the party hierarchy and policy in the 2010-2015 period. In so doing it acknowledges that any assessment of the feminization varies according to the variety of feminist thought that is used to make the appraisal; notwithstanding evidence of the acceptance of liberal feminism and in some cases, such as violence against women, radical feminism, leftist feminists are highly critical of the harmful effects on women of the party’s austerity politics. The chapter also explores gender and the vote at the 2015 General Election; it finds that the Conservatives continued to do well among women, particularly among the older generations.

‘The statutory woman whose main task was to explore what women … were likely to think’: Margaret Thatcher and women’s politics in the 1950s and 1960s

After Margaret Thatcher's death much was made of her opposition to feminism, most of it self-expressed. Nevertheless, particularly in her early years in politics, Thatcher was less keen to distance herself from all women's causes or groups. This chapter explores some instances where she worked in tandem with other women in support of causes that many would see as feminist or woman-centred despite her later stance on such issues.

Conservative women and the Primrose League’s struggle for survival, 1914–32

This chapter examines the adaption of the Primrose League, an extra-parliamentary organization allied to the Conservative Party and having a large female membership, to the aftermath of the First World War. Founded in 1883, the Primrose League was an important vehicle for women’s participation in politics before they held the national franchise. While most historians have downplayed the Primrose League’s accomplishments after 1914, this chapter argues that the League re-made itself for its female members between 1914-1932. This chapter will show how the Primrose League deftly survived the deluge of the First World War by focusing on wartime hospitality and philanthropy and rebranding itself as a political educator of citizens newly enfranchised by the 1918 Representation of the People Act (especially women). It will also show how the League continued to be relevant in the postwar period through a combination of anti-socialism and a consumerist version of popular imperialism. In these ways, the Primrose League did not become redundant but was able to remain a useful political weapon for the Conservative Party and an important part of Conservative political culture throughout the 1920s.

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....

Women2Win and the feminisation of the UK Conservative Party

This chapter is an account of the establishment of Women2win, an organization created in 2005 to support the selection of women candidates for political office in the UK Conservative party. Its author is its founding, and still, co-Director, Baroness Anne Jenkin. The chapter charts the efforts of Women2win over the last decade, and discusses the issues that it has faced in securing a higher number of Conservative women MPs in the UK Parliament. In 2015 there were a total of 68 Conservative women MPs (20 percent) up from 17 (9 percent) in 2005. The chapter charts, then, considerable success for the party, although it also points out ongoing concerns about the supply pool – the number of women seeking selection – and the practical issues of seeing women aspirant candidates being selected for the party’s winnable seats.

Feminist responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism

In the 1970s, the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) viewed both Labour and the Tories as part of the mainstream political establishment, dominated by men and largely indifferent to women’s concerns. Now, although many feminists continue to have a contentious relationship with the Labour party, most would see Labour as, at least, the lesser of two evils. This chapter argues that it was Thatcher’s free market ethos and her emphasis on traditional family values, which she articulated from the late 1970s onwards, compounded by the cuts to social welfare programs and the marginalization of the Equal Opportunities Commission during her first government, which convinced many feminists that the two “establishment” parties were not, in fact, interchangeable. It highlights the extent to which Thatcherism was perceived by feminists to be incompatible with feminism, even if the practical record of Thatcher’s administrations was more nuanced.

Conservatism, gender and the politics of everyday life, 1950s–1980s

This chapter examines the rise and fall of the gender gap in voting patterns – whereby women were more likely than men to support the Conservative Party – from the 1950s to the 1980s. It critically analyses political and social surveys from the period, highlighting the common findings that high politics remained distant from the everyday lives of most voters, and that women, in particular, often felt alienated by a politics that was still dominated and defined by men. The chapter examines how the Conservative Party adapted its policy and communications to the social changes of the 1950s and 1960s, and suggests that the party appealed to women with its plausible and sincere rhetorical invocation of the hard-working, ambitious and consumerist, but still traditionally-minded, housewife or part-time worker. This was a rhetoric that Margaret Thatcher mastered, and used to her advantage. By the 1970s, however, the impact of social change, the emergence of a more pluralistic society, and the impact of feminism, undermined the coherence and plausibility of this unifying language of the housewife.

The middlebrow and the making of a ‘new common sense’: women’s voluntarism, Conservative politics and representations of womanhood

Recent work on interwar Conservatism has stressed the success of the Conservative Party’s politics towards women and the stability of the female vote in this period. This chapter focuses on the contribution Conservative women made to the formulation of Conservative principles. It examines their claim that they were ‘practical’, ‘commonsense’ women, as opposed to what they saw as their cerebral, theoretically minded Labour and Liberal counterparts. The deliberate cultivation of the identity of ‘the middlebrow’ was an important means to embrace democracy and speak to all social classes, which led them to develop a particular view of ‘responsible womanhood’ and citizenship, notions which they felt had been inappropriately annexed by the Left. It was also a response to the emergence of a new culture of non-partisan organisations, which provided an important challenge to the position of political parties in interwar Britain. Women’s voluntary associations were particularly instrumental in educating in citizenship and provided a female sphere of political activity that was removed from the rough-and-tumble of party politics. This chapter investigates the links between the Women’s Voluntary Service and Conservative party politics during the Second World War and the importance of specific representations of womanhood to the Conservative identity.