There are only 25 women M.P.s. But outside parliament - at the grass roots of politics - women play a bigger role than most men realise.
IT IS STILL DIFFICULT to imagine women in politics as other than a forbidding regiment of fierce, embattled, latter-day suffragettes; or else, perhaps, a bevy of squires' ladies in hats smothered with artificial cherries and spring flowers raising party funds by running jumble sales and garden parties. But there are thousands of women active in politics today who couldn't be saddled with these unflattering descriptions. Women in politics now are as various as women voting in elections, and they have gone in for politics not as pioneers of women's rights or for an entree into local social life, but simply because politics fascinate them.
The handful of women in Parliament represent only the fraction of the iceberg normally noticed. There are, for instance, 10,000 women councillors serving in local government. There are uncounted women chairmen, treasurers and secretaries of constituency association committees. There are more than 30 women already adopted as prospective candidates at the next election (15 of them Liberals). Among the paid professionals on the organisation side of politics there are nearly a hundred qualified women election agents (68 are Tories), and many more women organisers acting as assistant agents. There are the women who have unobtrusively taken over during recent years senior positions of responsibility in the parties' organisation networks all over the country, and the few, largely unknown, senior officers at the party headquarters. Sara Barker, the Labour Party National Agent and second only to the General Secretary, Len Williams, is the best known.
Joan Lestor, for example, a young teacher who runs her own kindergarten school in south London, is the prospective Labour candidate for Lewisham West. A forthright, independent-minded, vital girl with copper-tinged hair and the poise of an old political campaigner, she is the daughter of a journalist who was an ardent member of the old, very Left-wing, Socialist Party of Great Britain. She joined the S.P.G.B. herself when she was 15, and at 19 was speaking on its behalf in Hyde Park. In 1955 she revised her opinions and joined the Labour Party. She serves on the Wandsworth Borough Council and fought an L.C.C. election unsuccessfully.
"I want to be an M.P. not because I'm convinced I'd be better than anyone else, but because I'd like to implement policies I think are right," she explains. "There are people in the Labour Party who just don't like women candidates and others who believe they lose votes and shouldn't stand in marginal constituencies. But there is no evidence they do lose votes."
Miss Lestor considers a politician needs plenty of push. "You have to stand being shot down. I enjoy speaking - especially at outdoor meetings - and like the cut and thrust of argument."
Living with her parents in a small house on the outskirts of Oxford is Ann Spokes, who fought North-East Leicester in 1959, reducing the Socialist majority from 5,000 to 1,400. She is an Oxford City Councillor, and is at present hoping for an invitation from a constituency with good prospects of a Tory victory in the next election.
"Every woman candidate makes it easier for the next," she says. "North-East Leicester were woman-minded because they'd had a woman there before." (The constituency proved her point by choosing her in preference to two men.)
Miss Spokes began her political career, after reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, by qualifying as an election agent. Agents are not permitted to stand for Parliament, so she has now taken a job with the National Council for Social Service to gain wider experience of other people's problems. The salary is not extravagant, but, she points out, one of the obstacles frequently in a woman candidate's way was removed at the end of the war when the Maxwell Fyfe report recommended that no candidate should give more than ú50 to his party association. Previously, women, usually in poorly paid jobs, were at a disadvantage in making material gestures of support to the constituencies.
Miss Spokes considers that most women are handicapped as politicians by their narrow range of experience and limited spheres of interest. "I think it would be difficult for a married woman to get into Parliament after spending, say, 15 years at home at her children's level," she says.
Girls like these show that quite feminine and unexceptional women relish a political career and it seems likely that the rarity of women M.P.s (only 25 of the 600-odd members of the present Parliament are women) is due to the difficulties and discouragement which at present deter most married women from pursuing any career.
An exception is Mrs. Nelia Penman, prospective Liberal candidate for Sevenoaks and the mother of three girls, aged 13, 11 and six. Married late in life, she had managed beforehand to realise some of her potentialities. She was adopted as prospective candidate for Wavertree, Liverpool, at the age of 22, qualified as a barrister and practised at the Bar, and fought Sevenoaks at the 1945 election. Now, after devoting 17 years to her family, she is standing again.
"My doctor told me I wasn't getting enough brain exercise," she says, "and that it was as if a Rolls-Royce engine was running in a Mini Minor. If I actually win the seat, I'll have to reorganise my home life and pay someone to do the domestic work. My husband isn't exactly keen about the idea, but he's being very good about it. I think it's better for a woman to have outside interests - better for her family as well as for herself."
MARRIED WOMEN - not only those who might have chosen a political career had they remained single, but many who have never taken more than an intelligent voter's interest in politics - are, however, multiplying on local councils, and today about one in four elected members of local authorities are women. Especially on county councils, where good candidates willing and able to attend afternoon meetings are not plentiful, women are being positively wooed.
The excuse of most retiring housewives that they don't know anything about local government is brushed aside. They learn that schools and street lighting, public libraries and traffic jams are the familiar raw materials of local politics, and they realise that they can not only master the problems involved, but also get through the business more expeditiously than their male colleagues.
Mrs. Joyce Clyne, won a seat for the Liberals on the Middlesex County Council in 1958, and is at present on the Finchley Borough Council. "I'm not an emphatically political person," she says, "and I'd never think of standing for Parliament. But politics interest me as an observer and I've enjoyed my local government work, especially on the County Council where one's dealing with children and welfare."
She thinks that women have to realise that men are more aggressive and competitive, "always jockeying for position," and that it is no good sitting back and expecting your ability to be noticed or feeling aggrieved when it is not. "You must always ask for what you want."
Mrs. Phyllis Stedman, wife of Peterborough rose-grower Harry Stedman, agrees. She has helped in every Parliamentary election since 1924 when, at the age of eight, she handed out Labour Party leaflets and sang Party jingles. She fought her first local government election in 1946 when the prospective Labour candidate decided at the last minute to stand down. She stepped in and won by ten votes. She is at present not only a Soke of Peterborough Councillor but Leader of the Labour group. "On committees women really try to find out about their subject," she says, "whereas men assume they know it all already. But women become over-emotional about issues that matter to them."
For some young women a seat on the local council may be the first step up the political ladder to Parliament. Brenda Oldham, 25-year-old Lewisham Tory Councillor and Divisional Chairman of West Lewisham Young Conservatives, works as a translator with an insurance company (she knows French, Spanish and Russian as well as Latin and Greek). She decided to become a Conservative while she was still at school, largely because she was disillusioned by the non-appearance of the Socialists' brave new world after the war. "I can remember wishing we could get on with rebuilding London instead of spending money on the Festival of Britain," she recalls. She hasn't finally decided whether or not she will stand for Parliament.
Behind the scenes in politics are the organisers, the paid political workers who keep the party organisation running smoothly. A professional agent, for instance, is employed by every constituency party association that can afford one to put over party policy, to organise canvassing and meetings and ensure elections are run in accordance with the law.
Daughter of a dedicated Labour family, Doreen Smith worked first in a voluntary capacity. In 1953, at the age of 26, she became the first woman member of Newport Pagnell Urban District Council, and was elected a constituency party delegate to the annual Party Conference. The same year she decided she wanted to give all her time to the Party, and a job as agent was the obvious solution.
After qualifying, she served as agent in Wellingborough through the 1955 and 1959 elections, and has recently been promoted to become Regional Woman Officer in the Northern Home Counties.
Penny Kininmonth, the Liberal Party's Western Counties Federation Secretary, on the other hand, is ambitious for her Party but not really for herself. "I'm better as a backroom girl-but I feel strongly about my politics or I couldn't go on with my job." Miss Kininmonth knew nothing of what went on behind the scenes in politics until, stuck in an uncongenial office job just after the war, she was advised to investigate the possibilities. After a spell as organiser on the Women's and Young Liberals' side of the Liberal Party organisation, she became Frank Byers' agent in North Dorset from 1951 to 1953.
In her experience, women lack confidence in their own abilities. For instance, she has found that "women will always address envelopes and run jumble sales. But, if you ask for canvassers, not one comes forward until you assure them that it's mostly a matter of personality, that someone will go with them the first time, and that they needn't work in the neighbourhood where they're known. Then they get very clever at it."
One point on which all women politicians experienced in doorstep canvassing seem agreed is that the housewife who leaves politics to her husband has all but disappeared. Better education for girls, and television which allows the housewife to keep up with the issues men discuss at work, have finally achieved the revolution the suffragettes anticipated. At election times, indeed, His and Hers political bills sometimes appear in the same windows. "Well," said one wife, "I think my husband is entitled to his own opinions . . ."
