THE CASE against women politicians is easily made. There are still only 25 women in the House of Commons or a little less than 4 per cent. of all M.P.s, and the figure has fluctuated between only 17 and 28 since the last war ended. Of the 76 women M.P.s returned since Lady Astor first took her seat in 1919 only four have risen to be Ministers of full rank.
There has never been a woman on the Woolsack or at the Exchequer, at the Foreign Office or the Home Office. There has never been a woman Speaker or Deputy Speaker; no woman is a Whip or a Chairman of Committee.
If a man wears a dotty hat in the Commons he is thought rather gay and cavalier; if a woman does so she is thought to demonstrate only the essential frivolity of her sex. Let ten men make boring or absurd speeches in a row and we are resigned to it; let a woman do so and it confirms our worst prejudices. Let a woman speak on Defence and see what notice is taken of her.
If she plays it tough, she is accused of being unfeminine; if she behaves like a woman, she cannot be trusted with a man's job.
Although women have precisely equal rights with their male colleagues, they are still not really welcome in the Smoking Room of the House of Commons. The Parliamentary lavatories say what they do not really mean: Members Only and Lady Members Only. In the politics of sex, all men are Tories.
Whatever else may be said about our present 25 women M.P.s, it cannot honestly be argued that they are dull. There is the redoubtable Dame Irene Ward, who is said to know more about coal-mining than any woman in the world and has put four private Bills on to the Statute Book. There is red-headed Dame Patricia Hornsby-Smith, who has just capped a distinguished public career by becoming the first woman chairman of a Unit Trust. There is Mrs Patricia McLaughlin, Member for West Belfast, who wears nothing but Ulster-made dresses and suits to boost their sales. There is Mrs Judith Hart, who is a dish, and got a first in Sociology at the London School of Economics. There is Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who is another, and took her Bar Finals three months after giving birth to twins. There is Lady Tweedsmuir, who managed to conceal even from her women colleagues the fact that she was expecting a child, was still speaking in the House during her seventh month of pregnancy, and skilfully had the baby during the Recess. There is Miss Joan Vickers, who has a blue rinse, smokes Dutch cigars and rides to hounds. There is Battling Bessie Braddock. There is Mrs Barbara Castle, who has shown in a series of fighting speeches on colonial subjects from Hola to Cyprus that she can hold her own with any man. There is Miss Joan Quennell, who relaxes by parachuting from aeroplanes.
They are interesting because they have had to fight that much harder to get there. It is worth noting that nine of the 25 have never married, and another five are widows; these stark figures alone eloquently reflect the competing pulls of public and family life. Of the 11 married women, only four, Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Hart, Mrs Butler and Lady Tweedsmuir, have children of school age.
If we knew all their ages, we should probably find that on average they are a little older than their male colleagues, though this probably only reflects the longer struggle for a seat. Mrs Thatcher, at 38, is the youngest woman, but exactly ten years older than Paul Channon, youngest M.P. in the House. The average age of those women M.P.s who give their date of birth is 55.
They are nicely balanced; 13 are Conservative, 12 are Socialist. Four (including one Tory, Dame Irene Ward) are miners' daughters. Mrs Evelyn Emmet, on the other hand, lives in a castle. Only when it comes to titles does party bias seem to creep in; all the Socialist women except ex-Liberal Lady Megan Lloyd George are plain Mrs or Miss, while the Conservatives can boast three Dames, two Ladies, one Honourable. Twelve of the 25 are university graduates.
A Scottish M.P. once boomed at Lady Astor in the House: "I canna abide women or Jews." No M.P., in 1964, would dare to get his tongue round such an offensive observation. On the other hand, he might well still think it. We have grown more polite, but not necessarily less prejudiced.
It is an emotional matter. Women can make even quite rational men feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Just after the war, a succession of motions to admit women to the Oxford Union were wrecked by the intervention of a certain ex-President. Sweeping aside all the logical arguments, he used to crash his fist down on the dispatch box with the cry: "The fact is, Mr President, we don't WANT the women." This bold sentiment always induced a great animal bay of triumph from the entire house. The point was that he dared to articulate all the usual subconscious male resentments. It is at least debatable that if the backwoodsmen had kept on asking him down from London to speak there would still be no women in the Oxford Union.
Winston Churchill crystallised these masculine inhibitions when he took a bad-tempered swing at Lady Astor shortly after she first entered the House. The intrusion of a woman into the Commons, he told her, was as embarrassing as if she had burst into his bathroom when he had nothing to defend himself with but a sponge. This deserved, and elicited, her perfect straight left: "You are not handsome enough to have worries of that kind."
One consequence has been that men have leaned over backwards to be fair. This, perversely, can be equally annoying. For example, one woman M.P. said she noticed that, if a woman has spoken from one side of the House, the Speaker tends to call one from the other side to redress the balance. This, she argued, however well meant, was irrelevant: M.P.s should be called because they had something to say, not because they were women.
President Johnson has driven this quota principle to alarming lengths. He has directed that a number of top government posts be allocated to women; more than a hundred have already been installed. They are in the ú8,000 a year range. "It ain't much," President Johnson says cornily, "but it's enough to keep a husband on."
Again, however good the intention, in the upshot his decision must seem cynical, even contemptuous. To appoint an official only because she is a woman is as logical as passing her over only because she is a woman. It would be as sensible to appoint a hundred officials merely because they had hammer toes: except that the hammer-toed of America do not control 50 million votes.
But do women want women? A Gallup Poll published in America last year showed that 58 per cent. of men would vote for a woman President provided she were qualified, compared with 51 per cent. of women. In 1937 public opinion was two to one against a woman President, with men more opposed to the idea than women.
The question is academic; though Senator Margaret Chase Smith might well be the Republican ticket for Vice-President. In Britain, the best step forward would be to put a woman into one major job not immediately concerned with social welfare - say the Board of Trade. So far we have had women in charge of only three ministries: Education (twice-Ellen Wilkinson and Florence Horsbrugh), Labour (Margaret Bondfield) and National Insurance (Edith Summerskill).
The difficulty is that most men M.P.s (and even some older women) think that women politicians should stick to the price of cabbages and nappies.
Herbert Morrison, usually one of the most enlightened politicians in encouraging women M.P.s, advised Lena Jeger when she first took her seat to stick to women's subjects. Yet, in her own words: "We insult our menfolk if we presume that they do not care about clean milk for their babies, preventable cancer in their wives, what their children will live on if father gets run over by a bus."
Lady Astor set up a special committee for dealing with the women's organisations-she felt she was the 'M.P. for Women'. Equal pay, day nurseries, footwear for poor children, all these good causes - and their current equivalents - expect special attention from women members. But if you are to be effective as an M.P., representing the men as well as the women in your constituency, you must do these things in addition to, not instead of, general political work.
A careful reading of the debate on the Street Offences Act shows the women's contribution at its most intelligent and thoughtful. Indeed the late Mrs Jean Mann, in her gossipy autobiography Women in Parliament, said she knew only one really frivolous woman M.P. - and she was no longer in the House.
"I have one favour to ask," said Lady Astor. "Don't make too much fun of women in politics. I know it's a tremendous temptation. We are funny, but so are you."
We should remember that universal female suffrage in Britain is younger than the youngest woman M.P. When the Flappers got the vote in 1928, there were portentous misgivings which, in retrospect, seem ludicrous. "These five million young women have revealed their knees but not their minds", rumbled the Press. Hands were wrung over the extra expense and, oddly, over the massive majorities which would pile up in safe seats. Even such a great radical as the late Professor G.D.H. Cole could argue that, while the women should have the vote as a matter of principle, they would hold up the march of progress because they were both unintelligent and reactionary.
It is easy to argue that they have not yet made much advance anywhere else in the world. In the U.S.A., generally regarded as the first gynocracy, there are still only 11 women Representatives and two Senators.
In France Madame Marthe Richard made history by banning prostitution and closing down the brothels. Signora Angelina Merlin did the same for Italy. Both laws have been greeted by qualified rapture and success.
The number of women in the world's legislatures is still small indeed. Perhaps Israel with its 10 per cent. female representation, its two women Deputy Speakers, and its distinguished Foreign Secretary, Mrs Golda Meir, is the most progressive.
Distinguished British women politicians have usually been childless; one thinks of Margaret Bondfield, Susan Lawrence, Florence Horsbrugh, Eleanor Rathbone, Ellen Wilkinson, and Margaret Herbison. Edith Summerskill seems the only major exception so far.
The trouble is that women still have babies. Constituency candidates committees, however well-intentioned, may be forgiven for asking themselves whether a woman under 40 may not have a child. And it is in one's twenties and thirties that one has to fight the hopeless seats. Forty is late to start in politics. It is the years of trying to get into Parliament which are the most exhausting and the most expensive - once in Parliament, the salary does help a little to give a woman M.P. independence.
It would be a considerable help if there were creches where a housewife could leave a child for half a day or a day (at present they tend to be reserved for unmarried mothers and widows). Until this sort of concession is made, argues Mrs Judith Hart, "a woman will find it hard to be not only Tommy's mother and Bill Smith's wife, but also herself."
One of the most difficult points about being a woman M.P. is not having a wife. This is not facetious. An M.P.'s wife can keep the house running smoothly, answer telephones, see callers, visit old people who have written incoherent letters about their pensions, give away school prizes and go to nurses' tea-parties. Most important of all, she can go to public functions with her husband, thus making two to be talked at.
Of course a woman M.P.'s husband may be a tower of strength (Lady Summerskill's husband Geoffrey is a splendid example) but is likely to have a job of his own. And a woman M.P. without a husband has a tough time. She has to be host and hostess and attend all the women's functions as well as the normal ones. She is probably rather more conscientious than her male colleagues; being still on the defensive may say yes too often.
The M.P.'s life is exhausting for men and women: resisting pressure groups, researching, talking, writing, listening, travelling. A woman on her own has no one to recharge her batteries on. A bachelor on the other hand will have allowances made for him; local parties will mother him until they can find him a wife.
But the woman M.P. with a family has her difficulties too. Mrs Hart, for example, has two schoolboy sons aged 14 and 12. She has a cook each afternoon to make their evening meal. But at weekends endless ingenuity with casseroles and cold tarts is necessary. If she has a number of late night sittings she likes to get home at about 7 p.m. to see them, then go back to the House from Barnes for the end of the debate.
Another unexpected point: a senior male politician may enjoy acting as a patron to the younger generation-for example, Hugh Dalton encouraged bright young men like Jay, Gaitskell and Crosland to come into politics. He is not likely to sponsor a woman M.P. for fear of being misunderstood.
All in all, it is surprising that woman do as much as they do.
The fact is that, as Byron once pointed out, women are nicer than men. They lose their idealism more slowly, and are much better at taking their weekly or monthly surgeries on constituents' problems. Not only do women prefer telling their problems to another woman; many men do.
According to the Evening News of February 16, 1961: "Women M.P.s were never more popular among their colleagues than in the early hours of this morning, when six of them came to the rescue of parched and weary M.P.s in the tea-room. 'Angels in the House' was the title they won from grateful Members. Sleeves rolled back, they washed up the cups and saucers which were piling up."
Back to the sink after all those years of struggle! Mrs Pankhurst must have chained herself afresh to the portals of Elysium.
One woman M.P. was rung up in the middle of the night by the police. An old lady, dying alone in hospital, had given her name as next of kin. Could she come at once? She went. The old lady apologised; they had said she must put down somebody and, though they had never met, she had once heard her speak at a meeting.
The M.P. had to make the funeral arrangements, and was the only mourner at her graveside.
