This week, 140 women will sail off on a learning cruise to Denmark. They are members of the 300 Group, an organization dedicated to getting more women into politics, and they will spend the two days on the North Sea discussing issues related to this aim.
But do women really need this kind of support? Do they have special problems in politics? After all, they have been involved in the national scene for almost as long as they have had the vote.
Indeed when women got the vote in 1918, the belief of the suffragettes and their supporters was that the battle was largely won. They confidently expected the ever-increasing involvement of women in politics and for the next ten years, or so, they seemed to be right. Not that the numbers were more than modest - by 1929 2.3 per cent of the House of Commons was female - but they had grown. What is ironic is that today that number differs only by percentage points, and has never scaled the heights of 5 per cent. There are only 19 women (2.9 per cent) in the Commons out of 635 MPs and this in the era of the first woman Prime Minister and with a national electorate over 50 per cent of which is female.
Of course this rather embarrassing situation has been noted before and the political parties have assiduously passed worthy resolutions at their conferences to the effect that "more women" should be encouraged "at every level". But little of any substantive help or encouragement was offered, and most women stayed where they were in politics, generally providing the support systems in local parties rather than running the show.
This was the background within which the 300 Group was launched last November to get more women of all parties into Parliament. The group aimed to identify the special problems women faced in entering politics and to try to provide support in their endeavours. In the last nine months, its organization has spread nationwide and a fair amount of information has emerged about aspiring political women.
To begin with, certain myths would seem to have been laid; for example the claim that women are just not interested in politics is hardly confirmed by a response from more than a thousand women (and many men) keen to get involved in their own local groups. This also seems to dispose of the belief that women are typically unsupportive of other women, that they are calculating, bitchy and unreliable. For a further 300-400 women who do not see themselves as potential MPs have responded with offers of support "for another woman." And this is clearly not just a vague, sisterly sentiment, but a quite hard-headed realization by more and more women that their interests can only be protected and advanced if they are in Parliament in sufficient numbers.
After asking women, for perhaps the first time, what they need, the 300 Group is beginning to evolve a series of courses as well as support networks. These resources are particularly valuable to women in giving them information about the often dauntingly complex issues of modern politics - economic strategy and defence, Europe and the Third World - when they have frequently, in the past, from their largely private and domestic stance, been mainly concerned by domestic issues.
And to know more about an issue is to be generally more confident and self-assured. Women, even well-educated, able, competent women are often rather reticent about voicing their opinions confidently. Women do generally sell themselves short: they under-estimate their own ability and often under-achieve accordingly. On the other hand for a woman to be opinionated and assertive is to cease to conform to the female stereotype and to be liable to be branded as brash and unfeminine, and many women, with strong, well thought out views are still impressed by this kind of put-down.
Just to begin in politics, women must cease to jump quickly back into line, like well-programmed robots, immediately the words "assertive" or "demanding" are uttered about them, and they are more likely to learn this in discussion with other women.
In the area of public speaking too, 300 Group members have confirmed that they would welcome more practise. While women are not by any means all timid, inarticulate creatures, in general their experience of being forceful and opinionated in public is limited, and even women who have been magistrates and mayors tell of their lack of self-confidence. In this area MPs themselves, or anyone in the habit of speaking in public, will testify to the frequency with which men get up in public meetings to ask questions of dubious relevance or stunning banality, with great selfconfidence: women, on the other hand, will tend to come up privately afterwards and preface a perhaps much more perceptive query with "I hope this isn't too silly a question . . " or "This may not be relevant, but . . "
This is partly, of course, the result of women's not belonging in large numbers to the so-called "articulate professions" - the law and academics, for example - which are such appropriate training grounds for this kind of activity.
It is partly a result of the more passive role to which women are diffusely socialized from childhood. And although, in the end, if you want to learn to speak in public, there is absolutely no substitute for getting up and speaking, it is possible to provide some practical training and some experience from which to start.
In this context the 300 Group held a debate on employment in the Palace of Westminster, in March, to give women the opportunity of speaking with the correct procedure and in the authentic surroundings of the Commons.
The 300 Group now has more than 20 cross-party area groups with new ones starting up every week and there are already groups established in many major cities.
Women are more and more taking a direct interest in politics, as they have emerged from the privacy of family life to become 40 per cent of the workforce. Their growing awareness of their economic importance, but derisory representation in all areas of public life, may well be the shock which leads them at last to insist on having their say. Politics has ceased to mean for women simply a bit of thin consumerism in the party manifesto, and become the demand for a continuing say in the structure and organization of our public affairs.
