The first shadow spokesman on women's rights, Joan Lestor, MP for Eton and Slough, explains how she sees her new job.
My appointment as opposition spokesman for women's rights and welfare marks a new development in this sphere for Britain. The position will give me the opportunity to scrutinize the departments where women's rights are affected: for example, the Treasury on taxation, the Department of Education and Science on general educational assumptions and opportunities and nursery schools, the Department of Health and Social Security on many aspects of women's rights - but in particular, those in the field of social security and child care.
France and Norway have both recently appointed women in similar positions and I look forward to discussions with them at the earliest opportunity so that we can identify the main areas of discrimination.
Women of any social class are certainly an oddity in the House of Commons; so are working class men, and blacks of either sex have yet to arrive. So, of the few women who become MPs, the overwhelming majority are middle class. Yet MPs are not a race apart, especially women MPs. We work, we worry, we relax, we play (but not very much). We have families, we have mortgages, we have doubts. We get nervous. We make mistakes and in between we do the shopping - especially the shopping!
I am a working woman and a working mother. My work happens to be as an MP, which makes my life more complicated than many other working mothers, but in its essentials it is no different.
Society has been told so often that MP's are a special breed and that for a woman to become an MP she has to be twice as good as a man that many women believe it. That helps to prevent more women becoming MPs.
It is a myth and it is time someone said so. Its purpose is to impress upon women that the demands of being a constituency MP are so great that they must choose Parliament or a family, a career or a home. Like most ugly rumours about women it is peddled mostly by men.
Women MPs are no different from the majority of other working women. Like them, we have to divide our time between our children, our constituencies and the Commons and neglect none of them. Many women MPs - Gwyneth Dunwoody and Judith Hart are two - became MPs when their children were still very young and coped admirably.
Tory ministers who now advocate that women should stay at home with the children should remember that their own Prime Minister became an MP when her twins were very young. The late Lady Tweedsmuir had a baby while an MP and so, more recently, did Helen Hayman. No one claims they neglected their work as a result.
We have all coped, and the main problem is often the attitude of other people and not the demands of the job: an attitude which implies that the children must be suffering. I looked at mine the other day when we were all swimming and they were positively blooming. Of course, we need help at home, but which working mother doesn't? Often she may not get it, but she needs it.
It would be foolish to imply that travelling from an out-of-London seat to Westminster and maintaining a home is not difficult. It can be tremendously taxing, but so are many other jobs that women with children undertake. The more who decide to enter politics, the more the pressure will be on the establishment to alter the working parliamentary day, to ease the path of working mothers in this field.
Women need to have their confidence boosted, not deflated. They need to be told what they can achieve, not what the obstacles to achievement are, or what others say they believe to be the obstacles.
There are few women in the Commons today for the same reason that there are few women in most areas of "status" and "position": that those who do make it are presented as unusual, i.e., they have the minds of men. The more the successful career woman is presented as unusual, the more other women have their fears confirmed, because they believe they cannot be that unusual or single-minded. Thus the myth of the unique woman lives on.
Girls are conditioned away from "men's" occupations even before they start school, and education does little to widen their horizons.
It is also hard for parents, however emancipated, not to transmit their own outlook to their children. What a child perceives in the home affects her attitude almost from birth. Father is still the breadwinner, mother's career is secondary and, especially in working-class homes, the idea of a girl being a politician or a managing director is out of the question.
In many industrial countries today women are losing ground, not gaining it. The EEC recently set up a commission to examine the declining role of women in the Community, so Britain is not alone.
We need to look at our educational system and challenge some of the conventional beliefs about our sex. Society's concept of femininity teaches that women who go into what are traditionally men's jobs are unfeminine, and we should show what rubbish that is. What, after all, is femininity? And what, come to that, is manliness? These concepts, taught in the cradle and carried on in our schools, have a lot to answer for. If women are to be given more opportunities, men's attitudes and those of society to men will have to change as well.
Although discrimination plays a part, it is not nearly as great as many women profess to believe. The harsh truth is that women do not try in the same numbers as men because they believe succeeding is so much more difficult. Women provide their own discrimination, which they have been taught from birth.
That is certainly true of Parliament and more or less true of higher management in industry, public corporations, the trade unions and many other areas. Look at the newspaper advertisements for management vacancies. Despite the law against discrimination, what is undoubtedly required are applications from men.
There are those who argue that we must have positive discrimination to ensure a better balance between the sexes in employment. Even if it did operate and society seemed, superficially, more balanced we will have achieved little if we do not tackle educational attitudes, conventional "wisdom" about roles and about emotional make-up. It all begins at birth. The moment the colour of the bootees is chosen, the discrimination begins.
The author has been Labour MP for Eton and Slough since 1966.
