Abstract
A dreadful memory sprang vividly to mind somewhere in the midpoint of Sophy Ridge's illuminating history of women in politics. The year was 1968. I was a reporter on the London Evening News and found myself at a Tom Jones concert at the London Palladium. (“You like theatre and music, don't you?” someone had said at the office.) Barbara Castle was the minister of transport in the Labour government of the day and had lately introduced the breathalyser to try to cut the toll of road deaths caused by drunken driving. There was a warm-up act before the star attraction, a stand-up we would have called him today, but nobody, not even then, would have called him a comedian. “That Barbara Castle!” he proclaimed. “Now there's an old bag that needs blowing up.” I remember nothing else about the evening except the outrage which seared that comment into my brain.
Political history remembers Castle for her ambitious attempt to reform the trade unions, a failure that sealed her career ambitions, but perhaps she should be celebrated as the minister who introduced the breathalyser, compulsory seatbelts and the 70mph speed limit, thus reducing annual deaths on the roads from 8,000 in the late 1960s to 6,000 within a decade and about 1,700 today. And here she is, being interviewed by a man from the BBC, quoted in Ridge's book: “Minister, this is a rotten idea, you're really spoiling my fun as a motorist, so minister, what's the idea behind it?”
Castle patiently explains that the idea is to save his life and that she is prepared to risk unpopularity to save him from himself, if his “fun” involves drinking and driving. He concludes: “You're only a woman, you don't drive, what do you know about it?” Ugly sexism, Ridge rightly calls this and it is, alas inevitably, a discoloured thread that runs through the pattern of all the lives recorded here.
That being said, the book is not a whinging one. The injustice, the unfairness, the difficulties, the sheer bloody nightmares suffered by the heroines whose history we read is part of the fabric of the story, but this is a celebration of women in politics. And it is a glorious story: a racy account of just how much has been achieved over the centuries, but particularly in the past hundred years since the Women's Suffrage Bill of 1918, the culmination of a 50-year fight, which Millicent Fawcett hailed as “the greatest moment of my life”. Now we are to have a statue of Fawcett in Parliament Square, and look how far we have travelled since the first woman government minister, Margaret Bondfield, was told to “go home and mend your stockings” as she tried to recruit union members among her fellow shop workers. The derision and scorn poured recently on the Daily Mail, with its ill-judged “Legsit” front-page pictures of Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon (and their stockings), is a measure of that. Yes, women in politics can still be trivialised by reference to their hemlines or necklines, but they themselves can make headlines for what they do, not what they wear. How unbelievable it now seems that in 1956 a newspaper could actually have reported Betty Boothroyd's “vital” statistics as the “figures” that would matter to would-be voters when she was selected as a Labour parliamentary candidate – in the introduction.
There is much of interest and I was particularly taken with the earlier chapters featuring a number of figures from feminist history of whom I had never heard. Ridge fleshes out the characters of the past whose achievements are widely known, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Pankhursts, Lady Astor and the mysterious Countess Markievicz, but she has also researched the lives of some fascinating women whose lives are long forgotten. There is Elinor James, an energetic 17th century pamphleteer (she had the good fortune to marry a printer); Mary Astell, who campaigned for the education of women in the late 1600s long before Wollstonecraft got in on the act; Mary Carpenter, who ran ragged schools and gave evidence to a Commons committee on the treatment of destitute juveniles; Caroline Norton, whose efforts brought about the Married Women's Property Act in 1870; and the ineffable Josephine Butler, whose work with those condemned to prostitution led to the 1886 repeal of the invidious Contagious Diseases Act.
Ridge had the idea for the book in the heady politics of last year's midsummer madness. It is straightforward, easy to digest and a good read. If I were education secretary I would make it a set book for A-level politics. If I were Serjeant at Arms I would bulk-buy copies and stack them in the members' library with a notice saying “Compulsory coursework for ALL members”. And if I chaired a major political party I would send copies out to everyone on the candidates list. Chaps included.