Role of Women in Public Life

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, what a great pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe. In her quiet and undemonstrative way—although she was not all that quiet just then—she is a real champion for the role of women in society and I pay public tribute to her. It is right that we pay tribute to the women—and men—who campaigned for votes which we too often take for granted.

When you look at the serried ranks of the establishment at the time, those campaigners faced formidable barriers. No one has mentioned Lord Curzon yet—the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, is nodding. He was co-president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage immediately before the Act. In 1914 he warned this House that suffrage would,

“unquestionably weaken our prestige and influence throughout the world”,

and that women lacked the “balance of mind” to use the vote. Even a social reformer such as Octavia Hill, who helped establish social housing in Britain and was one of the founders of the National Trust, believing in the right to clean air and open spaces, was anti-suffrage. She thought that there would be,

“a serious loss to our country … if women entered … political life”.

Those who campaigned against such odds are a role model and an inspiration.

I suspect that I would have had to wait a further decade before being enfranchised, as the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, said, because only those with property qualifications benefited in 1918. The majority of the working classes were excluded. It may sound cynical, but I suspect the vote was granted to women only because ex-servicemen over 19 and other men over 21 were given it, and leaving women out would have been seen as unnecessarily provocative.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to make any direct links between enfranchisement and prosperity or equality. That is not to diminish the importance of the vote. In my trade union days, I visited Pinochet’s Chile, the former South West Africa—now Namibia—and apartheid South Africa to support trade unions and visit political prisoners. People died for democracy in those countries, just as they did here. I know how important it is to be able peacefully to vote a Government out of office. When I first joined the campaign trail for equal rights for women in the 1960s we had the Ford women workers as our inspiration. I thought we would have made more progress, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, in achieving equal pay and pension rights, better representation for women, and protection against sexual harassment and domestic violence. Of course I was idealistic. In some areas the absence of real progress is appalling: an estimated 54,000 maternity sackings; two women killed every week in domestic violence incidents; and women still dependent on men, in England at least, for the payment of their benefits.

We had a debate quite recently, as has already been mentioned, about the WASPI women: women who lost out on their expectations of a state pension because they were too young for one system and too old for the new one, after also being discriminated against in occupational pensions all their working lives. They call themselves Women Against State Pension Inequality. Now we learn that thousands of military spouses are also losing out on their state pension if they reached pension age before 6 April 2016, whereas those reaching retirement age after that date will be able to claim credits equivalent to a year’s national insurance for any year they were abroad since 1975. Those who reached pension age before 6 April 2016 will be entitled to only 60% of their husband’s pension. As one military wife has said, it was frowned on for wives to work:

“Even throughout the 1980s, women had to live on the base. I had to look after the 100 or so families on the base”.


She was expected to be hostess and welfare adviser, all unpaid. She cannot claim credit for her six years abroad serving her country in an unpaid capacity and she will now receive a reduced state pension. I believe this is a betrayal of some of the military wives in the same way as WASPI women were betrayed.

Anniversaries such as this give us the opportunity to reflect on whether we have made a contribution to society—what inspired us about the suffrage movement—but also how far we still have to go. I was the seventh woman president of the TUC in the 132 years of its history. My noble friend Lady Prosser was the sixth. She was a role model for many of us. Margaret Bondfield, who has already been mentioned, would have been the first president of the TUC in 1923 but she left to take a post in government. It was left for Anne Loughlin of the Tailors and Garment Workers’ Union to become the first woman TUC president in 1943—75 years after its founding. However, since 2000 there have been eight women TUC presidents, including my noble friend Lady Drake—three in the past three years—and a woman general secretary, Frances O’Grady, for the first time. We made a slow start but we are now catching up. I represented low-paid workers, mainly women, in my trade union and was extremely proud to be appointed to the first Low Pay Commission in 1997. So far I am the only woman to have been chair of ACAS.

I learned from the women campaigners before me that you need determination, patience, a great deal of gritting of teeth and an understanding that there are different ways of working. My noble friend Lady Prosser put part-time workers centre-stage in the trade union movement and I was privileged to move acceptance of the part-time workers directive in the European TUC, which at the time quietly believed that only full-time work was respectable. As an aside, a Canadian-style deal with the EU after Brexit will end up with ILO minimum standards and the current protections for part-time workers, paid annual holidays, parental leave, and the protection of working conditions if your company is taken over by another will not be there. I promise that anyone who tries to remove those protections will have quite a job on their hands.

In conclusion, the campaigns are still needed, whether it is on the gender pay gap or protecting workers’ rights—people’s rights—after exiting the EU. There is still much to do.