Women: Contribution to Economic Life

Baroness Seccombe Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Seccombe (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on making it possible for this annual debate to be in government time in this important centenary year of the start of the First Great War. This is the year we begin a four-year commemoration which will highlight many of its shocking and horrific events. I hope noble Lords will forgive me as I take a moment to look at what this meant for women and how it altered the status of women for ever.

My earliest memory of my family and other families is of the sheer number of women in the world. Of course, in my family I had my mother, my very special mentor and most loyal supporter, but there were many more women who were either widowed or unmarried. I think that most families had maiden aunts and maiden great aunts; I certainly had two. The 1914 war left a generation of young women who never married, who were sometimes referred to by the appalling term “surplus women”. The scale of the war meant that the number of young men had been decimated and as a result there were just not enough chaps to go round.

These were the times when very little paid work was available for women and voluntary work was only for the rich. Single women often had to take on roles in domestic service just to get by. My mother, for example, had gained secretarial qualifications, but just as she thought that she would be able to put them to use in 1918, her father told her there was no way that she should even contemplate finding paid employment as all available jobs should be offered only to the returning troops. In many instances, contracts of employment during World War One had been based on collective agreements between trade unions and employers that decreed that women would be employed only for the duration of the war.

Marriage for my mother later meant, of course, that there was no possibility, either within the tax system or social convention, of being employed. For single women, the outlook was bleak. Some remained at their childhood home and ended their lives as unpaid carers to elderly parents. Others took on roles as housekeepers or companions to elderly, usually difficult, ladies, whose demands were inflexible and harsh but at least that provided a roof over their heads. It was not a time to be a surplus woman.

My father went through the First World War spending most of the years in the trenches or in a military hospital. He entered the war as a fit young man, and five or so years later emerged described as C3—the lowest grade of fitness—having had three bouts of rheumatic fever. He went on to serve in Ireland, but was forced to leave because his employers refused to hold his position any longer. The Army insisted on a form of medical treatment before discharge but, as he was under such pressure from his employers, he felt unable to accept it. The result was that when he died from heart-related disease, I was 10 years old, my brother was 15 and my mother was not entitled to any form of pension for his military service. It was certainly no time to be a widow.

My father never spoke of the horrors and tragedies he witnessed, so my mother was not able to pass on to us any of his experiences or the awful conditions in which the troops who survived had lived. As regiments were wiped out, together with his bouts of illness, he went from regiment to regiment. I can only be grateful that he survived to have a happy, but short, marriage and to give me a few years of love and real affection.

The war as it progressed opened unthought-of opportunities for many women. Between 1914 and 1918, an estimated 2 million women replaced men in employment, an increase in the proportion of women in total employment from 24% in July 1914 to 37% by November 1918. These women kept the home front firing by providing weapons from munitions factories and food through working the land. It was not easy, but these women enjoyed the sense of freedom and independence that this gave them.

When the armistice eventually came, many of these women did not relish a return to the home. This emancipation of women during the war had given them the impetus to start fighting for real equality. Women started truly to educate themselves, seeking more independence from husbands, fathers and families. Indeed in 1918, after much campaigning and violence by such doughty fighters as Emmeline Pankhurst, the vote was awarded to women over the age of 30 who owned property and this, thankfully, was extended 10 years later to universal suffrage.

It is hard to believe that, in spite of opportunities for women during the 1914-18 war, only two, outside domestic service, were employed in the House of Lords by 1918, and they were in the Library. Believe it or not, the number had increased to only five by the end of the Second World War in 1945, which can hardly be thought of as progress. Today the figure stands at 224 women out of a total of 587 employees.

What changes we have seen in the opportunities for women since the unsatisfying and inhibiting lives they led in 1914. Happily, we are living in an age when if they have the expertise, the determination and, best of all, a supportive family, women can hope to achieve much of their dreams. Families are as important today as they were in 1914, and long may they continue to be so. Of course there is much to do, but I am thankful that I am alive today and not in those dark, miserable days which left not only an untapped, precious resource for this country, but many women unfulfilled and depressed. We should not forget.