Role of Women in Public Life

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I decided to speak in this debate because it is important for some males to contribute. I have one or two things to say and, as has been referred to, the second woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was returned for Louth, in a by-election in 1921, following the death of her husband, Tom.

The first of my two points is to draw attention to the somewhat anomalous wording of the Motion. The Representation of the People Act was enacted in 1918. Women have been able to stand for election to the House of Commons since 1918. However, they have not been able to stand for election by virtue of that Act. The qualifying age for election to public office is dealt with in separate legislation from that governing the franchise, and the Representation of the People Act left unchanged the ineligibility of women to stand for election to the House of Commons. It was eight months after the Act received Royal Assent that the House of Commons approved, by 274 votes to 25, the Motion:

“That, in the opinion of this House, it is desirable that a Bill be passed forthwith making women eligible as Members of Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/10/1918; col. 785.]


The Bill to give effect to this wish had one clause and received Royal Assent the following month, on 21 November. As there was no reference to age in the measure, the minimum qualifying age was deemed the same as that for men: 21. The omission appears not to have been an oversight, as the implication was acknowledged when the Act was going through the Commons. There was no real opposition to letting women stand at the age of 21. The reason the franchise was restricted to women aged 30 and over was to ensure that women remained in a minority in the electorate in the immediate post-war period. That reasoning, of course, was irrelevant to the qualifying age for election to the House of Commons.

Thus, we should be acknowledging in the Motion the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918. That was the measure that enabled women to enter the House of Commons. As we know—it has already been touched on—it did not exactly open the floodgates to women being elected as MPs. This brings me to my second point. There may not have been quantity in numbers but there was quality. Some of the women elected to Parliament in the inter-war years made a significant contribution to the nation’s politics. The House of Commons may not have seemed a conducive environment for the few women MPs elected in this period. Some, though, did take to it, and with effect. Nancy Astor was obviously high-profile and capable of giving as good as she got. However, she did not achieve as much as some other women MPs.

Three years ago, I gave the Speaker’s Lecture on Eleanor Rathbone, the independent MP for the Combined English Universities from 1929 until her untimely death in 1946. She was the first woman to be elected as an independent and remains the only woman to have served as an independent MP throughout her parliamentary career. She knew how to use Parliament to get what she wanted, and she enjoyed it. When the House got a little unruly, she confessed to Mary Stocks that she,

“rather liked the House when it is in this rollicking mood, though I suppose it would shock a serious critic of Parliament”.

She knew how to use procedure and how to pursue Ministers, not just in the Chamber but in the Corridor. As Harold Nicolson recalled, she would stalk through the corridors, weighed down with her papers, to waylay Ministers, who in time became to view her approaching figure with some trepidation. As Susan Pedersen wrote of her:

“She was, simply, implacable; and, since she was well-placed, impossible to shut up, and immune from party discipline, officials and ministers had no alternative but to deal with her. But when they did so, they often found, to their surprise, that she was neither fanatical nor impractical, but flexible, imaginative and terrifyingly good on the details”.


Her achievements were remarkable. She is credited with getting family allowances introduced—the Family Allowances Act was enacted shortly before she died—but she did much else beside. She was amazingly prescient in recognising the dangers posed by Nazi Germany. Six weeks after Hitler became German Chancellor, she was on her feet in the House, warning of the dangers. She fought hard for refugees: with three other MPs, she set up a Parliamentary Committee on Refugees. She fought to improve the condition of women in India. She became a champion for the creation of what became the State of Israel. She demonstrated real stamina in pursuing her goals—all the more remarkable for the fact that she was first elected to the House of Commons at the age of 57. According to one of her biographers, she was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century. As I said in my lecture, one can identify a “look at me” politician, driven by ego, and an “I want to get things done” politician, driven by values. The two types are not mutually exclusive, but Eleanor Rathbone was a pristine example of the latter.

Rathbone was thus distinctive, though she was not unique in being a female MP who made a mark in the inter-war years. She worked with the Conservative MP, the Duchess of Atholl, to evacuate some 4,000 children from Spain during the civil war. The duchess resigned her seat in 1938 to fight a by-election in opposition to the Government’s policy on appeasement. On the Labour side, there were politicians such as “Red” Ellen Wilkinson and, of course, Margaret Bondfield, who was the first woman to serve in the Cabinet.

They all deserve credit for demonstrating that women could do just as good a job as men in the House of Commons, if not better. Rathbone has been described as an early Margaret Thatcher. It would probably be more accurate to describe Margaret Thatcher as a latter-day Eleanor Rathbone. They were very different in many ways, although both were products of Somerville College, Oxford, and both demonstrated what women could achieve in the House of Commons.

As has been emphasised, the return of women MPs has been slow—indeed, for decades glacial—but one should not lose sight of what the few who were returned in those early years contributed to public life and in a not necessarily congenial institutional setting. This is a great opportunity to draw attention to all that they did.