Role of Women in Public Life

Baroness Corston Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Corston (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate, to commemorate the fact that 100 years ago tomorrow certain women in the United Kingdom were enabled to vote: women over 30 who either owned property or were married to men who owned property—so no woman on either side of my family would have been able to vote; they had to wait another 10 years. Indeed, seeing my noble friend Lady Gale at the Dispatch Box today reminded me that, in 1978, she and I were at a reception in 10 Downing Street where we commemorated the 50th anniversary of universal female suffrage. As my late right honourable friend Tony Benn used to say, when you reach the age of 50 you realise that a century is not a very long time.

As the 168th woman elected to the House of Commons, in 1992, I am conscious of the fact that in those days there were more men called John in the House of Commons than women MPs. In the very first vote of that Parliament, we voted for the Speaker and I voted for my noble friend Lady Boothroyd. In the Division Lobby, I saw the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell. She and I were friends. We saw each other and I said, “Tessa!”, and she said, “Jean!”, and we gave each other a hug. We were overlooked by two gentlemen whom the Conservatives used to refer to as knights of the shires—they used to call them the Sir Bufton Tuftons—and one nudged the other and said, “Look at this: the place is filling up with women!”. I also want to say how fortunate I was to have Barbara Wootton as a friend—the first woman to sit on that Woolsack and the first woman life Peer. She was absolutely a model for us all.

I want to spend most of my speech on a woman whom I knew when I was the women’s organiser for the Labour Party in the south-west region, based in Bristol, from 1976. She was coy about her age, but she was in her 80s and she was one of the last surviving suffragettes. Her name was Jessie Stephen. She was a Scot, the eldest of 11 children. Her father was a tailor. She left school at 14 and went into domestic service. She realised in no time that it was drudgery from dawn to dusk and it was isolating. She had a half-day off every week. She said to me, “During my afternoons off, I would go around Glasgow putting incendiary devices into post boxes”. She was a suffragette. Although I note what the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, said from the Government Front Bench, the suffragettes needed the suffragists and the suffragists needed the suffragettes, and I do not make a distinction.

At the age of 17, Jessie founded the Scottish Domestic Workers’ Union and was its general secretary well into the 1920s. She saw in me, she said, a reawakening on some of the things on which she had fought in her life, issues which she thought had become dormant in the 1950s and 1960s—the issues that we were concerned about then included access to jobs, abortion, rape, childcare—and it pleased her no end. She used to reminisce with me on the fight for women’s suffrage. She talked about the Cat and Mouse Acts and about helping to organise suffragette meetings. I loved to hear, more than once, about how she helped to carry a big wicker laundry basket into meetings during the time of the Cat and Mouse Acts. The police on the door would say “What’s in that basket?”, and the organisers would carry it as if it contained what they said it contained—bunting—but it actually contained Mrs Pankhurst. They would take her to the back of the hall and find a room. When the meeting opened, Mrs Pankhurst would appear and the police would try to rush the platform, but there was a phalanx of women like Jessie on the front of the platform whom they had to negotiate while Mrs Pankhurst was spirited away out the back.

Jessie joined the Labour Party and stood for the council in Bermondsey in 1919, as shown in the Daily Express of 30 October of that year which recorded how many serving women were delighted to find that one of them was standing for election. She became celebrated on the lecture circuit of the United States and Canada, and when she had to dash back for an election the Liverpool Echo recorded that she had come back from a lecture tour. She was a woman whom people knew. When she was in Portsmouth, she stood as a Labour candidate and reduced the Conservative majority from 18,000 to 5,000. Although there were other speakers on the platform, when she finished speaking most of the audience would leave with her for her next meeting. She became the first woman president of the Bristol Trades Council in 100 years, which was no mean feat in a city characterised by industrial workers and dockers.

Jessie also turned her hand to journalism. The title of one her articles particularly amused me. It is: “After the Wedding: Why Should Wives not Continue to Work?”. It was written in 1920. The 4 October 1919 edition of John Bull put her down as one of the world’s most powerful women.

Jessie was a parliamentary candidate three times—of course, she stood in seats that were not usually winnable. I understand that because, when I was a women’s organiser in 1979, I persuaded some women to stand for election in the south-west of England. None of them could have won, but one of my male colleagues in another region—who is now departed from us—said, “Who’s that woman in Bristol persuading women to stand for Parliament”, as if it was an offence when nobody complained about him conducting shortlists that were all men.

This was the wellspring of reminiscence and experience in that little house in Bedminster, Bristol, which so impressed me, and I am pleased to say that Bristol City Council has recognised Jessie’s worth and there is a plaque on the wall of her house in Chessel Street, Bedminster, recording when she lived there. She wrote her autobiography and bequeathed her papers to me, as she thought of me as a kind of daughter, but because of a misunderstanding her sister burnt them the day after the funeral. Noble Lords can imagine the distress I felt about that. But I discovered that her trade union had a copy of her autobiography and some of her papers, photographs and press cuttings, and I have deposited them in the Bristol reference library.

In June 1979, the National Conference of Labour Women was in Felixstowe, and I was told that Jessie was ill and had gone to hospital. She died on 4 June, and it is recorded that her last words were, “You’ll have to change my tablets; I am going to a women’s conference”. The point of all this is that we stand on the shoulders of women like Jessie: women who nobody has ever heard of but who mean so much to us. I wanted to record here and now that, without people such as Jessie Stephen, we would have waited even longer for some of the privileges that we rely on today.