International Women’s Day

Baroness Cumberlege Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great challenge to follow the inspiration of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. We can easily see why she is the Bishop of London. I thank her for a marvellous talk.

The right reverend Prelate challenged nurses to take on bigger, more important roles. I hope that they are listening, because in my career I have met so many inspiring nurses, wonderful people, who have been rather buried in their careers and have not succeeded as I hoped they would.

I resisted speaking in the debates that made marriage before 18 illegal, because I made the decision to marry at 17. It was high risk, but after 62 years of encouragement from my family and friends, I have no regrets and, secretly, I love him to bits.

Early in my married life I met Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, a past suffragette who in her 90s travelled through the Far East exhorting women to fight for their rights. We owe much to women such as her, the suffragettes.

Even when I started one of the first village playgroups for children under five, I was told that mothers should be at home looking after their own children. Although I confess that there was more than an element of enlightened self-interest, I could see that my children were the winners.

As a chair of social services and later chair of health authorities, I rejoiced at freeing hundreds of “fallen women”, as they were called in those days, from institutions, thus avoiding the scandal that is now besetting Ireland.

I have, I fear, regaled the House often enough with speeches on the disgraceful way in which women have been harmed by the NHS. Even today they are denied redress, which is a scandal. Because they were women, physical symptoms were dismissed by doctors simply as figments of their imagination; they are not. Only last week, pain due to implanted mesh caused a woman to take her life.

In the course of our two-year inquiry, we spoke to more than 700 women. They were not mad, but maddened by false promises or just ignorant doctors. Entitled First Do No Harm, our report makes salutary reading. Some of the recommendations are being implemented or partially implemented, but we continue to work on all nine to ensure that they are implemented.

I have not been a feminist campaigner, but I have a remarkable cousin by marriage, Jane Grant. She has just published the biography, The Other Emmeline: The Story of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. That Emmeline thought that the women’s movement, the suffragettes, went far beyond the vote:

“It meant also to women the discovery of the wealth of spiritual sympathy, loyalty and affection that could be formed in intercourse, friendship and companionship with one another … The Suffrage campaign was our Eton, our Oxford, our regiment, our ship, our cricket match.”


I have good reason to give thanks to those suffragettes, who, as we know, chained themselves to railings, endured hardship in prison and enabled me to be here in the House today as an equal. I continue to campaign on behalf of over half of the population, who are not yet all considered equal. It is not yet 100 years since all women got the vote. Just consider the progress we have made, not least by winning the support and respect of most of the other half of the population, and certainly the support and respect of Members of this House, for which I sincerely thank them.