Conservative History Journal

Working on that article about the under-appreciated Lady Knightley, whose activity sends me into complete exhaustion, I have been reading Conservative Women by G. E. Maguire, published in 1998 at an early stage of studies devoted to the subject. Dr Maguire cautions against the assumption that is still widespread despite studies like hers that the movement for women's political involvement and suffragism were entirely on the left. I have no doubt that the forthcoming film Suffragette will uphold that hoary old tenet.

If we look at the history of women's rights, we find the following:

The Primrose League, a Conservative organization, was the first political group to admit women, Conservatives like Lord robert Cecil, the Earl of Lytton, Lady Selborne and Lady Betty Balfour worked tirelessly for somen's suffraage - sometimes even uniting their efforts with those of the Pankhursts or Millicent Fawcett.

It was a Conservative dominated coalition government that gave women over thirty the vote in 1918 and an entirely Conservative one that gave women the right to vote on the same terms as men in 1928.

The first woman member of Parliament, Lady Astor, was a Conservative. It was Harold Macmillan's government that introduced equal pay for teachers and non-industrial civil servants. Later, Edward Heath ordered the formation of the Cripps Committee whose job was to examine the legal disabilities against women and recommend legislation to remove them. Finally, and most obviously, the Conservatives were the first and, to this day, the only, party to choose a woman leader.

Women have mobilized in mass numbers since the days of the Primrose League for the Conservative Party. it has been estimated that, if women had not been given the vote, the Labour Party would have been in power almost continuously since 1945. It would not be going too far to say that women have provided the basis for Conservative Party dominance in the twentieth century.

It is a general rule that a second is lessfamous than a first. However, this is not the case when it comes to the first and second women to serve in a Conservative cabinet. The second woman was of course Margaret Thatcher whose name is (almost) universally known. The same cannot be said of the first woman to hold cabinet rank in a Conservative government, for few people today have heard of Florence Gertrude Horsbrugh, who was Minister of Education almost twenty years before Lady Thatcher made her cabinet debut. While some writers such as Pamela Brooks and G.E. Maguire have shown at least some recognition of her importance, overall she has received surprisingly little attention by historians of the Conservative party or scholars of Scottish and British politics, with many omitting her entirely. Yet in her day Florence Horsbrugh was arguably the best known woman MP in the UK and she is deserving of being even more widely known.

As a public figure, Florence Horsbrugh enjoyed the advantage of a resonant, well-modulated voice and a tall, dignified bearing. At a time when women were often reluctant to smoke in public she became noticeable ‘puffing briskly at a cigarette held levelly between the lips’ (Horsbrugh MSS, 1/4). Despite a reputation for being severe in the manner of a Scottish schoolmistress, she was a good-humoured woman who enjoyed political controversy; she once described herself as ‘representative of all the maiden aunts in Britain’ (Horsbrugh MSS, 2/12). Although it was claimed in her obituary (The Times, 8 Dec 1969) that she had ‘achieved many victories for feminism’, these successes were of a minor or largely nominal character; for example, in 1936 she was the first woman to move the address in reply to the speech from the throne. In fact she was a beneficiary of gains made by women before and during the First World War rather than an active worker for women's causes.

Tory Historian, naturally, wishes to congratulate the Conservative Party on its victory and, more specifically, the new Members of Parliament and the slowly emerging members of the Cabinet. TH is convinced that Lady Knightley, a great heroine of this blog, would have been delighted to find that a third of those now in the House of Commons are women and several Cabinet members are. When the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association (CUWFA) was founded in 1908 and she became its first President, this could not have been even a distant dream. But she would not have been too surprised to find out that the first sitting woman MP was a Conservative as was the first woman Prime Minister.

There was much more to the suffragist movement than the WSPU, which was small, less and less influential in the years before the First World War and, many said even at the time, counter-productive in its actions and attitudes.

Martin Pugh, the well-known historian of popular politics and women's politics (sometimes these overlap and sometimes they are opposites) says this in the first chapter of his Women and the Women's Movement in Britain 1914 - 1959:

The important role traditionally claimed by the Pankhursts has not, so far, recovered from the careful analysis of their organization by Andrew Rosen. Their suffering and sacrifice made an indelible impression that can never be forgotten; but history is an unsentimental business, and it has clearly exploded many of the more extravagant claims made by the suffragettes.

Pankhurst claims that they had won public opinion to their side scarcely seem consistent with the antagonism towards them amongst working-class women which Jill Liddington has discussed in her valuable study of Lancashire. Nor does it square with the growing hostility of the crowds and the defeat of the Pankhurst-backed candidate at the Bow and Bromley election in 1912.

Always a small organization, the WSPU split repeatedly until it became a mere rump of personal followers of the Pankhurst family. Nor, ultimately, did militant tactics succeed in shaking the resolve of the government on women's suffrage; rather they alienated, if only temporarily, much of the support built up amongst politicians for enfranchising women.

The inclusion of the wives of workingmen - the bulk of the 8.4 million women - largely satisfied the non-Conservative politicians that there would be no additional advantage for the propertied classes. But the new electorate of women displayed an obvious bias towards age. Only the youngest of the women had been born in the late 1880s and thus reached an impressionable political age in  the Edwardian period when Liberal-Labour reformism was at its height. The great majority of women voters are likely to have formed political loyalties in a period when the choice was between Conservative and Liberal, though we must allow for the realignment of some of the most politically active women as a result of the suffrage controversies prior to the war.

Although most women electors had not voted even in a local government election before, the low turnout of 58.9 per cent in 1918 should almost certainly not be attributed to female abstention since the 12.9 million males included 3.9 million naval and military voters of whom it was reported that two thirds failed to take the chance of voting by post or by proxy.

Modern studies confirm that young voters are consistently the least likely to participate, and it thus seems very likely that abstention in 1918 was due to male behaviour rather than to the more mature female electorate. This is corroborated by many contemporary accounts which refer to the women as undemonstrative but determined in turning out to vote.

Dr John Turner has approached the 1918 election by using the evidence provided by the electoral register of 1915 and the number of men included in the 1918 register to estimate the total number of new male electors. He then examined the performance of the Labour Party's candidates and found that there was an inverse relationship between the size of the Labour poll and the proportion of new voters. In fact the greater the proportion of new male voters the less well Labour did and the greater proportion of women voters the less well Labour did.

Yet a statistical relationship is one thing: explaining it is another. This can be done at two levels. From a long-term perspective the emergence of an organised Labour Party can be seen to have been linked to the relatively prosperous, unionised and politically aware working-class communities who were already enfranchised to a great extent. Consequently the incorporation of the whole of the male working class weakened Labour's position in the short run. Similarly, women as a group were as yet relatively uninvolved in the social and institutional networks that fostered support for Labour, and their enfranchisement was unlikely, without further changes, to prove advantageous.

More immediately women appear to have reacted to the 1918 campaign in a rather striking way, as contemporaries observed. It is easy to be misled by the prominence of a small group of women activists i n the anti-war cause. To those politicians who had hoped or feared that women would want to vote for international peace and conciliation the Coupon Election came as a shock. Anti-war candidates such as Ramsay MacDonald experienced heavy defeats in their constituencies, in his case at West Leicester where the women voters were reported to be 'bloodthirsty, cursing their hate', and as posing a physical threat to pacifist politicians.

Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence first became aware of this in 1917 when helping a peace-by-negotiation candidate at Aberdeen; the women there 'were even more embittered than the men', she wrote. Subsequently as a Labour candidate herself in Manchester in 1918 she commented:

I realised at once that my supporters were not the women - this election was their chance of 'doing their bit' and the were all for 'going over the top' to avenge their husbands and their sons. My supporters were the soldiers themselves.

Legislation that gave women the right to vote on the same terms as men received its Royal Assent on July 2, 1928. Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 is sometimes referred to as the Fifth Reform Act or the Equal Suffrage Act but that is its proper title.

As is well known the first woman MP actually to take her seat in the Commons was a Conservative, to wit, Nancy Astor. This blog  has mentioned her a few times before, naturally enough, here, here, here and here. It is, however, worth recalling her career yet again, as today is the anniversary of her Maiden Speech. Thus, on February 24, 1920 was the first time a woman spoke in the House of Commons.

Tory Historian is aware that "awesome" has become one of the most fashionable slang words meaning, roughly speaking, "pretty good". This is rather a pity as the word should be used only when describing people like Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842 - 1885), modestly described by Wikipedia as a "traveller and soldier". And so he was, as well as a superb writer of two classics of travel literature: A Ride to Khiva and On Horseback Through Asia Minor.

Thanks to one of Colonel Burnaby's admirers who is also a reader of this blog, Tory Historian has found out about Mrs Burnaby (1860 - 1934) who became later Mrs John Frederick Main and Mrs Aubrey Le Blond. She seems to have been as awesome (in the true sense of the word) as her first husband, becoming a leading mountain climber and the first President of the Ladies Alpine Club. She wrote about her mountain climbing under her different married names and made a number of films of snow sports in the Alps. She is generally considered to be the first woman film-maker.

Le Blond evidently did not think her filmmaking of any great significance as she fails to mention it in her autobiography, perhaps because her life encompassed so many other activities: as well as writing and photographing, she lectured, travelled widely, worked in the Service de Santé Militaire in the First World War, and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1933.

Tory Historian has spent some time recently reading M. V. Hughes's books about her life in Victorian London and the later one about life between the wars in Cuffley, a village just outside London that was, in that period, steadily moving towards becoming a suburb.

December 1, 1919 saw the introduction of the first woman MP to the House of Commons. Needless to say, she was a Conservative. Nancy Astor was not the first woman to be elected to the House - that had happened in 1918, when Constance Markiewicz was elected as a Sinn Féin MP for one of the Dublin constituencies but, in line with party policy, refused to take the oath and was not allowed to sit in the House of Commons. [Both Wiki links need to be read with great care as there are inaccuracies and omissions but the outline of the two stories are useful.]

That was the first election, held in December 1918, after the Representation of People Act, passed in March 1918 that widened the franchise to all men over 21 and women over 30 as long as they were "either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register". Women had been allowed the vote in various local elections since the late 1880s.

Nancy Astor's candidacy and election was not, in the first place, an achievement for feminists though, obviously, it could not have happened without years of campaigning by both suffragettes (whose contribution was often counter-productive) and the suffragists, many of whom had been Conservatives. It was all a deal put together by the local Conservative Association but something of a political risk, nevertheless.

Early in October 1919 the first Viscount Astor (by birth American but a long-time resident of Britain where the entire Astor family assimilated very quickly) died of a heart attack. This made his son, Waldorf, until then MP for Plymouth Sutton, the second Viscount and he had to resign from the Commons. The Association then had the brilliant idea of putting up his wife who had been closely involved in his political career. The assumption was that there would soon be legislation that would allow those who inherit a title to reject it through various legal methods. In fact, the Peerage Act was not passed till 1963 and Nancy Astor remained an MP till 1945.

The picture above is the proclamation of her victory. Naturally, there are no pictures of her being introduced into the House by David Lloyd George and A. J. Balfour.

More from Diane Urquhart's book on the formidable Londonderry ladies. This quote is singularly relevant to certain developments in the American presidential election, where the "second-wave feminists" have found themselves on the back foot:

There is no question that the marchionesses formed part of a small coterie of political confidantes and hosteses who worked by distinctly personal means in high society to promote their family, direct careers and impact change while their marriage and widowhood would respectively facilitate and impede their political influence.

Indeed, the idea of the personal being political, brought to the public's attention by the second-wave feminism of 1960s America, can be applied to a different place and a different time: in this instance to nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain and Ireland.