Abstract
Two women, two wars. Expressions of hope and forecasts of change. Both women steeped in Labour Party women’s organizations and both sure that women had something special to offer, that the future would be transformed because of women’s gifts. This idea of the necessity of women’s contribution to a future world of equality and ease, and the protest implicit in the second quote, that men in the Labour movement undervalued this contribution and therefore delayed the revolution, have remained constant throughout women’s involvement in Labour Party politics. Yet is the protest justified? Can the idea that women’s special gifts be realized through the agency of the Labour Party be put into practice? Was it ever feasible to expect that the Labour Party, which dedicated itself not to revolution but to representing working people in parliament, would have the ideological space to value, the political space to acknowledge women’s special gifts? Can one indeed objectify ‘the Labour Party’ in this way, giving it a single identity as actor and endowing it with power to act? Claims for women such as those voiced above must be called feminist, although neither of the speakers reported above would have given herself that label. How had such ideas come to be voiced at the rather staid Labour Party women’s conferences, even in time of war that encouraged such chiliastic expression?
Daughter of the Ancient Eve We know the gifts you gave, and give; Who knows the gifts that you shall give Daughter of the Newer Eve?
Mrs K.M. Shailes, Chairing 23rd National Conference of Labour Women, 1945
They noted all over the world signs of the change that was coming, and women of the working classes have taken the foremost place in it. A tremendous transformation was going to take place on this earth; and the injustices of the ages, the misery of the oppressed classes, and the sorrow of the poor, and the tyranny of the wealthy were going to be swept away forever. Nothing could stop the movement. When the trades union movement fully realised that all workers, men and women, youths and maidens, were members one of another, then they would hear more than the rumble of revolution in the distance; the revolution would be here.
Ada Salter, Women’s Labour League conference, 1914, Daily Dispatch, Gertrude Tuckwell Collection, 345/79
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Notes
For one of the few commentaries that does problemitize ‘the complexities of feminism and Labour’s response’, see Martin Francis, ‘Labour and Gender’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Matthew Worley, ‘Building the Labour Party: Labour Party Activities in Five British Counties between the Wars’, Labour History Review, 70(1), 2005, p. 78. Worley’s opinion is that continuing male dominance prevented success in other areas. Martin Francis, ‘Labour and Gender’ op. cit. asks why women succeeded in the field of welfare but not that of equal pay.
Worley, op. cit., p. 75. Cf. Steven Fielding and Duncan Tanner, ‘The “rise of the Left” Revisited: Labour Party Culture in Post-War Manchester and Salford’, Labour History Review, 7(3) 2006, p. 215; ‘Labour was a very masculine organisation, with many local parties being managed by male cliques’.
Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party (Oxford University Press, 1963).
Lucy Middleton (ed.), Women in the Labour Movement (Medwood Burn, 1977).
Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris (eds), Gender and Party Politics (Sage, 1993);
Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski, Political Recruitment: Gender Race and Class in the British Parliament (Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Pippa Norris ‘Gender Difference in Political Recruitment in Britain’, Government and Opposition, 26(1), Winter 1991.
Neil Evans and Dot Jones, ‘“To help forward the work of humanity”: Women in the Labour Party’, in Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams and Deian Hopkins (eds), The Labour Party in Wales (University of Wales Press, 2000).
Christine Collette, ‘The International Faith: Rituals and Liturgies of British Labour Movement Internationalism, 1918–1939’, in Berthold Unfried and Christine Schindler (eds), Riten, Mythen und Symbole–Die Arbeiter-bewegung zwischen ‘Zivilreligion’ und Volksskultur (Akademische Verlaggansanstalt, 1999).
Florence Davy ‘From Zeppelins to Jets’, Labour Heritage Women’s Research Committee Bulletin, (2) 1987. Joan Davis, ‘A Life in the Labour Movement’, ibid. Many Labour Heritage women echoed these sentiments at conferences around Britain in the1980s.
Sarah Perrigo, ‘Women, Change and the Labour Party’, Parliamentary Affairs, 49(1) January 1996, p. 119.
See introduction to Fiona Montgomery and Christine Collette, The European Women’s History Reader (Routledge, 2002) and
Joanna Bornat and Hannah Diamed, ‘Women’s History and Oral History: developments and debates’, Women’s History Review, 16(1) 2007.
Irene Wagner, ‘Socialist London at War’, Labour Heritage Women’s Research Committee Bulletin, (2) Labour Heritage, 1987.
Dan Weinbren was instrumental in recording Labour Heritage members. See also Dan Weinbren, Generating Socialism: Recollections of Life in the Labour Party (Sutton, 1997), passim.
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© 2009 Christine Collette
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Collette, C. (2009). Introduction. In: The Newer Eve. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236981_1
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