Women in the Conservative Party Organization, 1945–75

Abstract

The 1945 election defeat was one of the worst in the Conservative Party’s history, and, for this very reason it galvanized the party to undertake needed reforms. Churchill named Lord Woolton, the popular Minister of Food during the war, to the position of Party Chairman: he began a major reassessment of the party and undertook to modernize it. Under his leadership constituency branches, which, in some cases, had practically ceased to exist during the war, were rejuvenated, and women’s membership, in particular, started to grow. The old structure of separate men’s and women’s branches was abolished. Joint branches for both women and men were established as the basis of the party organization but separate women’s sections continued to exist. These women’s sections were co-ordinated by women’s advisory committees whose task was to take care of the special interests of women within the party. The hope was to integrate the women more fully into the mainstream organization of the party in order to avoid the competition and overlapping that had existed between the separate branches, while allowing them to retain an important degree of autonomy. By the 1960s these women’s sections were simply being called constituency women’s advisory committees and membership in them was optional.