Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique French Journal of British Studies
XXIII-1 | 2018 Women in Britain since 1900: Evolution, Revolution or 'Plus ça change...' ? La Situation des femmes au Royaume-Uni depuis 1900 : changement ou continuité ?
Marc Calvini-Lefebvre et Laura Schwartz (dir.)
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1748 DOI : 10.4000/rfcb.1748 ISSN : 2429-4373
Éditeur CRECIB - Centre de recherche et d'études en civilisation britannique
Référence électronique Marc Calvini-Lefebvre et Laura Schwartz (dir.), Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, XXIII-1 | 2018, « Women in Britain since 1900: Evolution, Revolution or 'Plus ça change...' ? » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 15 mars 2018, consulté le 04 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1748 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.1748
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 4 septembre 2020.
Revue française de civilisation britannique est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. 1
SOMMAIRE
Confronting Continuity in Women's History
Introduction: British Civilization Studies and the “Woman Question” Marc Calvini-Lefebvre et Laura Schwartz
« On ne peut pas empêcher les concepts de voyager » : un entretien avec Christine Delphy Marc Calvini-Lefebvre
Gendered Implications of the Neoliberal Turn
Neo-liberalism and Gender Inequality in the Workplace in Britain Louise Dalingwater
A Tale of Female Liberation? The Long Shadow of De-Professionalization on the Lives of Post-War Women Eve Worth
Sites of Contestation: the Law, the Church, and Cricket
A Legal Maternal Wall? No Revolution in Motherhood for Women Lawyers in England Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec
Déconstruire le patriarcat dans l’Église d’Angleterre : enjeux et résistances Églantine Jamet-Moreau
“Cricket Has Given Me Everything”: Women’s Sport and the Women’s Movement in Twentieth-century Britain Rafaelle Nicholson
Agents of Change? The Women's Suffrage and Trade Union Movements
The Missing Two Million: The Exclusion of Working-class Women from the 1918 Representation of the People Act Anna Muggeridge
From Grunwick to Gate Gourmet: South Asian Women’s Industrial Activism and the Role of Trade Unions Sundari Anitha, Ruth Pearson et Linda McDowell
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History, Memory and Politics
The Women’s Equality Party: “And Everything Old is New Again…” Véronique Molinari
Review article: The Politics of Remembering the Suffragettes Laura Schwartz
Book Reviews
Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage L’Europe des femmes, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle de Julie Le Gac et Fabrice Virgili, Michel Prum
Review of Rewriting Academia, The Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe by Renate Haas (ed), Shirley Doulière
Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage Inclusion through Access to Higher Education – Exploring the Dynamics between Access to Higher Education, Immigration and Languages de Marie-Agnès Détourbe (Ed.), Marie-Annick Mattioli
Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage Le Reggae en Angleterre 1967-1997 d’Éric Doumerc John Mullen
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Confronting Continuity in Women's History Se confronter à la continuité dans l’histoire des femmes
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Introduction: British Civilization Studies and the “Woman Question” Introduction : Les Etudes de civilisation britannique et la « Question de la Femme »
Marc Calvini-Lefebvre and Laura Schwartz
1 This is the first themed issue in the Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique’s twenty- eight-year history to be entirely devoted to what was once called “the woman question”. It was commissioned by John Mullen (may he receive our heartfelt thanks), and we feel privileged to have had the opportunity to be its editors.
2 “First wave” British feminists made various predictions about the kind of gendered social change that their struggles would usher in. Some imagined a complete overhaul of relations between the sexes, particularly once women could use their votes to transform every aspect of society. Others envisaged a more gradual progression, believing that with the passage of time equality between the sexes would become the new normal, a common unquestioned and systematic practice. All of them would probably have been surprised by the kinds of changes that have occurred, as well as the resilience and adaptability of gendered inequality and oppression. The political agenda of “women’s rights” has existed in Britain for more than two centuries, and yet today women remain concentrated in the lowest paid forms of work, sex and gender-based violence persists, women’s bodies and identities remain the grounds upon which racist, imperialist and religious ideologies are frequently played out. Most immediately, the political developments of the last two years or so have served as a sharp reminder that gender remains at the heart of neo-conservative bids for power and the rise of the far right.
3 This themed issue invited articles engaged with the question of gendered social change in Britain in any period since 1800. As historians, the two of us seek to make sense of the questions that puzzle us by interrogating the longue durée. How have women’s roles changed vis-à-vis those of men? To what extent has the imbalance of power between men and women shifted? What has driven that change, and how much importance should be attributed to feminist movements in this process? Should the transformation
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of what it means to be a woman and the deconstruction of binary gender roles be understood within a framework of “progress”? Or is this inadequate to understanding the multiplicity of ways in which gendered oppression and exploitation has been able to take on new guises, and emancipatory gains have been captured and contained? What might the “long view” reveal about this state of affairs and what theoretical models are best deployed to comprehend such developments and dead ends?
4 We were aware, naturally, that these were not new questions. They haunt each generation of feminists, recently in the powerful call by medievalist Judith Bennett to “ confront [a presumably disheartening] continuity” in women’s history rather than, or at least as well as, emphasize instances of (presumably encouraging) change.1 In the 1970s, historians were at the centre of wider feminist debates on the utility of concepts such as patriarchy, and the question of whether analytical frameworks were capable of accounting for historical change was a key criteria for assessing their viability. It is for this reason that we wanted to open our themed issue with an interview with the French sociologist Christine Delphy, emeritus professor at the CNRS, by Marc Calvini-Lefebvre of Aix-Marseille Université. In 1975, Delphy famously designated patriarchy as the women’s liberation movement’s “principal enemy”, arguing that women faced a specific form of oppression that was not reducible to an effect of existing systems of economic oppression, but worked autonomously from them.2 In other words, she warned that women’s oppression would not magically disappear with the smashing of capitalism, as was sometimes complacently argued in leftist circles. In this interview, Delphy explains how she came to choose the term, and defends her usage of it from the familiar accusation of ahistoricism. On this view, “patriarchy” is a uselessly monolithic term that is incapable of taking social, political and cultural change over time into account. To describe 19th and 21 st century Britain as “patriarchies”, in other words, is to overemphasize continuity and conceal the significant changes that have occurred in that time span. This objection, however, only stands if patriarchy is thought to have a fixed, “thick”, definition. If, instead, it is understood as a shorthand for a system in which men are systematically advantaged vis-à-vis women, then it is not inaccurate to say that 19th and 21 st century Britain are both patriarchies, if not of the same hue. Delphy also takes historians and anthropologists to task for their confident claims that they have found the origin of women’s oppression, be that in ancient taboos over menstruation or in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The quest for origins, she implies, is probably a red herring. The urgent task is, rather, to tirelessly track the ways in which patriarchal systems reproduce and transform themselves, in the hope of managing to both better understand and better combat them.
5 The first section of this issue consists of two studies – one of contemporary Britain, the other of the 1980s and 1990s – that look into the gendered implications of the neoliberal turn; a political and economic project that both drew upon and circumscribed the achievements of “second wave” feminism.
6 Louise Dalingwater of Paris 3 draws on a flurry of recent analyses pertaining to gender inequality on the British labour market as well as her own qualitative research with focus groups on either side of the Channel to argue that the higher pay and prospect gap that British women suffer is strongly correlated with the neoliberal framework that has shaped government policy since 1979. For although the promotion of a flexible, service-based economy has drawn more women into the labour market, they have found themselves overwhelmingly clustered in “pink-collar” part-time jobs with limited
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job security. More importantly still, Dalingwater’s research suggests that neoliberalism has managed to achieve a form of cultural hegemony, as evidenced by the seeming acceptance by her British respondents of these inequalities as inevitable, the “normal” consequences of the market’s unfettered workings. As Delphy might put it, it would seem that patriarchy and neoliberalism are mutually supportive.
7 This point is particularly powerfully illustrated in the article by Eve Worth of Oxford University. Drawing on oral history interviews she conducted with women born between 1938 and 1952, she seeks to complicate the familiar presentation of this generation as one that benefited straightforwardly from the profound social changes of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, by focusing on the second half of their lives, she brings to light the impact that the neoliberal turn had on their careers and sense of self. Thatcherism, as Worth highlights, was not only characterized by deindustrialization and its effects upon a predominantly male workforce. It was also characterized by what she terms “deprofessionalization”, a process through which a predominantly female workforce working in the so-called “semi-professions” of the public sector was stripped of its autonomy and expertise by a new managerial (and virile) ethos that claimed to make the welfare state a “leaner” and supposedly more efficient machine by rigidly codifying and systematically inspecting the actions of its agents. The consequence, for Worth’s interviewees, was often downward occupational mobility and a profound sense of personal failure, of “being put back in my box”, as one puts it.
8 The attempt to contain and constrain the impact of more than a century of struggles for gender equality is a central theme of the second section of the issue, with three articles that, like Worth’s, are grounded in interviews which reveal how women have navigated and continue to navigate the minefield of gender norms in three distinct contexts: the legal profession, the Church of England, and the professional practice of Cricket.
9 Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec, of Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, focuses on highly- educated women who work in the socially prestigious and financially lucrative legal sector as barristers and solicitors. As in other sectors of the economy, these women earn comparatively less than their male counterparts and face both vertical segregation (the infamous “glass ceiling”) and horizontal segregation (they tend to cluster into certain areas of legal practice, like family law, but are under-represented in others, like criminal law, which generates higher income and greater prestige). She shows that the most convincing explanation for this is not so much institutional sexism (though this can be the case in certain sets of chambers) as the operation of a “maternal wall”, a concept coined by the American scholar Joan Williams and that this article applies to an analyses of labour markets in Europe. Indeed, it helps to pinpoint the specific discrimination women face as real or potential mothers including in working environments that are, at least on paper, proactively attempting to eradicate sex discrimination. The discrimination women face, then, is best understood as intersectional, that is to say as the result of overlapping ideas, attitudes and prejudices regarding femininity, maternity and motherhood (and that may interact with other paradigms such as race, class, sexual orientation, and so on).
10 Such ideas also loom large in Eglantine Jamet-Moreau of Paris Nanterre’s analysis of the Anglican Church’s tortuous debates over the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopacy since 1900. Indeed, the antis seem always to fall back on the idea
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that women’s bodies are the ultimate obstacle to their ordination. Because Christ was a man, they argue, only men can embody him. All the more so that women’s ability to carry a child and give birth are God-given and indicate clearly in what direction they must devote their lives. What is more, women’s bodies are described as impure, both because of menstruation and because of the fact that they bear witness, via pregnancy, to sexual activity. Such impurity is declared to be incompatible with officiating in a sacred, holy, space. Significantly, despite their ancient pedigree and relentless repetition, these arguments have not been sufficient to bar women from ordination in the Anglican Church. However, Jamet-Moreau shows their continued effects on the manner in which the Church strives to accommodate those within its ranks who refuse to accept female ministers, as well as the ways in which the gendered expectations of congregations affect the experiences of ministers, male and female. Clearly then, patriarchal ideas and norms, though contested, have not, to reprise the article’s title, been fully deconstructed in the Anglican Church.
11 Rafaelle Nicholson of Queen Mary, University of London explores one area in which women have managed, since the late 1920s, to challenge conservative gender norms not by fighting for change to an existing institution from within but by creating their own parallel organization: the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA). Here too, it was widely argued that women could not play this most English of games because of their bodies, for reasons both biological (their bodies are too weak, too fragile, or too precious, to play this game) and aesthetic (when played by women, the game is ugly, and a woman who plays the game loses her beauty). The WCA took these criticisms to heart and attempted to nullify them by imposing strict dress codes to ensure that players would appear irreproachably feminine. Such enforcement of conservative gender norms, and the general hostility of the largely middle-class interviewees to the label “feminist”, should not, Nicholson argues, conceal the significant ways in which cricketing women challenge(d) the gender status quo. Most obviously, there is their practice of cricket at the highest levels of international competition and in mixed-sex games, which undermines claims about their bodily inability. But there are also their domestic arrangements which, because of the nature of the sport (the length of games and tours), require long spells of absence from their homes, sometimes for several months at a time. Cricket, then, is one arena in which we can trace the legacies and impact of first wave feminism into the later twentieth century, even when the women involved did/do not embrace the feminist label.
12 The third section of this issue explores the strengths and limitations of campaigning organizations which seek to speak on behalf of women and their rights, through two case studies – one of the women’s suffrage movement, the other of labour organising.
13 In her article, Anna Muggeridge, a doctoral student at the University of Worcester, explores the oft-overlooked property qualification of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. It is well-known that, whereas all men aged twenty-one and older were enfranchised, the vote was only granted to women over thirty. What is often forgotten is that these women also had to face a property qualification. The result was the exclusion, Muggeridge shows for the first time with accuracy, of close to two million working-class women from the franchise. Looking into the women’s movement’s reaction to this exclusion, she notes that the concern it caused was minimal when compared with the constant campaigning for the redress of the age qualification up to 1928. We see here how the well-documented class bias within the women’s suffrage
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movement not only contributed to acceptance of the property qualification but also to a relative lack of interest in combating it. This article, then, is a timely reminder that even the most uplifting of movements for social justice can simultaneously reproduce forms of exclusion and domination, thus leading to legal transformations that do less to further gendered social change than might have been expected.
14 A similar conclusion can be drawn from the next article by Sundari Anitha of the University of Lincoln, Ruth Pearson, Emeritus Professor of International Development at the University of Leeds, and Linda McDowell, of the University of Oxford, who discuss two emblematic trade disputes involving South Asian women workers: Grunwick in 1976-78 and Gate Gourmet in 2005. Enriching the existing record of these disputes with new interviews, their account reveals troubling continuities in the ways both management and the trade union movement engaged with migrant and/or Black and Minority Ethnicity women workers. In both disputes a central feature of managers’ attempts at bullying women into being more productive involved a sex-specific limitation of their bodily autonomy through the deliberately humiliating policing of toilet breaks. The trade union leadership, on the other hand, are taken to task for misleadingly presenting Grunwick as a turning point in their treatment of marginalized women workers, a claim to “progress” that they failed to make good over thirty years later in the case of the Gate Gourmet workers. Indeed, not only did the trade union bureaucracy arguably fail, in both cases, to adequately support the striking women workers, they also continue to work on orientalist assumptions about these workers’ alleged preference for domesticity, disinclination to unionise, and tendency to be moved to action by community rather than class interests. Nevertheless, while acknowledging the challenges unions face in a labour market characterized by a ubiquitous “ethnic division of labour”, the rise of the “gig economy”, and a legal framework that impedes militancy, the authors maintain that marginalized women workers’ interests can and must be better defended. For this to occur, unions must first acknowledge and remove the structural barriers within their organizations that limit the representation of marginalized voices. In addition, they would do well to adopt an intersectional approach when analysing these workers’ situations. Indeed, as their article shows, this allows one to see that these workers’ sense of injustice and their decision to resist is driven not only by the degradation of their working conditions but by their desire for recognition and the restoration, as the authors put it, “of their sense of worth and dignity”.
15 The final section of this themed issue looks at how the memory of the women’s movement is mobilised both within contemporary British politics, via a case study of the recently formed Women’s Equality Party (WEP), and within broader British public debate, via the heated exchanges sparked by the feature film Suffragette.
16 Véronique Molinari of Université de Grenoble’s article places the WEP in historical perspective. Created in 2015 and already accruing more members than UKIP or the Greens, the WEP is not the first attempt by some British women to effect political and legal change by organizing separately from the existing “malestream” parties. Its predecessors, Molinari argues, range from Christabel Pankhurst’s short-lived right- wing Women’s Party, created in 1918, to the left-leaning interwar Six Point Group, through to the Women’s Liberation Movement and the six radical demands it championed between 1971 and 1975. Taking the long view reveals two striking continuities in this hundred-year history. First, that the main policy areas singled out
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for reform have remained largely the same: education and employment, pay, violence against women, and sexuality. Second, that despite their considerable differences, these groups have come in for a pair of strikingly similar criticisms: enemies accuse them of being primarily motivated by misandry, while potential allies chide them for naively expecting to achieve their aims from outside the main parties of government. One way in which the WEP has sought to meet these criticisms and legitimate its actions, has been to explicitly invoke the memory, and adopt the colours and slogans, of the militant suffragettes. Here, the historical perspective invites a reflection on the politics of memory. Indeed, it is quite clear that the WEP has much more in common with a reformist/liberal strand of suffragism than with militancy, both in terms of methods and policy. That it prefers instead to lay claim to quite a different political tradition is a testament to the place that the suffragettes occupy in Britain’s national narrative. But it also problematically sweeps their authoritarianism and post-1914 xenophobia under the carpet, all the while obscuring important continuities in liberal feminist reformist politics.
17 Molinari’s article thus places a helpful spotlight on the tensions surrounding the history and memory of the suffrage movement, tensions that came to the fore in the heated public debate about the film Suffragette released in 2015, a debate to which Laura Schwartz of the University of Warwick turns in the review essay that brings our themed issue to a close. One of many historians of the nineteenth-century women’s movement to weigh in on the various controversies surrounding Suffragette, Schwartz returns here to one of the most controversial critiques of the film, that surrounding its race politics. Her article highlights how approaching such debates historically requires a double lens. Historians might indeed wish to nuance criticisms of the film for failing to portray suffrage campaigners of colour or failing to distance itself from the racist pronouncements of the Women’s Social and Political Union’s leadership, on the basis that this is to too bluntly impose a reading of the North American experience onto the British context. Yet it is also crucial to understand that although context is explanatory it is not exculpatory. The fact that the British women’s movement did reproduce racist and imperialist tropes is beyond question and cannot be simply brushed aside as “a sign of the times”. Not only because there were contemporaries who did not think in this way, but also because such ideas have not disappeared. The point, then, of thinking as a historian is not to stand in judgement over our predecessors, nor simply to set the record straight by drawing on our expert knowledge of the archives, but rather to keep the past alive as a site from which to think and act in our own time and place.
18 We knew that this issue could not offer either an exhaustive nor a definitive treatment of our questions and we regret that it does not, as we initially hoped, go further back than 1900. But we were impressed with the breadth of topics that our questions were applied to, and the depth of expertise with which those topics were treated. Indeed, as Florence Binard has recently shown, though women’s and/or gender studies have been a constant presence in the plural and varied landscape of British civilization studies in France since at least the 1970s (benefitting greatly, as this issue has done, from the weaving of close intellectual and friendly ties between scholars on either side of the Channel), it is only recently, in 2010, that a dedicated learned society (the Société Anglophone sur le Genre et les Femmes)3 was founded, indicating that a critical mass of “British civ” scholars is now actively working in these fields. 4 This themed issue may thus be thought of as a further stepping stone in the gradual move of women and gender studies from the periphery to the heart (if not the centre) of British civilisation
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studies in France. It is certainly a testament to the vibrancy of the field that it brings together scholars at all stages of their careers (from the doctoral student to the Emeritus professor) and from at least four different disciplinary backgrounds: economics, history, sociology and political science. We hope therefore that it will contribute to furthering the dissemination of interest in women and gender studies amongst the next generation of British civilisation scholars. Such continuity would, for once, be cause for celebration!
19 Ce numéro de la revue a été mis en forme et mis en ligne avec le logiciel Lodel par Shirley Doulière et John Mullen.
20 Marc Calvini-Lefebvre is Lecturer in 19th Century British History at Aix-Marseille Université. His research explores the intellectual history of feminism in Britain.
21 Laura Schwartz is Associate Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on the history of British feminism and is currently completing her third monograph Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class Conflict and Domestic Labour in the British Women's Suffrage Movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennet, Judith, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Bennet, Judith, ‘Confronting continuity’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 9, n. 3, (1997), pp. 73-94
Binard, Florence, ‘Beyond Invisibility and Bias: English Women’s and Gender Studies in France’, in Renate Haas (ed.), Rewriting Academia: the Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe (Oxford, Perter Lang, 2015), pp. 105-132.
Delphy, Christine, L’Ennemi principal, 2 tomes, 3e édition (Paris, Edition Syllepse, 2013).
NOTES
1. See in particular, Judith Bennet, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), especially chapters 3 to 5. The original expression can be found in an earlier article of hers: Judith Bennet, “Confronting continuity”, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 9, n. 3, (1997), pp. 73-94. 2. Christine Delphy, L’ennemi principal, 2 tomes, (Paris, Edition Syllepse, 3e édition, 2013). 3. Société Anglophone sur le Genre et les Femmes 4. Florence Binard, “Beyond Invisibility and Bias: English Women’s and Gender Studies in France”, in Renate Haas (ed.), Rewriting academia: the development of the anglicist women’s and gender studies of continental Europe (Oxford, Perter Lang, 2015), pp. 105-132.
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ABSTRACTS
This is the first themed issue in the Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique’s twenty-eight-year history to be entirely devoted to what was once called “the woman question”. At its heart lies a simple yet puzzling question: why is it that, after over two centuries of campaigning for “women’s rights”, women remain concentrated in the lowest paid forms of work, sex and gender- based violence persists, and women’s bodies and identities remain the grounds upon which racist, imperialist and religious ideologies are frequently played out? In providing detailed case- studies through which to reflect on this question, our contributors reveal the plurality of objects and methods that characterise the rich fields of women’s and gender studies research. We hope therefore that they will contribute to furthering the dissemination of interest in women and gender studies amongst the next generation of British civilisation scholars.
En vingt-huit années d’existence, ceci est le premier numéro thématique de la Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique à être entièrement consacré à ce que l’on appelait autrefois « La Question de la Femme ». Il pose une question à la fois simple et profondément déroutante : comment se fait-il qu’après deux siècles de militantisme en faveur des droits des femmes, celles-ci se retrouvent encore concentrées dans les occupations les moins bien rémunérées, les violences sexuelles et genrées persistent, et les corps et identités des femmes continuent régulièrement à être les terrains de déploiement privilégiés d’idéologies racistes, impérialistes et religieuses ? Les études de cas détaillées de nos contributrices montrent la pluralité des objets et méthodes caractéristiques de ces deux champs très riches que sont les études sur les femmes et les études genre. Nous espérons donc qu’ils contribueront à prolonger la dissémination croissante d’intérêt pour ces champs au sein de la prochaine génération de civilisationistes.
INDEX
Keywords: women’s studies, gender, SAGEF, civilisation studies, feminism Mots-clés: études sur les femmes, genre, SAGEF, études de civilisation, féminisme
AUTHORS
MARC CALVINI-LEFEBVRE
Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA), EA 853, 13625, Aix- Marseille Université.
LAURA SCHWARTZ
History Department, University of Warwick
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« On ne peut pas empêcher les concepts de voyager » : un entretien avec Christine Delphy “You Can’t Stop Concepts from Travelling”: an Interview with Christine Delphy
Marc Calvini-Lefebvre
1 Le concept de « patriarcat », qui est au cœur de la conception de ce numéro spécial, doit beaucoup aux travaux de la sociologue Christine Delphy. Directrice de recherche émérite au CNRS, co-fondatrice de la revue Nouvelles Questions Féministes1 avec Simone de Beauvoir, elle est l’une des théoriciennes majeures du féminisme matérialiste, terme qu’elle inventa en 19752. En 1970, elle publia une analyse pionnière du travail domestique gratuit fournit par les femmes au sein des ménages français, arguant qu’il s’agissait là de la base économique de la subordination des femmes aux hommes, sans distinction de classe sociale. Face à cette « oppression spécifique »3, les femmes se devaient de donner la priorité à « la destruction totale du système de production et de reproduction patriarcal »4, qu’elle désignait, dans une formule célèbre, comme « l’ennemi principal » du mouvement de libération des femmes. Nous avons souhaité la rencontrer pour évoquer avec elle la genèse de ce concept, certaines des critiques qui ont pu lui être adressée, son articulation avec d’autres notions et concepts qui ont été avancé pour faire sens des inégalités entre hommes et femmes, et la prolifération récente de son usage jusque dans les médias. Nous tenons à la remercier pour sa générosité, sa patience, et son souci constant de la clarté et de la précision du propos.
2 Marc Calvini-Lefebvre : Qu’entendez-vous par patriarcat ?
3 Christine Delphy : Le mot patriarcat désigne un système, non pas dans sa manière de fonctionner, mais comme un état de fait, un état de domination masculine. On pourrait utiliser d’autres termes pour décrire ce système : sexiste, viriliste, excluant. On peut dire, par exemple, « le système politique en France est patriarcal ». Mais ce n’est pas la seule manière dont on peut le décrire, et ça n’épuise pas le mot de patriarcat. Un système peut être patriarcal et beaucoup d’autres choses.
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4 MCL : D’où vous est venu ce terme ?
5 CD : Je ne suis pas historienne mais j’ai lu beaucoup de romans du 19e siècle. Chez des auteurs aussi différents que Hugo ou Marx, « patriarcal » désignait une espèce de société plus ou moins primitive et plus ou moins idéale où tout le monde dépendait de la bonne volonté d’un père de famille. Ce qui m’avait frappé c’est que les auteurs du 19e utilisaient beaucoup le terme de « vertu patriarcale » qui renvoyait à un mythe d’une société paysanne ou une famille heureuse vivait sous l’autorité d’un patriarche. Et l’image de ce patriarche c’était celle d’un gentil grand-père ! C’est sans doute pour cela que, dans les années 60-70, même des collègues qui étaient très proches de moi, me disaient « mais patriarcat ça ne va pas pour désigner la domination des hommes parce que ça vient de pater, pater c’est le père, ce n’est pas le mari ! » Ils pensaient au chef de famille. Or dans notre tradition, qui est la tradition de tous les pays occidentaux, et probablement de beaucoup d’autres, et bien le pater il est aussi le chef de la famille. Il n’est pas uniquement le géniteur des enfants.
6 MCL : Vous avez donc pris un concept courant du dix-neuvième siècle en l’investissant d’un sens nouveau, ce qui permet de suggérer une continuité dans le temps de ce système, malgré les profondes différences entre la France de Hugo et la France de Pompidou. Cette idée d’une continuité a pu être critiquée par certaines historiennes, comme Sheila Rowbotham5, qui ont reproché au concept de patriarcat de ne pas être en mesure de rendre compte du changement des sociétés dans le temps et à ce titre d’être anhistorique. Comment percevez-vous cette critique ?
7 CD : Je vous ferai une réponse en deux temps. Tout d’abord, quand je me suis intéressée très explicitement au 19e siècle avec une collègue britannique, Diana Leonard 6, nous avons étudié les données empiriques sur la production familiale/familière afin de dire quelque chose de l’organisation du système patriarcal de l’époque et non d’un système patriarcal abstrait, qui flotterait au-dessus de l’histoire. Loin d’être anhistorique, ce concept est, me semble-t-il, transhistorique. En effet, on ne peut soutenir qu’il est une création du 20e, du 19e ou même du 18e siècle. Par exemple, certaines historiennes font dater la relégation politique des femmes à la Révolution Française, parce qu’elles trouvent cette philosophie chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mais il ne la tenait pas de nulle part ! Le sort des femmes avant la Révolution n’était pas non plus très enviable. C’est le problème de ce que j’appelle le présentéisme : on prétend chercher l’origine d’un phénomène, mais on n’ose remonter trop loin au prétexte qu’avant, on n’a pas de sources. Pourtant, il me semble que l’oppression des femmes est observable dans les sources qui nous restent du Haut Moyen-Age, du Bas Moyen-Age, chez les Romains, chez les Grecs, etc…. A chaque époque, ce que l’on retrouve, c’est un patriarcat. Le patriarcat, dans le sens large de domination, on ne peut pas dire que ce soit un phénomène si historiquement circonscrit que cela. Il est peut –être circonscrit mais nous ne savons pas encore où en sont les limites.
8 MCL : C’est une question que mes étudiant.e.s me posent souvent : « mais alors, ça remonte à quand l’inégalité femmes-hommes » ?
9 CD : Oui, mais attention, je ne veux pas dire pour autant qu’il faille le faire remonter à la nuit des temps ! Lorsque l’anthropologue Françoise Héritier, une vrai féministe, une femme sympathique, affirme que la domination masculine a commencé il y a 500 000 ans, je trouve cela très problématique7. Comment le sait-elle ? A partir de quelle base empirique ? Je constate pour ma part que, chaque fois que l’on découvre un nouveau tibia, cela change entièrement les dates de la préhistoire. Force est de constater que
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l’on ne connaît rien de ces sociétés : sont-elles déjà humaines ? Sont-ce encore des singes ? On n’en sait rien. Or, certains anthropologues font parfois comme si ce que ces personnes croyaient ce serait perpétué jusqu’à nos jours, sous la forme de tabous ancestraux autour de la menstruation ou de l’allaitement par exemple, et cela expliquerait l’organisation patriarcale. Mais d’où viennent-ils, ces tabous ? Ils sortent de terre, comme des asperges ? La culture n’est pas gratuite, elle n’apparaît pas comme ça. Elle fait partie de la société, elle ne lui est pas extérieure. Elle ne force pas la société. Les sociétés et leurs croyances sont toujours en phase. La culture c’est l’un des éléments de la société. On ne peut pas l’en distinguer, parce que ce sont les mêmes acteurs.
10 A ce premier point historique, j’en ajouterai un second, épistémologique. Souvent ce qui apparaît comme une querelle théorique ne l’est pas. En France, par exemple, j’ai pu constater, lorsque j’ai participé au petit groupe de l’Action Thématique Programmée du CNRS, un programme de recherche qui durait quatre ans, combien les historiennes présentes refusaient d’utiliser le mot « genre », lui préférant la version anglaise gender. Pourtant, chez les sociologues, le terme sous sa forme française était présent dans nos travaux depuis 15-20 ans ! C’est un mot dérivé du latin genus, un mot très ancien. On le retrouve dans « gente masculine », « gente féminine », et dans ce mot très répandu en France, « les gens » ! Tout le monde faisait comme si c’était une importation de l’anglais. Ce n’est pas une importation de l’anglais. C’est l’utilisation d’un mot, comme l’ont fait les américaines et les anglaises d’ailleurs, pour signifier, pour ne pas le réduire au genre grammatical, c’est tout. Mais dire que cela venait de l’anglais, c’était une manière de le maintenir à distance, de montrer que l’on respectait les rapports de pouvoir dans le champ. Je ne sais pas si c’est le cas pour Sheila Rowbotham, mais en France, en tout cas, il me semble qu’il a été plus difficile pour les historiennes de se faire entendre dans leur champ que les sociologues.
11 MCL : Vous avez aussi été pionnière dans la théorisation du genre en France8. Comment l’articulez-vous dans vos travaux avec le concept de patriarcat ?
12 CD : Les deux vont ensemble, mais ne sont pas identiques. On peut parler du patriarcat de la France, pas du genre de la France. Constater la présence d’un système patriarcal relève de la prise d’un instantané, d’une photo. Mais s’intéresser au genre c’est entrer dans l’ordre de l’analyse du système de partition qui créé deux catégories de personnes et les hiérarchise.
13 MCL : Dans l’ennemi principal vous distinguiez le système patriarcal du système capitaliste, arguant de leur autonomie réciproque. Dans ce numéro spécial, de nombreuses contributions s’interrogent sur les conséquences du tournant néolibéral des années 1980 initié par Margaret Thatcher, sur le statut des femmes au Royaume-Uni. Quel regard portez-vous sur cette question ?
14 CD : Capitalisme et patriarcat sont deux systèmes indépendants mais qui s’appuient mutuellement. Si le genre des gens était indifférent pour le capitalisme, il ne prendrait pas le parti du patriarcat, les choses ne seraient pas semblables. Néolibéralisme est un nouveau mot. Le risque de ces nouveaux mots c’est de donner l’impression que l’on est dans une autre ère. Mais nous ne le sommes pas. Lorsque j’étais à la Fondation Copernic, j’ai eu à écrire une introduction pour un ouvrage qui s’interrogeait sur le sort de tout le monde, pas que des femmes, dans ce qu’il appelait « l’ère néolibérale ». J’ai demandé à mon co-président pourquoi les contributrices et contributeurs de cette ouvrage ne s’attaquaient pas plutôt au capitalisme. Et il m’avait répondu que c’était parce qu’ils et elles considéraient que ce n’était pas la même chose. Pour moi, c’est la
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même chose. Ce n’est qu’un développement du capitalisme. C’est voir les choses par le petit bout de la lorgnette.
15 Ceci étant dit, la situation des femmes se détériore évidemment depuis le tournant Thatchérien/Reaganien, y compris en France. Le but est toujours de limiter l’action de l’Etat pour développer l’économie. C’est un leitmotiv que l’on connaît depuis 40 ans. Cette politique agit d’une façon spécifique sur les femmes parce qu’elles sont spécifiques, parce qu’elles partent avec un fardeau beaucoup plus lourd, ça leur pèse plus qu’aux autres. Mais tout le monde est affecté.
16 MCL : Pour faire sens et combattre les inégalités que le moment néolibéral génère ou aiguise, genre, comme patriarcat, sont des concepts qui, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, sont passés dans le discours médiatique, voire même dans la pop culture. Craignez-vous que ces concepts perdent de leur tranchant analytique en se diffusant ainsi ?
17 CD : On ne peut pas empêcher les concepts de voyager ! Ils vont voyager, et après il y aura des débats et des débats qui n’aboutiront pas à un emploi unanime. En fait, ce qu’il faut faire c’est dire « voilà ce que moi j’entends par là ». On ne peut pas faire autrement !
18 MCL : Voyageons alors avec ce concept pour tenter d’éclairer notre actualité. Lors de l’élection présidentielle américaine récente, les femmes qui se sont déplacées ont, très majoritairement, votées pour Hillary Clinton. Cependant, lorsque l’on a regardé plus finement le vote par catégorie ethnique, on voit que les femmes blanches font exception : elles ont voté à 53% pour Donald Trump. La sociologue Deniz Kandyioti a proposé la notion de « troc patriarcal »9 pour expliquer le soutien de certaines femmes au système patriarcal : parce qu’elles en tirent certains avantages matériels et de statut, elles lui apporteraient leur soutien malgré leur position subordonnée par rapport aux hommes de leur catégorie sociale. Cette notion vous paraît-elle éclairante pour ce cas ?
19 CD : Je dirai d’abord que les femmes blanches ne sont pas plus responsables de l’élection de Trump que les hommes blancs ! Ensuite, cette notion de troc patriarcal, très intéressante, rejoint me semble-t-il les analyses d’Andréa Dworkin dans son ouvrage Les Femmes de Droite10 : elle disait des femmes de droite qu’elles soutenaient le vote de leurs hommes de droite pour ne pas « rock the boat ». Leur intérêt était de passer dans la catégorie la moins opprimée de femmes, c’est-à-dire de femmes épousant un homme relativement aisé.
20 Ainsi, dans tous les groupes dominés, il y a des personnes qui peuvent penser marginalement bénéficier de régimes qui a priori sembleraient les opprimer, parce qu’elles ne se voient pas comme faisant partie d’une catégorie (les femmes) plus grande que leur petite catégorie (les femmes blanches) mais plutôt comme étant en compétition avec tous les membres de cette catégorie. C’est exactement le même problème qui se pose à propos de la race, et on voit bien les résultats dans notre pays : on ne dit pas « ce sont les patrons qui nous exploitent », on dit : « les patrons emploient des Arabes et des Noirs qui nous prennent notre travail ». Conclusion : il faut se débarrasser de cette concurrence pour avoir une part plus grande de ce petit quart de gâteau qui est ce qui nous est échu. Mais l’on ne remet pas en cause la taille de la part. Ainsi, ce que je mettrai en avant c’est plutôt cette compétition interne dans une classe qui ne se connaît pas comme classe. Ou plutôt, qui se connaît comme classe en soi mais a renoncé, n’a même jamais envisagé, de lutter pour sa libération.
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21 MCL : La misogynie, l’anti-féminisme étaient au cœur de la campagne de Donald Trump et on les retrouve aussi dans des mouvements réactionnaires un peu partout en Europe. Peut-on parler, d’après-vous, d’une nouvelle période de « backlash », après celle identifiée par Susan Faludi dans les années 1980-1990 aux Etats-Unis11 ?
22 CD : Vous savez, le backlash, en France, le mouvement féministe l’a vécu dès son apparition. Mais que pouvait-on attendre d’autre ? Le backlash est inévitable et permanent. Dès qu’une catégorie de gens essaient de lever le joug qui pèse sur leurs cous il ne faut pas penser que les autres vont accepter de bonne humeur. Lorsque Susan Faludi a écrit son ouvrage, elle découvrait peut-être ce phénomène, alors en a donné toutes les preuves. Mais ces preuves ne manquent pas, elles sortent tous les jours ! Et pas seulement contre les femmes, contre toutes les personnes stigmatisées qui tentent de s’organiser. Chaque fois qu’il y a un mouvement de libération, de protestation, des catégories dominées il y a une réaction des catégories dominantes. On ne peut pas s’attendre à autre chose. Malheureusement les femmes, elles, s’attendent trop souvent à autre chose parce que, contrairement à d’autres groupes dominés, elles sont très nombreuses à vivre et à avoir des relations affectives très fortes, avec les membres du groupe dominant.
23 Marc Calvini-Lefebvre est Maître de conférences en civilisation britannique du XIXe siècle à Aix-Marseille Université. Chercheur au Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA, EA 853). Ses travaux portent sur l’histoire intellectuelle du féminisme britannique.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
ALEXANDER Sally & TAYLOR Barbara, « In defence of “patriarchy” », The New Statesman, February 1, 1980, p. 161.
DELPHY Christine, L’ennemi principal. Tome 1 : économie politique du patriarcat, Paris, Edition Syllepse, 3e édition, 2013.
– L’ennemi principal. Tome 2 : penser le genre, Paris, Edition Syllepse, 3e édition, 2013.
– & LEONARD Diana, Familiar Exploitation. A new analysis of marriage in contemporary western societies, Cambridge (U.K.), Polity Press, 1992.
DWORKIN Andrea, Right wing women, New York, Perigee Books, 1983.
HÉRITIER Françoise, Masculin/Féminin, tome 1 : la pensée de la différence, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2007.
– Masculin/Féminin, tome 2 : dissoudre la hiérarchie, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2012.
KANDIYOTI Deniz, « Bargaining with patriarchy », Gender and Society, Vol. 2, No. 3, Special Issue to Honor Jessie Bernard, Sep., 1988, p. 274-290.
FALUDI Susan, Backlash: the undeclared war against American women, London, Chatto & Windus, 1992.
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ROWBOTHAM Sheila, « The trouble with “patriarchy” », The New Statesman, 21/28 December 1979.
NOTES
1. https://www.cairn.info/revue-nouvelles-questions-feministes.htm (dernière consultation: 27/11/2017) 2. DELPHY Christine, « Pour un féminisme matérialiste », in DELPHY Christine, L’ennemi principal. Tome 1 : économie politique du patriarcat, Paris, Edition Syllepse, 2013, 3e édition, p. 243-253. Cet article est paru pour la première fois dans L’Arc, en avril 1975. 3. DELPHY Christine, « Le patriarcat : une oppression spécifique », in DELPHY Christine, L’ennemi principal. Tome 2 : penser le genre, Paris, Edition Syllepse, 2013, 3e édition, p. 51-83. Cet entretien avec Louis Astre et Liliane Kandel, avait été publié à l’origine en 1988 dans Le féminisme et ses enjeux, FEN, Edilig. 4. DELPHY Christine, « L’ennemi principal », in DELPHY Christine, L’ennemi principal. Tome 1 : économie politique du patriarcat, Paris, Edition Syllepse, 2013, 3e édition, p. 52. Cet article est apparu pour la première fois en 1970 dans un numéro spécial de la revue Partisans intitulé : « Libération des femmes. Année zéro ». 5. ROWBOTHAM Sheila, « The trouble with “patriarchy” », The New Statesman, 21/28 December 1979. Pour une réponse contemporaine, voir Sally Alexander & Barbara Taylor, « In defence of “patriarchy” », The New Statesman, February 1, 1980, p. 161. 6. DELPHY Christine & LEONARD Leonard, Familiar exploitation. A new analysis of marriage in contemporary western societies, Cambridge (U.K.), Polity Press, 1992. 7. Voir HÉRITIER Françoise, Masculin/Féminin, tome 1 : la pensée de la différence, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2007 et Masculin/Féminin, tome 2 : dissoudre la hiérarchie, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2012. 8. DELPHY Christine, « Penser le genre : problèmes et résistances », in DELPHY Christine, L’ennemi principal. Tome 2 : penser le genre, Paris, Edition Syllepse, 2013, 3e édition, p. 223-238. Cet article était paru sous le titre « Penser le genre : quels problèmes ? » dans HURTIG M.C. et al. (eds.), Sexe et genre, Paris, Presses du CNRS, 1991. 9. KANDIYOTI Deniz, « Bargaining with patriarchy », Gender and Society, Vol. 2, No. 3, Special Issue to Honor Jessie Bernard (Sep., 1988), p. 274-290. 10. DWORKIN Andrea, Right wing women, New York, Perigee Books, 1983. 11. FALUDI Susan, Backlash: the undeclared war against American women, London, Chatto & Windus, 1992.
RÉSUMÉS
Le concept de « patriarcat », qui est au cœur de la conception de ce numéro spécial, doit beaucoup aux travaux de la sociologue Christine Delphy. En 1970, elle publia une analyse pionnière du travail domestique gratuit fournit par les femmes au sein des ménages français, arguant qu’il s’agissait là de la base économique de la subordination des femmes aux hommes, sans distinction de classe sociale. Face à cette « oppression spécifique », les femmes se devaient de donner la priorité à « la destruction totale du système de production et de reproduction
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patriarcal », qu’elle désignait, dans une formule célèbre, comme « l’ennemi principal » du mouvement de libération des femmes. Nous avons souhaité la rencontrer pour évoquer avec elle la genèse de ce concept, certaines des critiques qui ont pu lui être adressée, son articulation avec d’autres notions et concepts qui ont été avancé pour faire sens des inégalités entre hommes et femmes, et la prolifération récente de son usage jusque dans les médias.
The concept of patriarchy which is at the heart of this special issue, owes a great deal to the work of French sociologist Christine Delphy. In 1970, she published a pioneering analysis of the free labour that women did in the home, arguing that it was the economic foundation of their subordination to men, whatever their social class. In the face of this “sex-specific oppression”, women must prioritise, she argued, the “total destruction of the system of patriarchal production and reproduction, a system which she famously called the “principal enemy” of the women’s liberation movement. We wished to meet her to ask her about the genesis of this concept, its articulation with other notions and concepts that have been put forward to make sense of inequalities between women and men, and the recent proliferation of its usage in pop culture and the mainstream media.
INDEX
Mots-clés : patriarcat, genre, backlash, capitalisme, néolibéralisme Keywords : patriarchy, gender, backlash, capitalism, neoliberalism
AUTEUR
MARC CALVINI-LEFEBVRE
Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA), EA 853, 13625, Aix- Marseille Université.
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Gendered Implications of the Neoliberal Turn Quelques implications genrées du tournant néolibéral
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Neo-liberalism and Gender Inequality in the Workplace in Britain Néolibéralisme et inégalités de genre dans le monde du travail britannique
Louise Dalingwater
1 Mots clés: Le néo-libéralisme, inégalités, marché du travail britannique, ségrégation horizontale, enquête nationale
Introduction
2 There has been a significant rise in the number of women working in Britain since the 1970s. This rise is directly related to the move towards a service economy and also higher levels of education and training. In addition, a series of laws introduced since the 1970s, notably the Equal Pay Act of 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1974 and the Employment Protection Act of 1982, have encouraged women to work. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the quantity of work available for women and the quality. Quality work, as defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), can be described as work that provides decent pay, and offers development and progression opportunities. Many of the jobs created in the service sector, and largely occupied by women, tend to be low paid and low prospect “pink-collar” jobs, failing to meet many of the “decent work” recommendations of the ILO. 1
3 Although this is true of many industrialised countries with very different labour market conditions, such as France and Germany, the pay and prospects gap for women is considerably higher in Britain. There are, of course, a number of causal effects which apply to many OECD countries. However, a body of evidence suggests that higher gender inequalities at work may be linked to neo-liberalism in Britain. To test this theory, this paper uses both empirical evidence (a two-nation survey) and a literature review (various reports and analysis). However, other sources also show that a diffuse gender conservatism may also explain these higher gender inequalities in Britain.
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How has neo-liberalism impacted on women in Britain?
4 Neo-liberalism can be defined as an “Ideology and policy model that emphasises the value of free market competition”.2 There is considerable debate on the defining features of neo- liberal thought and practice. However, there does appear to be a consensus on the fact that it emphasises minimum state intervention and freedom of trade and capital. Although neo-liberalism emerged in the late 1930s during discussions held at the Walter Lipmann conference, which brought together 26 economists and liberal thinkers, it became a central part of government policy in the UK towards the late 1970s, with the decline of Keynesianism. With the arrival in power of the New Right in 1979, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, neo-liberalism was placed at the heart of economic policy in parallel with the application of neo-liberal policies in the US. This led to a whole range of organisational reforms to curb spending and reduce entitlements in order to maximise efficiency, promote competition and ensure complete responsiveness to user needs. The effects of neo-liberalism on the labour market since 1979 have been the deregulation of basic industries, the privatisation and/or contracting out of public services, a reduction in welfare programmes (lower unemployment benefits and stricter conditions to claim unemployment benefit), the marginalisation of collective bargaining, the casualisation of jobs (a decline in the number of medium to high-paying, long-term jobs and a rise in casual, low paid, less stable jobs) and unrestrained competition, putting downward pressure on wages. Neo- liberalism dictates that the market situation should be taken on by the individual. He or she should enhance his or her personal capital. Dependency does not enable one to do this. In situations where market or quasi-market situations are not possible, rewards and sanctions, incentives and disincentives guide individual behaviour and choices. Even New Labour embraced the fundamental concepts of neo-liberalism. Indeed, the welfare-to-work programme introduced in 1998 was very much in line with neo-liberal rationality. In this framework, the unemployed were obliged to take responsibility for their situation and take up work. Sanctions were applied to those who did not conform to the rules of the framework.
5 Since the neo-liberal model has taken hold and become central in government policy, academics have studied the effects of neo-liberal policies on women. Some authors consider that market liberalisation may have contributed to women’s empowerment.3 They argue that market liberalisation and increasing trade provides a growing number of jobs in a wide range of areas and opportunities for women to become empowered by actively contributing to the wealth and richness of the nation on the same level as men, rather than carrying out unpaid domestic chores behind closed doors. However Hawkesworth4 claims that neo-liberal policies destroy parts of the state that previously supported feminist action. For her, social mobilisation for empowerment has become fragmented and transformed into less effective individual self-improvement movements. US and British feminist writers, such as Hester Eisenstein,5 Fraser 6 and McRobbie,7 have underlined that there has been an erasure of feminist politics with the rise of neo-liberalism. Srilata Batiliwala shows how the word “empowerment” has been appropriated, used and abused in neo-liberal political discourse and its meaning changed. Empowerment in neo-liberal terms merely refers to exercise of individual
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preference or acquisition of assets. The World Bank defines empowerment as “the process of enhancing an individual’s or group’s capacity to make purposive choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.”8 Feminists' understanding of empowerment has a quite different meaning, that of challenging and changing norms and behaviour for female development. It is also associated with collective action.
6 Women are said to have been uprooted from old institutions, which focused on equal outcomes for women, and now work in a flexible economy. It can be argued that neo- liberalism has changed attitudes to inequality overall. As the Gender Impact Analysis of the UK underlined, gender equality is currently a contested political priority. It would seem that tackling inequality is not a priority in government policy. Equity, fairness, eligibility, entitlement and merit have displaced inequalities as priorities of government policy. Much of the theory and analysis on the influence of neo-liberalism presented thus far would seem to suggest that neo-liberalism has an overall detrimental effect on women’s advancement. The next two sections evaluate whether this is borne out in practice in the British labour market.
Empirical evidence: the effects of neoliberalism on women’s participation, occupation, pay and prospects
7 Two nationwide surveys of the working population were carried out in Britain and France in 2014. Although the aim of the surveys was not only to investigate gender inequalities in the workplace but also overall wellbeing, inequalities were nevertheless a major focus of the study. Researchers Louise Dalingwater and Catherine Coron, affiliated to the CERVEPAS research centre, worked with Marketest, a leading two- country (UK/France) statistical research company, to develop two multi-purpose questionnaires. Marketest was selected for the project because it had already collaborated with some of the leading British universities such as Cambridge University, Oxford University, LSE and Manchester University and it has a partner company in France. A panel of 1000 respondents who were in paid work in Britain and France was chosen to be representative of the working populations in terms of sex, age, region, socio-professional category and sector of activity. The surveys contained a wide range of questions relating to both objective measures of wellbeing, such as pay and prospects, but also subjective values relating to the social and physical environment of work. Within the framework of these questions, we focused on equality because substantial research has found that it can have a major impact on overall wellbeing. 9
8 Overall, our findings showed the atypical nature of working hours in the UK. Many British people work fewer hours and some a greater number of hours than the standard 35-hour week. This can be said to be a direct result of the neo-liberal framework. As mentioned previously, deregulation has led to a more flexible labour market, which has made it easier for firms to hire and fire. In addition, companies are less burdened by fixed costs and can thus be said to be leaner and more competitive. An increasing number of workers are working on zero-hours contracts and/or very variable hours or are employed on part-time contracts. Women, in particular, tend to work part-time.10 The UK has the third highest incidence of female part-time workers in the OECD (38.7%), which is significantly higher than that of France (22.5%).11 Our survey found that the percentage was even higher if only mothers working part-time are taken into
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consideration. Indeed, the majority of mothers in our survey worked part-time (56%) (see graph below).
Source: Louise Dalingwater, Catherine Coron and Jean Coron, 2014 This was significantly higher than in the French survey, where the part-time percentage for mothers was reported to be much lower (19.7%).
Source: Louise Dalingwater, Catherine Coron and Jean Coron, 2014
9 In Britain, the need to find family-friendly work tends to lead mothers to take on part- time, and generally less well paid, work. Despite laws to increase part-time workers’ rights, there are many drawbacks to working part-time including lower hourly earnings, fewer training and promotion opportunities, fewer job opportunities, less job security, less access to unemployment insurance and reduced pension entitlements. This high incidence of part-time work among women has been found to incur a
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significant pay and opportunities gap in Britain. In the UK, this is 17.4%. This is significantly higher than the OECD average of 15.6%, and very close to other countries that have fully embraced the neo-liberal economic framework: the United States (17.5%), Australia (18.0%) and Canada (19.2%).12 An ILO report also points to the concept of the motherhood wage gap, which suggests that inequalities in wages exist between mothers and non-mothers. According to a Glassdoor Economic Research report, the gender pay gap for women in the UK with no children is just over 7%. However, for those with at least one child, the rate rises to 21%.13
10 The OECD underlines that the high pay gap in Britain relative to other OECD countries is due to the prevalence of part-time work in this country. 14 Olsen, Gash, Vandecasteele, Walthery and Heuvelman15 were commissioned to carry out research for the Government Equalities Office to weigh up all the factors influencing the pay and opportunities gap. They found that years of part-time work was the factor that had the most influence on diminishing women’s pay. Harkness’ paper16 also shows how part- time female workers have not gained from the introduction of Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts in the 1970s in the same way as full time workers. Although earnings of female part-timers improved relative to male counterparts immediately after the introduction of these acts in the 1970s, the pay gap started to widen again for part-timers in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993, for example, hourly pay of part-time women was only 63% of male mean earnings. Moreover, the main problem with part- time work is that it is overwhelmingly concentrated in low paid sectors fuelling labour market segmentation. The highest paying and highest ranking managerial, professional and associate professional occupations are predominately occupied by full-time workers. The low rated and low paid occupations in service, such as sales and other elementary positions, are occupied by more women than men and by more part-timers. After analysing the incidence of part-time across countries, the OECD has concluded that women are more likely to work part-time in countries with high childcare costs. 17
11 The lack of affordable childcare and the country’s tax and benefits system can reduce participation of mothers in the labour market. Stier and Lewin-Epstein18 underline that greater institutional support for maternal employment enables mothers to limit breaks from the labour market or having to take part-time low prospect jobs. Esping-Anderson noted that only welfare policies that support daycare lead to high employment for women with young children. In Britain, parenthood is seen as an individual and private choice. The state is therefore not considered to be responsible for providing the necessary facilities at an affordable price to enable women to have easier access to paid work. If women are unable to purchase care on the market, they may withdraw from the labour market altogether.
12 The influence of neo-liberalism is thus apparent in this issue of childcare, which stresses the individual above state intervention. With the rise of neo-liberalism in Britain, the role of the market and voluntary sector in the provision of childcare has become central. This has thus reinforced the male-breadwinner society. By making childcare a private responsibility and that of women, it has led to part-time, discontinuous patterns of work for mothers and a rise in low wages, especially for the less well-educated, who do not enjoy the same conditions of maternity leave and/or cannot afford childcare.
13 Research carried out by Gash19 showed that workers in France and Denmark were able to move between full and part-time work quite easily because of adequate provision of
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childcare. This was very difficult in Britain, where workers are constrained by less favourable childcare conditions and less job mobility, which seems to suggest that part- time work may be more of a constraint than a choice. While local authority childcare places have decreased, Britain has witnessed a spectacular increase in the number of private nurseries and child minders. Despite the introduction of a Child Care Allowance for low income working parents and a nursery voucher scheme in 1994 under John Major and the introduction of the expansion of early childhood and childcare services under the National Childcare Strategy (leading to new paternity and parental leave and flexible working arrangements), Britain still lacks childcare state support. Childcare in Britain typically costs a quarter of female earnings and few employers provide nurseries on site. Inequalities in Britain persist therefore between mothers in low-paid jobs and those with a better education on higher incomes who can afford to pay for private care. Social class is influential in Britain because of the highly deregulated labour market which means that there is a wider spread of earnings and a residual welfare state.
14 In addition, austerity measures taken, in line with neo-liberal rationalisation since 2010 have only served to exacerbate the childcare dilemma. The coalition government in office between 2010 and 2015 cut child tax credits but also reduced local government budgets and these have hit women hard. Childcare provision in low income neighbourhoods has declined as a result of fiscal consolidation. The introduction of universal credit to rationalise benefits has also reduced work incentives for the second income earner – mostly women. The House of Commons library and the UK Women’s Budget Group report that 78.9 per cent of the cuts in welfare impacted on women, especially lone parents. The Runnymede Trust reviewed the 2015 Budget “welfare” reforms which comprised cuts to tax credits and a benefits cap on households with three or more children and also concluded that they disproportionately affected women. 20
15 It might be expected that this pay and prospect gap which can be attributed, at least in part, to the neo-liberal policy stance in Britain might meet with revolt or opposition by workers in the market. However, the British survey found that this was not the case.
Why do women consent?
16 An area where there were quite striking differences between the surveys conducted in Britain and France was that of attitudes to equality issues, particularly regarding equal opportunities for men and women at work. Considering the aforementioned higher pay and prospect issues, it might be expected that significant issues regarding men and women at work might be raised. However, the British survey did not bring out any significant issues regarding men and women at work. However, the French reported significant gender inequality issues. For example, 79% of British workers reported that there were equal opportunities for career development for men and women at their workplace, compared to only 52% in France. The differences are even more striking when workers were asked whether their workplace discriminates between men and women in terms of earnings, with 63% of French workers reporting discrimination compared to only 9% in the UK. However, as we have mentioned previously, statistics do not seem to suggest that inequality is stronger on the French labour market than the British one. The opposite is true.
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17 It might be the case that women are less aware of inequalities that exist in the labour market in Britain than in France because, as described earlier, working hours are very varied in Britain’s flexible labour market, which makes pay and prospect comparisons difficult. But can we also conclude that, in the neo-liberal British labour market, profit comes before equality? The prevailing neo-liberal ideology gives primacy to the individual above state intervention and this seems to have pervaded British culture. British people seem to accept more readily the trade-off between fewer hours and lower pay and family time: individual effort and reduced working hours automatically equates with low pay and prospect in this model, and it is considered to be acceptable. This indeed might explain why there is very little discrimination reported in the British survey. An LSE report supports our theory by suggesting that this accepted payoff is due to an adherence to orthodox economics, which argues that pay reflects employees’ contributions to output. 21 Wages are thus considered to be fair and reflect legitimate market processes. However, other countries where neo-liberalism is less pronounced do not buy into this theory, as the French survey suggests. Critics also argue that the increase in wages in the top decile, and particularly the top 1 per cent, which is particularly significant in neo-liberal economies, such as the UK and the US, is not in line with performance or qualifications. It is more in terms of the power that managers have to negotiate their own remuneration.
18 In addition, beyond the neo-liberal influence, the gender conservative nature of British society should not be ignored. Crompton22 underlines that cultural norms may actually outweigh institutions. British conservative tradition means that it is still overwhelmingly women that undertake domestic chores: on average 2 hours 40 minutes a day for women and 1 hour 25 minutes per day for men. 23 Moreover, in 2012, nine in ten people polled in Britain still stated that the mother should be the sole or main carer of children and that the ideal division is the mother working part time and the father full time.24 So we can see not only the influence of the economic model but also the social model. Women may adjust employment and childcare behavior to fit the cultural family model prevalent in their country or community.
Further statistical evidence: increased participation but horizontal segregation
19 Furthermore, it has been argued that neoliberalism has increased participation, but reinforced horizontal segregation. This goes beyond the scope of the two-nation survey, so only secondary sources have been used to analyse this theory.
20 Many OECD countries have experienced a significant increase in the participation of women in the labour market and Britain is no exception. In Britain, the participation rate has increased significantly since the 1960s to reach 72.1% for 15-64 year olds. This is still lower than for men (83.1%), but part of the gap can be explained by the fact that women tend to study for longer. If only 25 to 54 year olds are taken into consideration, 75.3% of British women are currently in paid work.
21 Although participation rates and participation gaps are not so different from many other European countries that have not seen neo-liberalism as the overriding model adopted by central government, neo-liberal countries do comparatively better compared to other countries. The OECD average is 62.8% which is substantially lower
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than Australia (70.5%), Canada (74.2%) and Britain (72.1%). The flexible nature of the neo-liberal labour market in Britain and much of the Anglosphere could explain why Britain and other neo-liberal labour markets perform relatively well compared to other countries with more stringent labour market legislation. The neo-liberal policy changes that were introduced in the 1980s, to free up the market through deregulation of the labour market, financial liberalisation and privatisation of public services have thus led to a massive increase in the number of jobs available and a fall in unemployment.
22 Indeed, in Britain, neo-liberal reforms would seem to have increased female participation. The rise in single person households led to the creation of government policies in the late 1990s to get lone mothers into work, supported by a shift in perspective from welfare to workfare. In order to receive benefits, people are now forced to take responsibility and take on work. Workfare started in the 1980s under the Conservative governments, but was particularly the focus of New Labour governments (1997–2010). It has paved the way for further stringent welfare reforms under successive governments to force people to work.
23 Nevertheless, neo-liberalism is not the only reason for the increased participation in the labour market. In Britain, the Equal Pay Act of 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1974 and the Employment Protection Act of 1982 were instrumental in reducing discrimination in terms of pay and opportunities for women in the workplace and thus boosting participation rates. Increasing numbers of women have entered higher education and want to use the skills gained.
24 The rise in the participation rate of women in Great Britain since the 1970s is also directly related to the move towards a service economy, which provides more varied and flexible working arrangements, and thus enables women to fit work around caring for young children. Many service jobs require general rather than specific skills which means that women and, in particular, mothers do not have to commit to long and uninterrupted careers. In general, this is not the case for manufacturing jobs where each industry and each firm tends to have its own production and management techniques, which makes it difficult for such interruptions to take place. The demand for female labour, which requires more general skills and less commitment, has risen with the service sector. Iversen and Rosenbluth also point to higher divorce rates which have encouraged women to become more independent and earn their own income in order to avoid poverty.25 Indeed, 14.6% of marriages ended in divorce in 1970, whereas the figure was as high as 50% in 2005 in the UK. However, the type of job offered to women tends to be of the low paid, low prospect type. There has thus been a rise in the participation of women in the labour market, but there has also been an increase in low skilled and low paid work for women. The service sector jobs which require general rather than specific skills are mainly low paid and low prospect jobs. A UK labour force survey carried out in April 2015 showed that a higher proportion of women than men worked in sectors such as administration and caring, which tend to be low paid.
25 A term has even been coined to refer to such a trend: horizontal segregation. Women tend to cluster in low paid jobs and, even at the same occupational level, men and women tend to be assigned different job tasks. Therefore, service sector jobs have increased participation, but have also led to increased segregation and this can also explain the pay and prospects gap in Britain, but this is very true of many other countries too. Evidence from France, Canada, the UK and the US shows the increasing
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feminisation of certain sectors or so-called “pink collar professions”: namely entire subsectors of health and education, which can produce reduced wage growth. In Britain, the Kingmill Report on Women’s Employment and Pay also showed that occupational segregation is significant in the British labour market. Out of 77 recognised occupational groups, 60% of females were present in only ten of these groups. A study carried out by the European Union underlines the gender bias in the British economy. The commission measured the top 5 preferred sectors of work for women and men and found only two common sectors ("Wholesale & Retail", "Professional, scientific and technical activities"). 19.8% of female workers and 20.4% of the male workforce work in these sectors. However, the most preferred sector for women is undoubtedly Health and Social Work, representing 40% of total female employment but less than 7% of male jobs. Overall, it was found that women prefer service and education occupations and men technical and engineering occupations. In addition, according to an LSE report, women still cluster in the 3Cs (Caring, Clerking and Cashiering) and men in the Skilled Trade Occupations which pay more.
26 Segregation starts at school. Indeed, girls outperform boys in reading but lag behind in maths, because of gender-imposed ideas about what is male work and female work. Research has shown that even women who study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are less likely to end up working in employment that uses physics, engineering or maths. Even though differences in occupational choices can be traced back to differences in educational choices, occupational segregation is further reinforced in the transition from post-secondary education to employment. 71% of male graduates from the science fields work as professionals in physics, maths, and engineering compared to 43% of female graduates. In other words, even if women choose STEM subjects they are less likely to pursue a science career than men, although there is no gender difference in performance.
27 Despite the fact that horizontal segregation is prevalent in countries that have not experienced a restructuring of the labour market due to neo-liberal policies, evidence suggests that horizontal segregation is higher in Britain than the EU average. Indeed, the European Commission has devised an occupational gender segregation (OGS) indicator. According to this indicator, gender segregation is calculated to be 5.5 pp in Britain, which is higher than the overall OGS of the EU-27 (4.6 pp).26 While neo- liberalism cannot explain away all gender inequalities, neo-liberal policies do seem to have exacerbated these differences between the British labour market and other developed economies.
Conclusion
28 Some authors have argued that market liberalisation has contributed to women’s empowerment because of the higher participation rates. However, the evidence presented in this article would seem to suggest that while neo-liberal policies in Britain have given rise to what critics call a “feminization” of labour, they have also been accompanied by a deterioration of working conditions – casualisation, flexibilisation and low wages.27 The move towards a service economy has also led to increased participation and more flexible forms of work in most developed countries. Nevertheless, a slightly higher participation rate for women in Britain may be linked to a more flexible labour market, which has led to the creation of a vast number of jobs
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providing atypical working hours for women. The pay and prospects gap overall was found to be relatively high in Britain compared to many other OECD countries. Both the theoretical and evidence-based approach suggests that these differences can be linked in part to the neo-liberal framework in Britain. A certain degree of gender conservatism towards motherhood in Britain might also explain why women tend to work part-time and thus incur a higher pay and prospect penalty.
29 The comparative study goes even further and explores the acceptance of neoliberal ideas by the workers themselves and suggests that there has been an internalisation of neoliberal principles in Britain’s labour market. This would seem to suggest that the efficiency of neo-liberalism in Britain rests on how deep-seated an individual’s understanding of the world is. Thus, even those who are clearly losing out in the neo- liberal economy see inequalities as “natural” or “justified”, which might be linked to Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony.28 However, to confirm such a thesis, it would be necessary to widen such a survey to other countries and to test for a greater number of factors.
30 Despite this rationalisation of the British labour market as a result of neo-liberalism, some progress has been made in terms of gender equality. In 2011, Public Sector Equality Duties were introduced to protect the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women and women on maternity leave, and to ensure equality. In terms of government representation, ministers have set a target to increase female representation by 25%. Board positions in the FTSE for women have also been increased to 20.7% compared with 12.5% in 2011 and 17.3% in April 2013.29 David Cameron called for an end to “the gender pay gap in a generation” during a Conservative Party Conference in 2015.30 Theresea May has also recently sought to have an equal number of women in the cabinet. However, such measures will not solve the problem of horizontal segregation because women will continue to be over-represented in low-wage sectors. It might also be added that if workers continue to internalise neoliberal principles, and thus underestimate or fail to give importance to underlying gender inequalities in the labour market, it could thwart any attempts to reduce labour market disparities between men and women.
31 Louise Dalingwater is an Associate Professor of British Studies at Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research focuses on the service sector, with a particular interest in changes that have occurred in the labour market since the 1970s and the move towards a service-oriented economy. She is currently leading a research project at her research centre (CERVEPAS) on wellbeing in English-Speaking countries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Alsop, R., Bertelsen, M. & Holland, J., Empowerment in Practice: From Analysis to Implementation (Washington, World Bank, 2006).
Clarke, A. & Senik, C., Who Compares to Whom? The Anatomy of Income Comparisons in Europe (Bonn , IZA Discussion Paper 4414, 2009).
Crompton, R., Employment and the Family. The Reconfiguration of Work and Family Life in Contemporary Societies (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Eisenstein, H., Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites use Women’s Labour to Exploit the World (CO, Boulder, Paradigm, 2009).
Elson, D., ‘Male Bias in Structural Adjustment’, in H. Afshar and C. Dennis (eds), Women and Adjustment Policies in the Third World (New York, St Martin’s, 1992).
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Fraser, N., ‘Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history’, New Left Review 56, 2009, pp. 97–117.
Gash, V., ‘Preference or Constraint? Part-time Workers’ Transitions in Denmark, France and the United-Kingdom’, Work, Employment and Society, 22 (4), 22 (4), 2008, pp. 655–674.
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Grosfeld, I. & Senik, C., ‘La montée de l'aversion à l'inégalité. Du temps des anticipations au temps de la déception’, Revue économique 60, 3 mai 2009.
Hakness, S., ‘The Gender Earnings Gap: Evidence from the UK’, Fiscal Studies, 17, 2, 1996, pp. 1–36.
Hawkesworth, M., ‘Feminists v. Feminization: Confronting the War Logics of the Bush Administration’, Asteriskos 1/2, 2006, pp. 117–42.
Iversen, T. & Rothenbluth, F., Women, Work and Politics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010).
International Labour Office, Decent Work Indicators: Concepts and Definitions (Geneva, ILO, 2012).
Lelkes, O., ‘Attitudes to Inequality’, in TARKI European Social Report 2009 (Budapest, 2009), pp. 17– 30.
LSE, Confronting Gender Equality (London, LSE, 2015).
McRobbie, A., The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London, Sage, 2009).
Moghadam, V., Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
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OECD, Closing the Gender Gap (Paris, OECD, 2012).
Park, A., Clery, C., Curtice, J., Phillips, M. & Utting, D., British Social Attitudes (London, Natcen Social Research, 2012).
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Sparr, P. (ed.), Mortgaging Women’s Lives: Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment (London, Zed Books, 1995).
Stier, H., N. Lewin-Epstein, and M. Braun. ‘Welfare Regimes, Family Supportive Policies, and Women's Employment Along A Life Course’, American Journal of Sociology 106(6), 2001.
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NOTES
1. International Labour Office, Decent Work Indicators: Concepts and Definitions (Geneva, ILO, 2012). 2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://global.britannica.com/topic/neoliberalism consulted 15 march 2017. 3. D. Elson, “Male Bias in Structural Adjustment”, in Afshar, H. and Dennis, C. (eds), Women and Adjustment Policies in the Third World (New York, St Martin’s, 1992). 4. M. Hawkesworth, “Feminists v. Feminization: Confronting the War Logics of the Bush Administration”, Asteriskos 1/2, 2006, pp. 117–42. 5. H. Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labour to Exploit the World (CO, Boulder, Paradigm, 2009). 6. N. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History”, New Left Review 56, 2009, pp. 97– 117. 7. A. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London, Sage, 2009). 8. Alsop, R., Bertelsen, M., & Holland, J. Empowerment in Practice: From Analysis to Implementation (Washington, World Bank, 2006). 9. A. Sen, Inequality Re-examined (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1992); Alesina, A., Di Tella, R. & Maccullogh, R., “Inequality and happiness: Are Europeans and Americans different?” Journal of Public Economics, 88, 2004, pp. 2009-2042; Clarke, A. & Senik, C., Who Compares to Whom? The Anatomy of Income Comparisons in Europe (Bonn, IZA Discussion Paper 4414, 2009); Grosfeld, I. & Senik, C., “La montée de l'aversion à l'inégalité. Du temps des anticipations au temps de la déception”, Revue économique 60, 3, mai 2009 ; Lelkes, O., “Attitudes to Inequality” in TARKI European Social Report (Budapest, 2009), pp. 17˗30. 10. In the UK, there is no specification for the number of hours that constitute part-time work. However, a part-time worker is defined as someone who works fewer hours than a full-time worker. A standard working week for a full time worker in the UK is 35 hours or more. 11. OECD, OECD Data ,
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17. OECD, Closing the Gender Gap, op.cit. 18. Stier, H., Lewin-Epstein, N. & Braun, M., “Welfare Regimes, Family Supportive Policies, and Women's Employment Along A Life Course", American Journal of Sociology, 106(6), 2001. 19. V. Gash, “Preference or Constraint? Part-time Workers’ Transitions in Denmark, France and the United-Kingdom”, Work, Employment and Society, 22 (4), 2008, pp. 655–674. 20. LSE, Confronting Gender Equality (London, LSE, 2015). 21. LSE, Confronting Gender Equality, op.cit. 22. R. Crompton, Employment and the Family. The Reconfiguration of Work and Family Life in Contemporary Societies (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004). 23. OECD, Closing the Gender Gap, op.cit. 24. Park, A., Clery, E., Curtice, J., Phillips, M. & Utting, D., British Social Attitudes (London, Natcen Social Research, 2012). 25. Iversen, T. & Rothenbluth, F., Women, Work and Politics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010). 26. European Commission, Gender Impact Assessment: United Kingdom, Brussels, EC, 2014. 27. V. Moghadam, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 28. R. Simon, Gramsci's Political Thought: An introduction, (Lawrence and Wishart, London, Routledge, 1991). Based on Karl Marx’s theory, Antonio Gramsci argued that the dominant ideology of society reflected the beliefs and interests of the ruling class. In the case of Britain, we are referring to the top 1%. This dominant ideology is then spread to social institutions such as education, media, family, religion, politics, and law, among others. Cultural hegemony is thought to be strongest when the group that is dominated by the ideology start to believe that the economic and social conditions are “natural” or “justified”, rather than created by people with a vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders. 29. UK Government, Women on boards: Davies Review Annual Report 2014, available at:
ABSTRACTS
There has been a significant rise in the number of women working in Britain since the 1970s. This rise is directly related to the move towards a service economy and also higher levels of education and training. In addition, a series of laws introduced since the 1970s, notably the Equal Pay Act of 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1974 and the Employment Protection Act of 1982, have encouraged women to work. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the quantity of work available for women and the quality. Quality work, as defined by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), can be described as work that provides decent pay, and offers development and progression opportunities. Many of the jobs created in the service sector and largely occupied by women tend to be low paid and low prospect “pink-collar” jobs, failing to meet many
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of the “decent work” recommendations of the ILO. Women tend to cluster in flexible service sector jobs such as infant school assistants, home helps and domestic helpers. Although this is true of many industrialised countries with very different labour market conditions such as France and Germany, the pay and prospects gap for women is considerably higher in Britain. There are, of course, a number of causal effects. However, a body of evidence suggests that higher gender inequalities at work may be linked to neo-liberalism in Britain. The influence of neo-liberalism has not only shaped legislation in Britain but also attitudes to women and work since the 1970s. Indeed, after analysing the results of a nationwide survey carried out across Britain and France in 2014 on wellbeing at work, this article shows how British attitudes to inequalities at work are shaped by the neo-liberal model and may have serious implications for future policies to improve pay and prospects for women working in Britain. It will thus explore the influence of neo-liberalism in Britain on career pay and prospects in Britain, taking both a theoretical and evidence-based approach.
Nous constatons une augmentation significative du nombre de femmes sur le marché du travail au Royaume-Uni depuis les années 1970. Cette hausse est directement liée à l'évolution vers une économie de services et à l’élévation du niveau de formation des femmes. En outre, l’introduction d’une série de lois depuis les années 1970, notamment la loi sur l'égalité salariale de 1970, la loi sur la discrimination sexuelle de 1974 et la loi sur la protection de l'emploi de 1982, a encouragé les femmes à travailler. Cependant, il semble y avoir une différence entre la quantité de travail disponible pour les femmes et la qualité. Un travail de qualité, tel que défini par l'Organisation internationale du Travail (OIT), est un travail qui offre un salaire décent et des possibilités de développement et d’évolution. Cependant, la plupart des emplois créés dans le secteur des services et en grande partie occupés par des femmes ont tendance à être faiblement rémunérés et peu qualifiés, des emplois «cols roses», qui ne correspondent pas aux critères du «travail décent» de l'OIT. Les femmes ont tendance à se regrouper dans des emplois flexibles du secteur des services tels que les nourrices, les aides à domicile et les travailleurs domestiques. Bien que cela existe dans de nombreux pays industrialisés avec des conditions très différentes du marché du travail, comme la France et l'Allemagne, l'écart de rémunération et de perspectives entre les hommes et les femmes est beaucoup plus important en Grande-Bretagne. Il y a, bien sûr, un certain nombre d'effets de causalité. Cependant, certains auteurs ont noté une corrélation entre la hausse des inégalités au travail et le modèle néolibéral qui domine en Grande-Bretagne. L'influence du néolibéralisme n'a pas seulement influencé les politiques et la législation du marché du travail en Grande-Bretagne, mais aussi les attitudes envers les femmes et le travail depuis les années 1970. En effet, après avoir analysé les résultats d'une enquête nationale menée au Royaume-Uni et en France en 2014 sur le bien-être au travail, cet article montre comment la perception des inégalités au travail sont façonnées par le modèle néolibéral et peut avoir de graves conséquences pour les politiques futures sur le marché du travail au Royaume-Uni. Il propose donc d’explorer l'influence du néolibéralisme au Royaume-Uni sur les salaires et les perspectives d’évolution pour les femmes en Grande-Bretagne, en prenant à la fois une approche théorique et empirique.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Neo-liberalism and Gender Inequality in the Workplace in Britain Keywords: Neo-liberalism, Gender Inequality, British Labour Market, Horizontal segregation, Nationwide survey
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AUTHOR
LOUISE DALINGWATER
CREW, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
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A Tale of Female Liberation? The Long Shadow of De- Professionalization on the Lives of Post-War Women Une génération libérée ? L’ombre portée de la dé-professionnalisation sur la vie des femmes de la génération d’après-guerre
Eve Worth
1 Lynn Abrams has adeptly argued that women born around the 1940s in Britain grew up during a period of social change which “rewarded achievement and self-development through education and work rather than marriage and motherhood”.1 She concluded that as a result of these changes women experienced a “liberation” of the female self and a progressive journey away from “a model of womanhood represented by the service and self- sacrifice of their mother’s generation”.2 This article seeks to build on and complicate this narrative by arguing that although women did experience expanded opportunities in the post-war decades, these opportunities were primarily in gender segregated jobs within the welfare state which were hit hard by the depreciation in working-conditions that occurred from the late 1980s onwards. Women of this generation’s material circumstances and sense of self were significantly affected by this reduction in conditions; in part, precisely because they had been socialized to expect more from their working-lives. By foregrounding female experience, the article also aims to demonstrate that the shifts in public sector employment engendered by Conservative governments constituted a process of de-professionalization which principally impacted women workers. This challenges the masculinised narratives of work which dominate the historiography of late twentieth-century Britain.3
2 This article draws on thirty open-ended life history interviews conducted with women born in Britain between 1938 and 1952 with a view to analysing the ways in which their lives interacted with broader political change. In analysing these interviews, the theme of these women’s relationship to the welfare state emerged as an important framework
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throughout their lives. On average the interviews lasted about two hours. They began with the question “where were you born?” and covered up to present day, an approach advocated by feminist oral historians such as Abrams.4 In order to let the themes emerge more naturally in the course of the research, criteria for recruitment was fairly broad; limited only by gender and birthdate. Methods of recruitment were varied but included: adverts in local newsletters, emails to institutions and attendance at community centre events. There was also to some extent a snowball effect amongst interviewees, defined by Angela Davis as “where each respondent gives the name of another person to participate” a method which especially helps “to secure trust”.5 As a result of this snowball effect, half of the interviewees are resident in Sheffield which has been a relatively neglected city in terms of oral history, with historians preferring to focus on the north-west of England or Scotland.6 The other fifteen interviewees are more scattered; residing in urban centres across England including London, Bristol and Birmingham.
3 The interviewees hail from a variety of class backgrounds: two-thirds self-defined as working-class during childhood, one-sixth clearly described themselves as middle-class and the final one-sixth saw their family as on the cusp of working-class and middle- class. By the time of our interviews around half had experienced social mobility across the life course, primarily upwards from manual working-class to lower professional middle-class. Working for the welfare state often functioned as the main instrument of this social mobility and all but one of the women I interviewed were employed by the state in some form for at least part of their careers even though this was not a criterion of participation in the project. We know very little about the lives of women of this generation beyond the mid-1970s, in part due to the 1968 activism paradigm which directs the historiography.7 Despite the life course approach, analysis of oral history can often privilege memories of youth and early adulthood. Therefore, interviews with women born around the 1940s are primarily used to illuminate the 1950s and 1960s; this has led Wendy Webster to describe oral history as “a potentially ageist project”.8 Taking analysis of the interviews forward in time allows us to consider the impact on women of the profound social and political change that occurred in Britain as social democracy began to falter.
4 A Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, was re-elected for a third term in 1987. This victory empowered her government to enact a sweeping programme of welfare state reform which was previously feared too radical. Whilst public support for the principle of a welfare state remained high, the government was able to harness “ growing dissatisfaction with state services that gave little choice to their users, in which the professional view remained dominant and the parent or patient in waiting-room seemed to count for little”.9 Particularly important for the purposes of this article was the 1988 Education Reform Act, which historians agree was the most substantial change since the 1944 Education Act,10 and the 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act which constituted the first phase of “the most significant review of the NHS in its 40 year history” (and also affected all welfare professions which came into contact with the health service).11 There were also further reforms during John Major’s government, including the 1992 Further and Higher Education Reform Act.12 This wave of reform deliberately sought to introduce neoliberal principles into the welfare state. Wendy Brown argues that a fundamental aspect of neoliberalism is the “economization’ of heretofore noneconomic spheres and practices, a process of remaking the knowledge, form, content and conduct appropriate to these spheres and practices”. 13 The logic of the market was now
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explicitly intended to govern the functioning of welfare institutions. The Working for Patients white paper published in 1989 for example stated that “health authorities [should] become more business-like in their provision of services and the use of resources”.14 The impact of these policy changes has thus far largely been considered from the perspective of users of these services,15 but here the perspective has been reoriented to focus on workers.
5 I argue that as a result of the changes, workers experienced a rapid period of de- professionalization from 1987 to the late-1990s (which was not reversed by the election of a New Labour government in 1997).16 The process of de-professionalization and its key features can be identified from my oral history interviews: it involved the devaluation of professional expertise by politicians, the introduction of a culture of managerialism (with an attendant shift in priorities for resource allocation), and a loss of autonomy in the workplace. These interrelated changes undermine the features of a professional career outlined by Harold Perkin in his seminal work on professional society: “specialized occupations, selected by merit and based on trained expertise”, “salaried with benefits”(hence more scope to decide how their time was spent) and “secure”.17 Just as Perkin argued that professionalization is not an autonomous process but rather driven by changes in social and political culture,18 we should understand de- professionalization as a deliberate consequence of successive Conservative governments’ efforts to re-shape the welfare state guided by neoliberal principles.
6 The article firstly provides a brief overview of why it is so important to centre women in the discussion of welfare state de-professionalization. It then considers each of the three aspects of de-professionalization in turn. Finally, it examines the impact of de- professionalization on women’s social status.
Women Working in the Welfare State
7 The post-war expansion of the welfare state caused structural change in British society that opened-up new educational and occupational opportunities for women of this generation. A 1980 report produced by Richard Parry, showed that there was a 1.8 million increase in public sector employees in the decade from 1966-76 which meant almost one-third of workers were now employed by the state. The percentage of the public sector workforce that was female rose from 24 per cent in 1951 to 44 per cent in 1976 which “reflects decline in male-dominated nationalised industries and the growth in education and health, which employ over twice as many women as men”.19 Alongside this, there was also an expansion in local government which administered a significant proportion of welfare services (including education) during the post-war period. Parry stated that the 1970s had witnessed the creation of a “new public sector” which was “ increasingly female [and] qualified”.20 He concluded that this change had “major social and political implications”.21
8 There were limited opportunities for women’s advancement elsewhere, and parents and schools encouraged young women’s entrance into what have been called the “semi- professions” or the “caring professions”; particularly nursing and teaching (primarily in schools, but also in further education colleges or polytechnics) but also newly invented welfare occupations.22 Jean (b.1950) had not especially wanted to be a nurse ( her dreams to be a doctor had been met with derision by her grammar school) but she did feel that nursing had “a high status in society” when she entered training in the late
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1960s.23 Contemporary studies found that there was a “broader social basis of recruitment” to these professions in the post-war years than during the interwar period.24 Sylvia (b. 1945), from a manual working-class background who became a lecturer in a polytechnic, powerfully described that “it was through gaining qualifications and working in education that I gained both access to a much better economic standard of living than that of my parents and to the cultural activities of the dominant class”.25 This was in large part possible because men flocked to fast-growing, better-remunerated employment in the existing ‘senior’ professions or in new private sector roles.26 The state expansion also necessitated an increase in support roles which were dominated by women. Five of the women in my sample had worked in public sector clerical jobs. This article focuses primarily on the women working in professional capacities, but also uses the narratives of these clerical workers to show that de-professionalization produced a ripple effect in the public sector which altered the conditions of the administrative staff.
9 Second wave feminists were ambivalent about the impact of the welfare state on women’s lives. During the 1970s and early 1980s they wrote a spate of critiques which sought to demonstrate “the discriminatory character of welfare programs and their function to reinforce sexist arrangements in domestic and public life”.27 The Beveridge Report (1942) was considered the original sin in this regard, enshrining ideas about women’s role in society and the family through the way it chose to administer services and benefits.28 Feminist scholars paid less attention to women as workers for the state but did note that women were often concentrated in the lower paid roles and that certain welfare professions, such as social worker, could make women complicit in the policing of other women’s behaviour.29
10 Nevertheless, women’s employment in the public sector overtook men’s after 1979.30 This trend intersected with the onset of neoliberal policies and occurred when women born around the 1940s were in the midst of their careers. It is notable that post-1987 “ the education and medical professions were a prime and deliberate focus for public displays of government contempt”.31 Already by the early 1990s, sociologists were recognising that the power of welfare state professions dominated by female workers had been eroded further than those dominated by males.32 The so-called semi-professions experienced the brunt of the changes during the early period of reform. As Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor have argued, in a patriarchal society “the work of women is deemed inferior simply because it is women who do it…far from being an objective economic fact, skill is often an ideological category imposed on certain work”.33 It is unsurprising therefore that when the public sector became dominated by women on a macro level its status began to be undermined, and that the first targets would be areas with majority female workers.
Expertise
11 The first aspect of the move towards de-professionalization in the late 1980s was a shift away from political elites valuing the expertise of welfare state professionals. The Conservative government sought to review and restructure the health and education systems, but deliberately chose not to seek the views of professionals in order to do so. They not only expressed disdain for an expansive welfare state but also for the professionals who worked for it. Thatcher expounded her belief that they are “powerful interest groups” who aim to disguise their self-interest as “high-minded commitment to some greater good”.34 She also found them insufficiently “cost-conscious” and slow to
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respond to market forces:35 anathema to her neoliberal principles. Rodney Lowe has explained that “any claim [professionals] had to expertise or altruism…was thrust aside. Doctors and teachers alike were excluded from the major reviews of health and education…so too was academia which was denied its accustomed privileged access via royal commissions to policy-making”.36
12 Women working in these areas of the welfare state certainly felt that big changes in the structure of their professions were being imposed by the state without much consultation. Elizabeth (b.1940), a doctor, exemplified these sentiments when asked her views on politics: “I just feel politics is interference. I think if you’re a professional especially in the medical world it’s just crazy. They downward manage teaching and medicine”.37 Sandra’s (b.1946) thoughts on the reorganization of the NHS in the late 1980s and early 1990s demonstrate workers’ frustrations. Having trained as a nurse in the late 1960s, by the 1980s Sandra had worked her way up to a position which she enjoyed in a regional health authority. She described this coming to an end when “Thatcher and her cohort decided they didn’t want as many regional health authorities and made us all redundant”.38 Notably, although she did not agree with the decision to get rid of regional health authorities, she did believe there was significant scope for change in the system. This pattern was reflected in other interviews; the women did not disagree with change per se- “we needed to shake things up”39- but specifically with the choices made by the government. Sandra offered a very detailed alternative to the choices made in the reorganization and also noted that she had tried to raise concerns at the time but was made to feel “naughty”.40
13 There was also a clear sense expressed by interviewees that the interference by the state was ill-thought through, and ultimately more concerned with political priorities than public service provision. One woman referenced the “inappropriate short termism” of the changes,41 and others noted that the Thatcher era settled little but instead ushered in a period of almost continual reform in the welfare state.42 Personal testimonies collected by the social research organisation Mass Observation echo these views. Alice (b.1950), a secondary school teacher, wrote that “every education initiative since the days of Thatcher seems to have been introduced without any thought about its ultimate effect”.43 The Conservative government wanted “preparation for working life” to be the principal aim of the education system,44 but teachers do not agree that this can be a workable end in itself. Alice elaborated:
14 If I had any say in the matter, (which of course I don’t because the government never consults teachers except those who have left the profession often because they couldn’t do the job in the first place), I’d try to revive the principle of education for education’s sake…the government talks about its great achievements in ‘improving education’ through targets but it’s complete nonsense. All that’s happened is that teachers have learned to adapt their methods in order to fit the targets and test.45
15 This exclusion of welfare professionals from decision-making was in stark contrast with the mid-century when “faith in the beneficent, public-minded expert underlay the creation of the modern welfare state”.46 As Paul Wilding has noted a “welfare state is a professional state ” and requires professionals’ knowledge to function well.47 Throughout the post-war years there was an increasing cachet to expertise and professionalism in the public sphere and construction of identities.48 It was therefore undoubtedly frustrating for women of this generation (many of whom hailed from working-class backgrounds) that
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just as they had gained professional status and expertise through working for the welfare state these characteristics began to be denigrated by politicians.
16 In tandem to expertise required by the welfare state in the post-war years, there was also the growth of a certain type of technocratic expertise associated with new careers (largely in corporate industry); which Frank Mort strongly linked to a form of lower middle-class masculinity.49 The qualities that were expected from these “organization men” were “complete neutrality in decision-making…and the ability to act, as Max Weber put it, without regard to persons”.50 It was this type of Weberian “detached and objective expert”51 making supposedly rational not emotional decisions that chimed far more with the neoliberal, Thatcherite world view.52 We actively see this type of expertise being imported into the welfare state. An example of this is the decision to get the newly- founded Audit Commission (note the terminology of accounting and finance) to audit the NHS, and the government expressed this explicitly in terms of the commission having the “expertise [to] look at the professional aspects of the [health] service”.53 In addition, the Better Schools white paper which laid the foundations for the 1988 Education Act stated the value of “prospective teachers having had previous employment…it is particularly helpful for teachers to gain some experience in industry or commerce”.54
Managerialism
17 The introduction of a culture of managerialism into welfare state institutions was a central pillar of the reorganisations and hence of the process of de-professionalization. Managers were considered an important mechanism for ensuring the dissemination of technocratic expertise and compliance amongst staff with the reform agenda. “ Strengthening management” in welfare institutions was outlined as one of the government’s key reform principles. They wanted both more layers of management and certain positions- such as that of head teacher- to be reconceptualised as management.55 Margaret Cook (b.1944) a hospital consultant noted in her autobiography, “the number of managers, and the cost of managing, rose exponentially”.56 Managerialism illustrates that the state did not straightforwardly contract, but instead priorities altered; in fact, overall social expenditure increased year-on-year in real terms between 1987 and 1996 (with the sole exception of 1988/89).57 The government openly vaunted that “the salaries for [new chief executive posts] will be set significantly higher” than existing posts in the NHS “so as to be attractive to good quality managers from both inside and outside”.58 Thus, unlike in previous years, this new wave of managers were not all promoted from within the profession.59 This distinction was noted by Lois (b.1947) in her description of her new manager in the local government arts department: “she was a new breed- a young administrator not your traditional curator type”.60 She felt this exacerbated how humiliating it was when she was forced to re-apply for her own job during restructuring and was interviewed by this manager.
18 Managers across the welfare state were tasked with allocating front-line resources in a manner which would exact more from workers for less. Employees felt that “it was perfectly clear what the new priority was amongst the hierarchy of general managers: money and savings”.61 Barbara (b.1941), who had worked as an administrator at various tertiary education institutions throughout her career, echoed this point. She recalled that “in 1989 higher education was changing”.62 From then onwards university management:
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19 didn’t always recognise that you needed more hands, it was quite stressful sometimes, in that I might have to take work home or I would stay on and work in my lunchtime… they were always looking to where they could save money…we weren’t getting things churned out quickly enough for them, we didn’t have the person power.63
20 An increase in workload, sufficient to interfere with the separation between work and home life, and between work time and break time, was mentioned frequently by my interviewees.64 These increased pressures led many women to fear for the continued provision of “a humane service”.65 Doctors at Cook’s hospital were instructed to see more patients, whilst spending less time with each. Carol (b.1948), a social worker, experienced similar demands in the early 1990s. Carol worked in the child protection aspect of social work, doing pre-birth risk assessments in hospitals. It was a difficult and stressful job because “a lot of it was drug related and domestic violence” and there was great deal of responsibility involved.66 Carol did not get on very well with her manager who saw no issue with repeatedly increasing her caseload:
21 My manager hadn’t given me a supervision for three months and she told me to take another case and I said I can’t I’ve got too much work already and she said ‘Oh it’ll only take a week’ and it turned into a really nasty case…and I thought I can’t do this anymore. I was going around crying all the time. I had terrible headaches and I wasn’t sleeping so I did go off with stress, and I was very angry with my manager because she didn’t protect me.67
22 Although she was signed off with stress for three months, Carol returned to work within a month because she felt a lot of guilt about being away from her casework. Cook also noted that health workers retained “good will” towards the NHS and therefore “bore the burden of trying to maintain standards in face of constant erosion of support and finance”.68
23 Managerialism created an especially difficult environment for female workers. Social policy scholars argued in the early 1990s that the introduction of managerialism by Conservative governments into the welfare state should be viewed as “a new set of male power relations located within a performance oriented culture”.69 Mike Savage has highlighted that the expansion of management that took place in the wake of the reviews had “the most adverse effects on women workers” because it placed many of them even further into a position of powerlessness in the institutional structure.70 It is notable that the Working for Patients white paper outlined a system whereby consultants were encouraged to have a role in their own management, and to self-manage as far as possible, but this was not recommended for the overwhelmingly female nursing staff.71 In 1992 only 37% of managers in the public sector were women despite being in the majority of all workers.72 Two of my interviewees Rita (b.1952) and Sylvia were promoted to management positions in academia around the mid-1990s. Rita had a difficult experience, given only a temporary contract and feeling that she was often ignored or talked over in meetings and male peers got different treatment even if voicing a similar issue.73 She was also under a lot of pressure to recruit international students to bring revenue to the institution even if they did not meet entry requirements; her professional decisions were often overridden by more senior managers. Sylvia had a better experience as manager, but she too expressed frustration at the creep of economization and the expectations from above that students be treated as “consumers”.74
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Autonomy
24 The impact of the large public sector reorganisations and the introduction of new layers of management were not abstract but filtered down to the regulation of the day- to-day activities of women working in the welfare state; political change was experienced on a personal level. Paradoxically therefore, although Thatcherite rhetoric was framed around freedom from state intervention, successive Conservative governments’ dislike of an expansive welfare state meant that in practice many women experienced a steep increase in intervention from the late 1980s onwards. This loss of autonomy was fundamental to the process of de-professionalization. Women of this generation described this in immense detail in their interviews because they had often worked in the welfare state both before and during (and sometimes after) the policy shifts.
25 Prior to the onset of the changes the women articulated a sense of having a degree of freedom to exercise their own judgement in their work which was very important to them. They believed there was faith in their ability and they were often left alone to carry out their duties. Rita described her experience in an early academic job: “I could do things and I could really make a difference”.75 Jean expressed similar sentiments about her nursing role during the 1970s:
26 When I was a district nurse back before I had my children, you’d use your common sense you know- you went into see somebody, and you’d decide well do they really need a bath or did they need breakfast? And you’d use your skills and make a decision.76
27 Women employed in other welfare professions echoed these views.77 Teachers both in primary and secondary schooling noted that they had previously enjoyed the autonomy that was given to them to “decide what you wanted to do in the classroom” and to be “creative” in adapting their teaching to the needs of different pupils.78 Social policy scholars have argued that during the 1970s, linked to the influence of new social movements such as feminism, there was an increasing emphasis on the subjective judgement of the teacher and the centring of personal experience. It was one of the explicit aims of the Conservative reforms of the late 1980s to marginalize this in the practice of education and the welfare state more broadly, for they thought teachers were choosing (wrongly) to spend time on pupil development “above measurable attainment”.79
28 The focus on results and performance across the welfare state, led women to feel as though the centrality of the patient, or the student, or the citizen was being forgotten and replaced by abstractions. Cynthia (b.1941) decided to leave primary teaching in the late 1980s because she was “becoming disenchanted with teaching, like all professions it’s become too obsessed with results”.80 When she returned to work in the mid-1990s “in the hospital as a secretary and the same happened there, it was statistics, you know, you had to prove your worth, so you had to bring all these stats- never mind the clients!”.81 Ann (b.1939) similarly felt uncomfortable with having to spend time producing stats and making cost-calculations about healthcare provision in her role as PA to a hospital consultant. She felt it violated her belief in healthcare according to need: “I think if you’re urgent, you’re urgent”.82 The performance of the welfare state had always been measured and assessed, but often in different ways to those outlined by the Thatcher and Major governments; measurements were not always statistical, and outcomes were expected over a longer period of time. This is striking when comparing the white paper Better
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Schools with the 1968 survey of the education system All Our Future. The latter features voices of students and the meaning of results is problematized rather than taken as objective truth of ability (of either pupils or teachers).83
29 In order to achieve the results desired by neoliberal governments, welfare professionals lost some of the autonomy to exercise their judgement in their working- lives. Jean was forthright in her opinion that reorganisation of the NHS in the late 1980s had “deskilled” nurses, she explained that it became: “formulaic about what you had to do, how many patients you were seeing and for how long”.84 She didn’t think this was good for patients because you often had to “cut corners like mad” to get everything done and produce all the paperwork to prove that you had stuck to the given timetable.85 The terminology of “deskilling” and “box-ticking” also emerged in interviews with female further education lecturers in the mid-1990s.86 The interviewer argued this was because “control over the conception and design of academic work is increasingly being taken away, by management, from practitioners responsible for its delivery in the classroom”.87 Reflections on changes in teaching after the 1988 Education Act (and as it intensified throughout the 1990s) echo the kind of “formulaic” shifts described occurring in the NHS and further- education. Teachers found the successive introduction of the national curriculum and SATs was increasingly restrictive; one interviewee described it as “literally a different job ”.88 Alice stated that “the testing system means everyone has to do exactly the same thing”.89 Similarly, Maureen noted “it got to the point where you had a booklet for maths, week one day one you do this- some children didn’t understand it, sorry we’re moving on. And you have to write it up, all these sheets to fill in”.90 This encapsulates a central theme of de- professionalization, the idea that the welfare worker should not be allowed to make judgements on a case-by-case basis but instead actions should conform to a standardised knowable and measurable regime with each moment accounted for.
30 There was also a marked increase in inspections and observations in schools, linked to but not exactly consonant with the broader culture of managerialism, which was especially stressful for teachers. Teachers had been highlighted by the Thatcher government as an area of particular concern, noting that: “a significant number of teachers are performing at a standard below that required to reach the new objectives”.91 They therefore advocated a “regular and formal appraisal of the performance of all teachers” which could lead to ‘early retirement or dismissal’ if unsatisfactory.92 The Major government strengthened these provisions by creating OFSTED in 1992 and then introducing the Schools Inspection Act in 1996. Maureen recalled 1996 as an especially difficult year because it was the first inspection she experienced under the new regime. She and her colleagues found the whole process overwhelming:
31 people started having nervous breakdowns…we had to write policies for every area because we didn’t know what we were going to be tested on…a lot of people were off sick with stress, early retirement, even relationship problems, you know, full time teaching plus stressful meetings and demands to write policies- all your spare time.93
32 This is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s image of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish where individuals are controlled through exposure to the gaze of the observer: the possibility of being watched at any given moment “assures the automatic functioning of power”.94 This worked literally though the inspection system in schools, and through the exponential increase in management figures across the sector, but also more figuratively through the standardisation of tasks. De-professionalization was an important element of the Conservative governments’ nascent “regulatory state” which
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constituted “a more complex pattern of government activity…more inspection and regulation- even if less public provision”.95
Downward Mobility
33 The process of de-professionalization altered the career trajectory of many women of this generation; the changes it caused could be compulsory or voluntary but in either case they often led to downwards occupational mobility. Work had become increasingly central to the lives of women in the late twentieth century and this loss of status could have a significant negative impact on the women’s sense of self; in a similar way to how historians argue de-industrialization has affected male workers.96
34 The importance of this type of work to the women’s identity led many of them to try to extend their time in the sector, even moving to work in different aspects of it, in the face of the stress and precarity caused by the increased workload, more monitoring, and fewer resources. This reduction in conditions can be viewed as a form of downwards occupational mobility even if they stayed in the same employment and meant the risk of moving jobs often felt worth taking. India (b.1947) moved from secondary school teaching to the extra-mural department of a university in the late 1980s. India initially had a lot of flexibility to create her own courses which she chose to make inter-disciplinary and “woman-centred”.97 However she noted that the department “became obsessed by accreditation in the nineties, I had to fit into a module system to degree level”.98 This meant that much of her course content was marginalized and deemed inappropriate for progression to degree level study. Feeling that what she had to offer was no longer of value to the department, India left in the mid-1990s to pursue freelance teaching which placed her in a precarious financial situation.99 Further and adult education had been relatively protected under Thatcher, but there was a significant amount of restructuring and redundancies in the wake of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. Growth in health and education employment had slowed in the 1980s and the early-to-mid 1990s witnessed an overall contraction in the number of state workers.100 Jean decided to leave nursing around this time because she felt it had become untenable. She had already been a representative on a committee about stress amongst NHS staff because “they wanted my opinion about why they were losing so many nurses through stress”.101 Jean went on to teach nursing in a further education college but took early retirement to avoid redundancy.
35 Having to alter career path left many women taking on positions of a lower social status, which could be especially difficult for women who had grown up working-class. After Sandra was made redundant from her position in the regional health authority, she took a role “in the health service, rehousing the mentally ill from a big psychiatric hospital ”. However, this was another consequence of NHS reorganization which she did “not approve of- it was the idea of mov[ing] people to the community which meant you could hide them”.102 Sandra was so uncomfortable with the approach that she decided to leave the sector to start a café with her husband in the mid-1990s. She lamented that as an older woman she was having to spend hours on her feet every day doing fairly menial labour, and worrying financially especially through autumn and winter.103 Sandra felt a “failure ” that she had ended her career in a non-professional job.104 Ruth (b.1949) echoed this sentiment, describing that being made redundant “felt like a horrible inevitability, that you can’t really escape your background”.105
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36 A number of women have taken up voluntary work in their sectors of previous employment.106 However these women are not satisfied with these arrangements; it does not provide them with status in the way paid work did. One of the aims of decreasing public services in the late 1980s was to reinvigorate civil society and family life because Thatcherite politicians believed caring should be the responsibility of women but largely (and ideally) in a domestic or voluntary setting rather than under the remit of the state.107 Rita, a university lecturer, was made redundant after a newly- appointed male boss brought in a management consultant. Unable to find another professional role, in the years since she has organised writing workshops for various charities, and volunteered as a counsellor for women with mental health problems. She has also taken on additional caring responsibilities within the family. Rita explained that she felt losing her job reduced her status in society:
37 After doing something that allowed you to gain expertise and be a player out there in the world, what’s expected of you and available to you now is just to do caring way below your skillset without power or status. What you brought to the professions as a female was at least recognised and remunerated in a male world, you weren’t a housewife, but now it just feels like being put back in my box.108
38 Even though many women disagreed with the changes and suffered in their careers as a result of them, they often blamed themselves for not being adaptable enough. Despite the fact Maureen felt that the process of de-professionalization had “undermined teachers’ authority” she took the position in her interview that teachers themselves need to take responsibility if they cannot handle the increased pressure: “you either do it, you have a breakdown, or you think ‘I’m going’. And you get out because you know you can’t do what is demanded”.109 Maureen found herself in the latter position, feeling that she was just no longer up for the job- as did many of my interviewees- and she took early retirement as soon as she was able in the early 2000s. Anita (b.1952), who was made redundant from her job in the public sector due to funding cuts, expressed this self- blame even more emphatically. The issue of her losing her job was woven like a connecting thread throughout the interview. Her statement in the closing moments, when we discussed her continued search for work, is particularly poignant: “I want to be out getting on, I want to make change happen. It’s hard to know how to do it, so I’m trying to change myself rather than the outside world, but that’s not easy”.110 This is very much in line with the idea of the neoliberal worker who, as Valerie Walkerdine suggests, “is totally responsible for their own destiny, and so techniques and technologies of regulation focus on the self-management of citizens to produce themselves as having the skills and qualities necessary to succeed in the new economy”.111
Conclusion
39 Between 1987 and c.1997 a rapid process of de-professionalization was engendered in the welfare state by Conservative governments which involved a devaluation of professional expertise, the introduction of a culture of managerialism and a loss of autonomy for workers. Unlike de-industrialization which has impacted male workers, the process of de-professionalization outlined here has disproportionately affected women because of their majority in the public sector and specifically in the semi- professions within health, welfare and education. Women of the post-war generation employed in these areas experienced fundamental changes in their working-lives,
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which often led to a feeling of loss of status and power in the workplace and society more broadly. Many found themselves unexpectedly downwardly mobile at a crucial stage of their career; either through the reduction in conditions, or through moving or losing a job due to changing conditions. These women grew up during a time when opportunities were expanding for women but they were not immune to the negative effects of structural change in public sector employment. The material presented here suggests that examining later life stages in personal testimony sources can complicate dominant narratives about the collective experience of a generation. Women’s life histories are in fact much more likely to be a contradictory narrative of progress and retrenchment because patriarchy is so adaptable. The way patriarchy is enacted changes across time and interacts with contemporary political ideologies; it should be analysed as an historically specific rather than universal concept. The form and impact of de-professionalization demonstrates the dialectic between patriarchy and neoliberalism during this period. De-professionalization deserves to be considered as one of the key explanatory processes of late twentieth-century Britain.
40 Eve Worth is completing her AHRC-funded doctoral research on ‘Women of the Welfare State Generation, c.1945-2015’. She is the Jenny Wormald Junior Research Fellow in Women’s History at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, Lynn, ‘Liberating the Female Self: Epiphanies, Conflict and Coherence in the Life Stories of Post-war British Women’, Social History, 39 (2014), pp. 14-35.
Arnot, Madeleine, David, Miriam and Weiner, Gaby (eds.), Closing the Gender Gap: Postwar Education and Social Change (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999).
Brown, Wendy Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015).
Cook, Margaret, A Slight and Delicate Creature: The Memoirs of Margaret Cook (London, Orion, 1999).
Cribb, Jonathan, Disney Richard and Sibieta, Richard, The Public Sector Workforce: Past, Present and Future (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2014).
Cutler, Tony and Waine, Becky, ‘Managerialism Reformed? New Labour and Public Sector Management’, Social Policy and Administration, 34 (2000), pp. 318-332.
Dale, Jennifer and Foster, Peggy, Feminists and State Welfare (Leicester, Routledge, 1986).
Davis, Angela, ‘Uncovering the Lives of Women in Postwar Oxfordshire: An Oral History Approach’, Rural History, 19 (2008), pp. 105-121.
Department of Education, Better Schools, Cmnd 9469, (London, The Stationery Office, 1984).
Department of Health, Working for Patients, CM555 (London, The Stationery Office, 1989).
Douglas, J., Ross, J., Simpson H., All Our Future: A Longitudinal Study of Secondary Education (London, P. Davies, 1968).
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Evans, Eric, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London, Routledge, 2004).
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, Penguin, 1991).
Gildea, Robert, Mark, James and Waring, Anette (eds.), Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).
Gillard, D., Education in England: A Brief History (2011),
Glennerster, Howard, British Social Policy since 1945 (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000)
Gordon, Linda (ed.), Women, the State and Welfare (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
Hadley, Louisa and Ho, Elizabeth (eds.), Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
Hilton Matthew, ‘Politics is Ordinary: Non-governmental Organizations and Political Participation in Contemporary Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), pp. 230-268.
Kelsall, R., Women and Teaching: Report on an Independent Nuffield Survey Following Up a Large National Sample of Women Who Entered Teaching in England at Various Dates Pre-War and Post-War (London, The Stationery Office, 1963).
Langhamer, Claire, ‘Feelings, Women and Work in the Long 1950s’, Women’s History Review, 26 (2017), pp. 77-92.
Leathwood, Carole, ‘Treat me as a human being- don’t look at me as a woman: Femininities and Professional Identities in Further Education’, Gender and Education, 17 (2005), pp. 387-409.
Lowe, Rodney, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2005)
Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, Spring 2004 Directive, W1813.
Mort, Frank, ‘Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 353-384.
Parry, Richard, United Kingdom Public Employment: Patterns of Change 1951-1976 (Glasgow, Centre for the Study of Public Policy at University of Strathclyde, 1980).
Perkin, Harold, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, (London, Routledge, 2002).
Philips, Anne and Taylor, Barbara, ‘Sex and Skill: Notes Towards a Feminist Economics’, Feminist Review, 6 (1980), pp. 79-88.
Rogaly, Ben and Taylor, Becky, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Roper, Michael, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994).
Savage, Mike, ‘Affluence and Social Change in the Making of Technocratic Middle-Class Identities: Britain 1939-1955’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), pp. 457-476.
Savage, Mike, Barlow, James, Dickens, Peter and Fielding, Tony, Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle-Class Formation in Contemporary Britain (London, Routledge, 1992).
Todd, Selina, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class 1910-2010 (London, John Murray, 2014).
Tomlinson, Jim, ‘De-Industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-Narrative for Post-War British History’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), pp. 76-99.
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Walkerdine, Valerie, ‘Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-Liberal Subject’, Gender and Education, 15 (2003), pp. 237-248.
Webster, Wendy, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity 1945- 64, (London, UCL Press, 1998).
Wilding, Paul, ‘The Welfare State and the Conservatives’, Political Studies, XLV (1997), pp. 716-726.
Wilson, Elizabeth, Women and the Welfare State (London, Tavistock, 1977)
Worth, Eve, Women of the Welfare State Generation, c.1945-2015, Oral History Interviews, Held by interviewer Eve Worth.
NOTES
1. Lynn Abrams, ‘Liberating the Female Self: Epiphanies, Conflict and Coherence in the Life Stories of Post-war British Women’, Social History, 39 (2014), p. 18 2. Abrams, ‘Liberating the Female Self’, p. 35 3. Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-Industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-Narrative for Post-War British History’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), pp. 76-99 4. Abrams, ‘Liberating the Female Self’, p. 16 5. Angela Davis, ‘Uncovering the Lives of Women in Postwar Oxfordshire: An Oral History Approach’, Rural History, 19 (2008), p. 108. 6. See for example Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class 1910-2010 (London, John Murray, 2014). 7. Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Waring (eds.), Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). 8. Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity 1945- 64, (London, UCL Press, 1998), p. xxii. 9. Howard Glennerster, British Social Policy since 1945 (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), p. 176. 10. D. Gillard, Education in England: A Brief History (2011), www.educationengland.org.uk/history, last consulted 22 February 2017. 11. Department of Health, Working for Patients, CM555 (London, The Stationery Office, 1989), p. 100. 12. Further key acts include: Local Government Act 1988, Social Security Act 1989, Education Act 1992, Education Act 1993. 13. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015), pp. 30-31. 14. Department of Health, Working for Patients, p. 19. 15. Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 16. Tony Cutler and Becky Waine, ‘Managerialism Reformed? New Labour and Public Sector Management’, Social Policy and Administration, 34 (2000), pp. 318-332. 17. Harold, Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, (London, Routledge, 2002), pp. 2-3. 18. Ibid. 19. Richard Parry, United Kingdom Public Employment: Patterns of Change 1951-1976 (Glasgow, Centre for the Study of Public Policy at University of Strathclyde, 1980), p.8 Parry notes that by 1976 a higher percentage of the public sector workforce was female than in private sector, p. 34. 20. Ibid., p. 1. 21. Ibid., p. 34.
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22. Madeleine Arnot, Miriam David and Gaby Weiner (eds.), Closing the Gender Gap: Postwar Education and Social Change (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999), pp. 58-59. 23. Interview with Jean, 13th April 2015 (All interviewee names are pseudonyms). 24. R. Kelsall, Women and Teaching: Report on an Independent Nuffield Survey Following Up a Large National Sample of Women Who Entered Teaching in England at Various Dates Pre-War and Post-War (London, The Stationery Office, 1963), p. 24. 25. Interview with Sylvia, 18th April 2015. 26. Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 1-15. 27. Linda Gordon (ed.), Women, the State and Welfare (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p.18 28. Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London, Tavistock, 1977). 29. Jennifer Dale and Peggy Foster, Feminists and State Welfare (Leicester, Routledge, 1986) pp. 81-104. 30. Jonathan Cribb, Richard Disney and Luke Sibieta, The Public Sector Workforce: Past, Present and Future, (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2014), p. 17. 31. Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2005), p. 331. 32. Mike Savage, James Barlow, Peter Dickens and Tony Fielding, Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle-Class Formation in Contemporary Britain (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 75. 33. Anne Philips and Barbara Taylor, ‘Sex and Skill: Notes Towards a Feminist Economics’, Feminist Review, 6 (1980), p. 79. 34. Margaret Thatcher quoted in Louisa Hadley, Elizabeth Ho (eds.), Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 31. 35. Eric Evans, Thatcher and Thatcherism (London, Routledge, 2004), p. 67. 36. Lowe, Welfare State, pp. 330-331. 37. Interview with Elizabeth, 27th January 2015. 38. Interview with Sandra, 17th April 2015. 39. Interview with Maureen, 10th April 2015. 40. Interview with Sandra. 41. Interview with Elizabeth. 42. Interview with Jean. 43. Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex (MOA), Spring 2004 Directive, W1813. 44. Department of Education, Better Schools, Cmnd 9469, (London, The Stationery Office, 1984), p. 15. 45. MOA, Spring 2004 Directive, W1813. 46. Matthew Hilton, ‘Politics is Ordinary: Non-governmental Organizations and Political Participation in Contemporary Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), pp. 252-253. 47. Paul Wilding, ‘The Welfare State and the Conservatives’, Political Studies, XLV (1997), p. 718. 48. Hilton, ‘Politics is Ordinary’, pp.252-253 and Mike Savage, ‘Affluence and Social Change in the Making of Technocratic Middle-Class Identities: Britain 1939-1955’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), pp. 457-476. 49. Frank Mort, ‘Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 353-384. 50. Roper, Masculinity, p. 1. 51. Ibid., p. 77. 52. Claire Langhamer has explored the false dichotomy between the rational and the emotional in the workplace in, ‘Feelings, Women and Work in the Long 1950s’, Women’s History Review, 26 (2017), pp. 77-92. 53. Department of Health, Working for Patients, p. 20. 54. Department of Education, Better Schools, p. 44.
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55. Ibid., p. 7. 56. Margaret Cook, A Slight and Delicate Creature: The Memoirs of Margaret Cook (London, Orion, 1999), p.188 57. Lowe, Welfare State, p. 333. 58. Department of Health, Working for Patients, p. 61. 59. Savage et al., Property, pp. 74-75. 60. Interview with Lois, 4th September 2014. 61. Cook, Slight, p. 188. 62. Interview with Barbara, 5th December 2014. 63. Interview with Barbara. 64. Interviews with Ann, 4th February 2015, Dawn, 12th September 2014. 65. Cook, Slight, p. 188. 66. Interview with Carol, 17th November 2014. 67. Ibid. 68. Cook, Slight, p. 189. 69. Arnot, Closing the Gender Gap, p. 99. 70. Savage et al., Property, p. 76. 71. Department of Health, Working for Patients, pp. 15-19. 72. Savage et al., Property, p. 197. 73. Interview with Rita, 20th October 2015. 74. Interview with Sylvia. 75. Interview with Rita. 76. Interview with Jean. 77. Interview with Carol. 78. Interviews with Maureen, Cynthia. 79. Arnot, Closing the Gender Gap, pp. 94-97. 80. Interview with Cynthia. 81. Ibid. 82. Interview with Ann. 83. J. Douglas, J. Ross, H. Simpson, All Our Future: A Longitudinal Study of Secondary Education (London, P. Davies, 1968), Department of Education, Better Schools. 84. Interview with Jean. 85. Ibid. 86. Carole Leathwood, ‘Treat me as a human being- don’t look at me as a woman: Femininities and Professional Identities in Further Education’, Gender and Education, 17 (2005), p. 398. 87. Ibid., p. 390. 88. Interview with Lesley, 19th July 2015. 89. MOA, Spring 2004 directive, W1813. 90. Interview with Maureen. 91. Department of Education, Better Schools, p. 50. 92. Ibid., p. 55. 93. Interview with Maureen. 94. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, Penguin, 1991), p. 201. 95. Wilding, ‘The Welfare State’, p. 722. 96. Todd, The People, pp. 322-326. 97. Interview with India, 28th March 2016. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Cribb et al., Public Sector Workforce, p. 12.
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101. Interview with Jean. 102. Interview with Sandra. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Interview with Ruth, 17th October 2015. 106. Interviews with Chrissie, 18th October 2015, Lois, Sandra, Jean. 107. Glennerster, British Social Policy, pp. 195-197. 108. Ibid. 109. Interview with Maureen. 110. Interview with Anita, 1st February 2015. 111. Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-Liberal Subject’, Gender and Education, 15 (2003), pp. 241-242.
ABSTRACTS
This article argues that though women born in the long 1940s experienced an expansion in educational and occupational opportunities, these opportunities were largely in gender segregated jobs within the welfare state. These same jobs were hit hard by the depreciation in working-conditions that occurred from the late 1980s onwards. Women of this generation’s material circumstances and sense of self were significantly affected by these changes; in part, precisely because they had been socialized to expect more from their working-lives. By foregrounding female experience, the article also aims to demonstrate that the shifts in public sector employment enacted by successive Conservative governments constituted a process of de- professionalization which principally impacted women workers. This demonstrates the adaptability of gendered inequality. De-professionalization had such profound implications that it deserves to be considered alongside de-industrialization as one of the key explanatory processes of late twentieth-century Britain and the neoliberal project; doing so would mark a shift away from the masculinised narratives of work that dominate contemporary history.
Les femmes nées dans les années 1940 ont vu s’ouvrir devant elles un vaste champ d’opportunités éducatives et professionnelles. Cet article montre que ces opportunités étaient principalement présentes dans de nouveaux métiers très féminisés liés à l’Etat-providence. Ces métiers furent durement touchés à partir des années 1980 par une dégradation marquée des conditions dans lesquelles ils s’effectuaient. La situation matérielle des femmes de cette génération et leur estime de soi en furent atteintes, notamment parce qu’elles avaient intériorisé l’idée qu’elles pouvaient attendre beaucoup de leur vie professionnelle. En mettant l’expérience de ces femmes au premier plan, cet article cherche à démontrer que les réformes répétées de l’emploi dans le secteur public poursuivies par les gouvernements Conservateurs successifs ont constitué un processus de dé- professionnalisation qui impacta principalement des employées. Nous voyons ainsi comment les inégalités de genre s’adaptent à de nouveaux contextes. La dé-professionnalisation a eu des implications si profondes qu’elle mérite d’être considérée, au même titre que la désindustrialisation, comme l’un des processus caractéristiques du projet néolibéral à l’œuvre au Royaume-Uni à la fin du vingtième siècle. Une telle reconnaissance nous éloignerait des discours historiographiques dominants sur le monde du travail, entièrement centrés sur l’expérience professionnelle masculine.
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INDEX
Mots-clés: femmes, Etat providence, dé-professionnalisation, années 1980, histoire orale, travail, néolibéralisme Keywords: women, welfare state, de-professionalization, 1980s, oral history, work, neoliberalism
AUTHOR
EVE WORTH
Jenny Wormald Junior Research Fellow in Women’s History, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford
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Sites of Contestation: the Law, the Church, and Cricket Lieux de contestation : le droit, l’Eglise, et le cricket
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A Legal Maternal Wall? No Revolution in Motherhood for Women Lawyers in England Un « mur de la maternité » dans les professions juridiques ? Pas de révolution de la maternité pour les avocates en Angleterre
Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec
Introduction
1 The concept of a “maternal wall”, developed by law professor Joan Williams in the United-States in the 1990s,1 refers to a form of discrimination based on family responsibilities. It is a pattern of bias and stereotyping that affects mothers as opposed to women in general.2 This approach looks at the pay gap and other short- and long- term impacts of pregnancy, maternity and motherhood in terms of career and discrimination. The concept may be seen as a pendant to the more well-known glass ceiling. In the United-States, the concept quickly gained traction in the press3 and since the early 2000s court cases have tended to show that this form of discrimination was finally becoming recognized as illegal. 4
2 Surprisingly, the concept has received little attention in Europe. Applied to the English legal profession, it sheds light on the testimonies of women barristers and solicitors who, when asked, have often said they believed there was no sex discrimination in their profession, but that discrimination on the grounds of maternity, by contrast, was rife. This article thus presents a case study focusing on gender equality issues in the legal profession in England and Wales that underlines the specific weight of motherhood in the slow transformation of women’s roles vis-à-vis those of men in the professional sphere.
3 The aim of such a focus is not to exalt motherhood as women’s most important condition in the spirit of what historians have called ‘maternalism’.5 It is, however, to take seriously the fact that women remain the expected primary carers for children in
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spite of feminist struggles for gender equality in the domestic sphere. Indeed, reproductive power has been claimed by some as the main, if not the only factor leading to male domination and patriarchy. Anthropologist Françoise Héritier sees it as central in what she calls the “differential valence of the sexes”. 6
4 Acknowledging the specific issues facing women as (real or potential) mothers, while positing that this identity should not be seen as part and parcel of female identity but constructed as an intersectional facet of identity may help reconcile opposing feminist views on maternity and motherhood. It may also help overcome the maternal wall by lifting the veil on the intangible, surreptitious way it operates.
5 That being said, not all women are mothers: in the UK, it is estimated that around 20% of women remain child-free (a level which is not historically unprecedented).7 Furthermore, the most educated women are among the most likely never to have a child. Unlike in some other European countries (such as the Netherlands or Norway) or in the United-States,8 educational differentials in childlessness are not narrowing over time; they are even increasing slightly. Today in the UK, for a wide range of reasons (not wanting children, postponing, not meeting the right person, health reasons and so on) tertiary-educated women are approximately twice as likely as women with low levels of education to remain child-free. 9 In the light of these figures, and in order to focus on gender equality issues in the law, specific attention needs to be explicitly given to the hurdles faced by women because of their maternal status – yet without identifying all women with mothers. For instance, in their latest study of women in the labour market (2013), the Office for National Statistics have identified that in the younger age groups of 16-24 and 25-29, the top 10% of earners were relatively evenly split between men and women, but that “the greatest fall in the percentage of the top 10% of earners that were women was between the 25-29 and 30-34 age groups, coinciding with women having children in their late twenties. Therefore, the percentage of women in the highest paid reduces after the average age that women tend to give birth to their first child”.10 Thus, assimilating these forms of discrimination to sex discrimination or, in other words, those forms of inequality to sex inequalities would not be true to the experiences lived either by women who have children or by those who do not.
6 In the legal profession, the hours, the specific timetable constraints (linked to court hearings), the role of clerks in chambers, etc., all contribute to making women lawyers subordinates. The prominence of maternity and motherhood, playing a key part in this subordination, was seen to be flagrant in interviews carried out in 2007-08 for the author’s PhD fieldwork11 with women lawyers and judges, research which aimed at testing a number of hypotheses and gaining further insight into the dynamics of identity and discrimination. Recent studies on the legal profession corroborate these findings and underline the resilience of these patterns. 12
7 In its first part, the article presents an overview of the legislative framework and practices in the profession. Then, by relying on examples derived from the fieldwork as well as the literature, it insists on juggling family and work in the legal profession as illustrations of the maternal wall. It aims at showing that discrimination on the grounds of maternity should be constructed as a form of intersectional discrimination. Intersectionality primarily stems from African-American feminist research, as a reaction to the fact that the interaction of sexism and racism was neither acknowledged by equality legislation nor identified by scholars. First coined by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, 13 the concept has received a tremendous amount of
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attention over the past ten years.14 In the present article, intersectionality is predominantly deployed in its relation to multifaceted identities but the author also draws on its ability to refer to systemic structural forces that shape societies.
8 Indeed, even though it is intricately tied to sex and gender, to reduce discrimination on the grounds of maternity to a form of sex discrimination might easily amount to an essentialist analysis.15 This form of discrimination partly explains the slower progression of women on the professional ladder, their relative confinement to certain areas of law and, consequently, the small proportion they account for in the senior judiciary, in spite of the fact that women now outnumber men among law students,16 achieve better academic results on the whole,17 and have made up around 50% of the profession at entry level for about twenty years.18 This situation undermines the trickle-up argument that is often put forward when trying to justify the lack of women in the upper echelons.
Overview: legislative framework and practices in the profession
9 This section aims to offer an overview of the British legislation and regulations that frame maternity and motherhood issues in the field of employment, in particular maternity leave and flexible working arrangements. It focuses on the input of the regulatory bodies of the legal profession, namely the Bar Council and Law Society, and contrasts the measures they have gradually introduced with the development of factory-like working patterns that appear to undermine recent efforts at more equality in the workplace.
10 In the UK, The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 specifically prohibited discrimination on the grounds of pregnancy or maternity leave. Since October 2010, this type of pregnancy and maternity discrimination has been unlawful under the Equality Act;19 it qualifies as automatic discrimination without the need to provide a male comparator, whereas such a comparator (actual or hypothetical) is used in other sex discrimination cases involving women, to test whether a man would have been treated more favourably in similar circumstances.20 The current protection exists from conception to the end of statutory maternity leave (the ‘protected period’). The Equality Act’s provisions for pregnancy and maternity cover all areas of employment, including, but not limited to, recruitment, promotion, training and redundancy selection. The Employment Rights Act 1996 and the Maternity and Parental Leave Regulations 1999 give employees (but not other workers) additional protection. This legislation makes dismissal automatically unfair if it is due to an employee’s pregnancy or maternity leave. Subjecting a woman to any other detriment due to her pregnancy or maternity leave (or because of illness suffered by her as a result of her pregnancy) is also unlawful.
11 Statutory maternity leave in the UK is 52 weeks, made up of 26 weeks of “Ordinary Maternity Leave” and 26 weeks of “Additional Maternity Leave”.21 Women must take at least two weeks’ leave after their baby is born. In addition, occupational pension schemes are now all deemed to include a maternity equality rule so that women are not treated unfavourably. There are differences depending on the collective agreements and specific measures taken by employers. Despite this framework however, discrimination based on the potential to become pregnant was reported a number of
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times in the interviews carried out by the author. This is linked to statistical discrimination, as theorised by Edmund Phelps: 22 […] the employer [who has no distaste for hiring and working alongside blacks and women and] who seeks to maximise expected profit will discriminate against blacks or women if he believes them to be less qualified, reliable, long-term, etc. on the average than whites and males.
12 In terms of the regulations that apply to the legal profession more specifically, the Bar Council, which is the representative body for barristers, encourages chambers to have a written policy addressing maternity, paternity and parental leave, providing definitions and including provisions on pre-departure and pre-return questions. They offer guidance with a detailed checklist mentioning for instance “What facilities does Chambers offer for maternity returners i.e. refrigeration for expressed milk, information on the nearest childcare providers, can Chambers obtain a discount for members, etc.”.23 The Bar Council has also produced a “Family Career Breaks Advice Pack”24 and holds “Family Career Breaks” events annually. The role played by the Bar Council and Bar Standards Board (the regulatory body of the branch) is key, as most barristers are self-employed (those who work in sets of chambers), and remain outside the scope of the legislation regarding these issues. They have, for example, standardized the practice of allowing women six months free of rent for maternity leave since 2004 and produced Equality Rules that came into force in 2012, accompanied by regular monitoring.25 Such policies greatly contribute to retaining women in the profession26 but they can still generate tensions in chambers. One of the interviewees thus explained: It’s all very well for everyone to say ‘everybody should be entitled to lots of maternity leave and reduced fees’, but it’s the rest of us who then have to subsidise them. So there is that, and the other thing is, if you have a diary of practitioners, let’s say one team, 1/3 of them are on maternity leave at any time. It makes it quite difficult for the clerk to accommodate them only working part-time; and then for the rest of us – in fact I think I probably benefited from that because, as somebody who doesn’t have children, when the other members of my team have gone off and had children, I’m the one that gets the bigger cases; so in fact I think it’s worked in my favour. [Interview 4]
13 Her account unveils the controversy around maternity and motherhood issues: at first the barrister seems to complain that she has to subsidise, in a way, what she perceives as advantages given to mothers but then acknowledges that from a professional point of view she has often benefitted from such periods of leave by being given bigger cases. The complexity of the issue derives from the conflict between the theoretical and the practical level but also, it seems, between the individual and the collective level. It is easy to argue collectively that the workplace should be adjusted in order to help mothers, but the practitioners directly confronted with that type of situation may deem the effort it might require from individuals too burdensome. Another characteristic of the barristers’ branch of the profession is the gap that exists between different sets of chambers. The following account exemplifies this gap more convincingly than many statistics: The last chambers I was at, [...] I think we had a baby born every month, we had hundreds of babies, but we didn’t lose a single woman in 17 years. They all came back, and they all resumed their practice, either at a part-time level or a full-time level, as they wished, and when they wanted to, they got back into the work full time. I think that was exceptional. This chambers, they have taken on women, there’s no doubt about that, […] but all the women have left, around maternity leave. We have to ask ‘Well why is that, what went wrong?’ […] It may be
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coincidence, […] but I have no evidence that there is no obstruction. But nonetheless, for me it’s more than a coincidence that all these women have gone. [Interview 6]
14 These variations not only depend on the size of the chambers and their location, but also and perhaps more significantly on their culture, a very subjective element that makes it hard to pinpoint specific hurdles.
15 The Law Society, which represents the solicitors’ branch of the profession, does not seem to have developed specific policies concerning maternity leave. Nevertheless, they have set up a Diversity and Inclusion Charter accompanied by a set of protocols that includes a “flexible working protocol” which “presents a clear business case for flexible working, guidelines, checklists, case studies and practical tools to help law practices embed flexible working in the workplace”. In spite of the fact that maternity is not mentioned explicitly, there is no doubt such a protocol has been designed with mothers in mind, as the number of female dropouts remains high. Indeed, a 2010 report drew from a series of interviews the conclusion that flexible working becomes a necessity for many women around the middle phase of their career. This phase typically coincides with children, and legal firms, by not offering true flexibility, remove a significant proportion of the legal talent available to them for key areas of law.27
16 The rhetoric of the business case – which may be seen as an indicator of how neoliberalism, defined as an ideology and policy model instituting market-based norms of practice and characterized by logics of financialisation, has pervaded equality and diversity issues28 – is a constant feature of the Law Society’s research into diversity issues, in accordance with the concerns of the profession, especially in the corporate or finance sectors. As Sommerlad’s interviewees highlight, this sector is a multi-million- pound business, and making money is the only worthy consideration. According to them, the ethos has nothing to do with gender equality, the key concerns are money and getting and keeping the clients.29 Muzio, Brock and Suddaby have also identified professional identities as increasingly framed around the logic of efficiency and commerce that have displaced the traditional philosophy of ethics and public service.30
17 Sommerlad noted in the early 2000s that some lawyers’ comments were indicative of the emerging contestation of these working patterns and the 2010 Law Society report confirmed this trend. It underlined a very marked difference in the views, perceptions and expectations of younger participants from Generation Y (born after 1980). The report emphasized the high exit rate from city firms of talented men and women who found the profession at that level incompatible with their expectations of work/life balance. However, in spite of almost universal rhetorical commitment to diversity and inclusion across the legal profession in England and Wales, the recession has impacted equality and diversity and makes it more difficult to ask for flexible working as women often contort in order to keep their jobs.31 Sommerlad’s latest articles evidence a deepening of those trends (intensification of work and heightened significance of client care in particular), which appear to be having a particularly adverse impact on women’s working conditions. 32
18 Indeed, the issue of flexible working is of great importance for women in the profession. Recent research carried out by Margaret Thornton in Australian law firms hints at the stigmatisation of those seeking to work flexibly, which, among other drawbacks, entrenches the masculinist identity of the ideal lawyer.33 The way she
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theorises the subsequent pathologisation of mothers ties in with the concept of maternal wall, illustrated below.
Juggling family and work in the legal profession: illustrations of the maternal wall
19 As has been widely identified by prior research, juggling a career and family life is far from easy and may be even harder for professional women, who tend to see their work as a primary role. 34 Indeed, the professions involve a long period of studying and a high level of commitment to work. This section therefore aims at highlighting some of the social expectations around motherhood that often conflict with the work practices of the legal profession, notably in terms of hours. Combined with the confinement of women to some areas of the law, these frictions lead to numerous dropouts.
20 The tensions that may arise in the frail balance between the different roles are most of the time due to down-to-earth aspects, in particular childcare, not only in the long run but also sporadically, when children are ill for instance: [A set of chambers] is a business, and each member of the chambers generates an income, for that chambers. Should your child be ill, you can’t go to court – you may not be able to turn up on a case, you may cause solicitors a whole load of hassle in order to get someone there who won’t know the case, […] So a solicitor won’t use you again, if you let them down, they will not use you at all, because you are a risk, because again, they are also a business, they want somebody reliable, you then lose, lose funds for chambers, and that’s just one example, and it goes without saying in our culture […] as soon as a child is ill, or hurt, the first person they want is Mom. I know my children do. [Interview 2]
21 Whether or not children want their mother or whether the interviewee had absorbed this social norm and made it hers, in the vast majority of cases, it is still the mother, and not the father, who deals with childcare issues, because of the specific status conferred on mothers as primary caretakers. Most interestingly, this specific status has been conceptualised by Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll, as analytically distinct from the female gender,35 and this is particularly relevant in an intersectional perspective as it refrains from equating women and mothers, without denying the intermingled dimensions of womanhood and motherhood.36 The two sociologists use expectation states theory,37 to try and account for inequalities. According to them, gender and motherhood are external status characteristics that are imposed by social beliefs and that come together with performance expectations.38 They conclude that motherhood is a specific status that has a direct negative impact in the workplace because the normative imperatives linked to motherhood conflict with those that apply to a committed, ideal-type worker. This conflict leads to the build-up of an imperceptible maternal wall. 39 Such conclusions echo the life experiences reported by interviewees, for instance a solicitor who showed how motherhood had modified her managers’ expectations: Because I was a mother, I felt as though they didn’t want to stress me, for instance doing research. […] I kept telling them that I could do – they had a lot of work to be done, but they didn’t want to delegate. […] but that was the very reason that I was there: to learn. And the only way to learn is if you delegate some of the work to me. I was a graduate, and I was quite capable of doing research. Anyway, there was a change of the management, the manager […] handed over to a female director, and
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she actually gave me research work to do, and it made a big difference. [Interview 1]
22 The modified expectations this solicitor had to confront apply to women when they are first perceived as mothers. The projections and assumptions made by colleagues and, more importantly, managers, will shape their careers differently and often circumscribe women to lesser roles as a result.
23 Sommerlad also underlined the discrepancy between women’s different roles in a study on outsider status and professional socialization in the solicitors’ profession. A woman who wanted to qualify as a solicitor as a mature student noted that older women – who have often had children – have become used to doing caring work and that it is more difficult for them to cultivate the kind of arrogance that’s expected from a lawyer, to give their voice and body language the self-confidence and the certainty that are essential to the authority of the profession.40 The gap between the opposing imperative normatives is such that it generates further hurdles for women who want to join the profession later in life.41 Another interviewee, who was heading a department in a law firm, observed that this gap could be deconstructed as superficial, if motherhood stopped being so undervalued. Drawing on a long-standing feminist insight, she listed a whole “personal skills-set that maternity brings”, including “a capacity to plan, to organize, to look ahead, to manage their resources, to manage a project” that could be valued in the workplace but is often disregarded [Interview 13].
24 If expectations and social roles play a major part in structuring behaviour and career patterns, other day-to-day constraints also contribute to the existence of the maternal wall. In the legal profession, one of these constraints is the hours. The situation differs for solicitors and for barristers. As far as solicitors are concerned, much of the problem, as identified notably by Sommerlad, derives from the macho glorification of workaholism and long hours, which contribute to placing women on the side of deviance and weakness because of their responsibilities as caretakers.42 The situation of barristers is different, as their timetable is very much linked to the court’s, which generates further complication when asking for flexible working. One of the difficulties in juggling a barrister’s work with family life is the unpredictability: when they are instructed by a solicitor, they do not know how long the case is going to be, whether it is going to come in early, late, or be rescheduled at a different time. Besides, at a certain level of seniority, cases may often be listed for five days in a row (Monday to Friday). If a barrister has their Friday off as a flexible working arrangement, they cannot take up these cases and will only be able “to pick up the rubbish small ones” [Interview 4]. Another solution is doing a paperwork practice and being in chambers most of the time, but in both situations the barrister’s practice will suffer. The fee structure also impacts the actual possibility of working part time, as barristers give a percentage of their earnings to chambers. Those working part time do not earn as much and thus do not give as much percentage, thereby reducing the incentive to arrange for flexible working: I know lots of chambers where the senior members think ‘well why should we be subsidising the part-timers?’ Because they’re just as difficult to clerk, maybe even harder to clerk, so more effort is going in by the clerks to arrange their diaries, but in fact they’re not bringing in as much income. [Interview 4]
25 Such considerations may provide some explanation for another facet of the maternal wall, i.e. the relative confinement of women to certain areas of law, or their relative exclusion from others, to put it differently, notably criminal law. In this area in
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particular, it is not rare that cases last for weeks, sometimes for months, and may require spending prolonged periods of time in another town.
26 The role of clerks, hinted at by the interviewee cited above, is linked to the timetable but expands much further. Clerks are the legal assistants who interact with solicitors, distribute the caseload to the different barristers in chambers, manage their diaries, and often keep the accounts. A number of practices inherited from past generations of clerks still operate and a chambers’ manager interviewed in London gave insights into the role they can play for women’s career in particular [Interview 6]. In spite of the existence of an Institute of Barrister’s Clerks providing training, co-optation often prevails (from father to son or uncle to nephew) and it has remained a very male- dominated branch. As of May 2000 (latest available figures), 74% of IBC members were men and 26% women.43 Sexism long prevailed in the traditional way clerks used to work, sometimes aiming more at improving their own situation (financially or other) than that of others. And it was not always advantageous to favour female barristers rather than male, as the latter’s career suffered fewer interruptions. Fixed salaries have been introduced in most sets, but clerks used to earn a percentage of the barrister’s fees and the power relationship was often very complex. Younger clerks are better trained, familiarised with sales techniques and, perhaps even more importantly, with diversity and equality issues; their renewal can only be good for women, and for mothers in particular, as is suggested by the following comment: Women at the Bar, in large numbers, is a relatively recent thing; you still hear things like ‘Well, she just didn’t do it the way that I expected’, and what they really say is ‘She didn’t do it like a man’. They [the clerks] don’t accept that there are different styles, different approaches, that clients want different approaches. [Interview 6]
27 Several studies have tried to understand the reason behind dropouts, and they highlight the key role of maternity and motherhood: family responsibilities are the most frequent reason why women do not renew their practising certificate, whereas for men it is generally due to anticipated retirement.44 Indeed, the difficulties experienced with part-time work, with juggling family and work often lead to career changes – from a mere change of specialism to the decision to work in a completely different sector or sometimes, to stop working altogether.45
28 This pessimistic view of a patriarchal profession is further supported by a 2004 lawsuit, Siân Heard & Fellows v Sinclair Roche & Temperley.46 Lawsuits opposing lawyers to their employers on the grounds of discrimination are uncommon or at least seldom go public. Law firms and chambers are well aware of the risks at stake, both in legal terms and for their reputation, thus these cases often settle out of court.47 In this case, Ms Heard and Ms Fellows, the claimants, decided to sue their employers because of their lack of progression in the law firm and the unfavourable treatment they had been subjected to (linked to maternity leave and requests to work part time, in particular). The Employment Tribunal openly described the culture of the firm as “discriminatory” and held that the claimants had never been given the same opportunities as their male counterparts to achieve the level of billings that was necessary to achieve full equity partnership. The tribunal’s decision sheds light on the long-term effects of maternity leave when no form of compensation is introduced, and illustrates the vertical segregation which is one aspect of the maternal wall – especially for mothers who work part time, as well as their confinement to certain types of cases. Both claimants were
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awarded between £400,000 and £500,000, a large sum of money, which shows the courts and tribunals do take these cases seriously.
29 The details of the case deliver an interesting perspective on the difficulty of separating sex discrimination and maternity and pregnancy discrimination, and help us to understand how their combination amounts to intersectional discrimination. Indeed, what defines intersectional discrimination is the impossibility of separating the different grounds, which are intermingled in the manner of a “marble cake”.48
Conclusion
30 Resorting to the concept of maternal wall to describe these situations of discrimination highlights the long-term negative effects of motherhood on women’s careers in the legal profession. Sadly, the bias faced by mothers in this specific trade may be replicated throughout society at large. In the words of Joan Williams, “many women never get near the glass ceiling because of the ‘maternal wall’”.49 A study published in 2012 on the wage penalty for motherhood50 calculated a wage penalty exceeding 50 per cent in the UK, which places the country in the group where penalties are highest.51 In this respect, parallels can also be drawn between the situation in the UK and that in the US. As underlined by The Shriver Report, “Motherhood is now a greater predictor of inequality than gender in the United States of America”.52 This ties in with the analysis of the situation in the English legal profession; the domino effect of the maternal wall and motherhood wage penalty ripples through the economy and society. Their intersectional dimension is made even clearer if we think that, still in the US, “while most women without children make 90 cents to a man’s dollar, mothers make only 73 cents, single mothers make about 60 cents and mothers of color earn as little as 54 cents to a man’s dollar”.53
31 We are far from the complete overhaul of relations between the sexes some first-wave British feminists had in mind and the imbalance of power between men and women remains striking in the employment field and may be even more acute in the legal profession, as is hinted at by the interviews. However, the concept of maternal wall offers a framework to encompass a wide range of pervasive biases and stereotypic views that may enable courts and policy makers to target more efficiently a type of discrimination that prevents a majority of women from reaching equality with men, in the field of employment as in other aspects of life.
32 These questions should be openly addressed by political leaders, who often leave them to equality bodies such as the EHRC in the UK, without instilling the necessary political will. In times of austerity, those bodies are often underfunded and the budgetary cuts impact women and gender equality sharply, as was recently underlined in a report on equality between women and men in the European Union.54 According to the report, austerity policies often evolve into a reprivatisation of care and a return to traditional gender roles. For working mothers, this frequently translates into trivial day-to-day compromises: “I think on the whole, it’s not only the social pressure on women [...]. It’s other things, and the ‘Who comes home from the office early if the children are ill?’ and things like that.” [Interview 15]. The words of this interviewee express in simple terms how these complex loaded questions transfer into private lives, reminding us of the validity of the famous second wave feminist slogan “the personal is political”: plus ça change …?
33 Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec is an Associate Professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where she teaches legal English. She is an alumna of the ENS de
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Cachan and was a visiting fellow at Queen Mary University Law School. She has specialised in gender, discrimination and intersectionality issues, especially in the field of sociology of law
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NOTES
1. Deborah Swiss and Judith Walker, Women and the Work/Family Dilemma: How Today’s Professional Women are Confronting the Maternal Wall (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1993) 2. Joan C. Williams, “Hitting the Maternal Wall”, Academe 90.6 (2004), p. 18. 3. See the maternal wall definition provided by the Work and Family Researchers Network, at https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/m/maternal-wall-definitions, consulted 26 May 2017. 4. Justine F. Andronici and Debra S. Katz, “Scaling the Maternal Wall”, Ms Magazine, Winter 2007. 5. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970. The Maternal Dilemma (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 8. 6. Françoise Héritier, Masculin/Féminin II. Dissoudre la hiérarchie (Paris, Odile Jacob, 2012). 7. Ann Berrington, “Childlessness in the UK”, in Michaela Kreyenfeld and Dirk Konietzka (eds.), Childlessness in Europe: Contexts, Causes, and Consequences (Cham, Springer, 2017), p. 57. Interestingly, the vast majority of statistics, articles and research papers use the terms ‘childless’ and ‘childnessness’, with negative suffixes, to refer to this social fact. 8. Pew Research Center 2010 figures, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/06/25/ childlessness-up-among-all-women-down-among-women-with-advanced-degrees/, last consulted 26 May 2017. 9. Ann Berrington, “Childlessness in the UK”, p. 70.
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10. Office for National Statistics, Women in the labour market: 2013. See full report at https:// www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/ articles/womeninthelabourmarket/2013-09-25, last consulted 26 May 2017. 11. The fieldwork this article partly relies on included 19 sociological, semi-conducted interviews with women solicitors, barristers, judges and equality officers and produced qualitative data on identity-related issues within the context of the English legal profession. The profile of the interviewees covered the whole range of the different branches of the English legal profession (apart from Legal Executives) and was as follows: 9 solicitors (including 2 partners and 2 law graduates looking for a training contract), 6 barristers (including a Queen’s Counsel), 2 judges (a district judge and a senior judge), an equality officer for the Bar Council and a chambers’ administrator. The qualitative data was analysed by using discourse analysis that focused on discursive themes across interview data. So as to preserve the interviewees’ anonymity and according to the rules set up by Queen Mary University, where the fieldwork was designed and conducted, based on the Data Protection Act 1998, the interviews are not followed by a descriptor including their age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. This also fits in with the holistic perspective favoured by intersectional studies and reduces the risk of an essentialist approach. For more details on the interviews, see Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec, ‘‘Dans quelle case rentrez- vous ?’ Identité et intersectionnalité’, ¿ Interrogations ? online journal, n°20. Penser l’intersectionnalité, June 2015. 12. These patterns apply across the board, as is shown by the EHRC, Research on the experiences of employers and mothers in the 21st Century, 2014-15, https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our- work/news/pregnancy-and-maternity-discrimination-forces-thousands-new-mothers-out-their- jobs, last consulted 26 May 2017; their 2016 digital campaign #PowertotheBump further demonstrates that this is a burning societal issue. 13. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989), pp. 139-167 and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, Stanford Law Review 43 (1991), pp. 1241-1299. 14. See Sirma Bilge, « Théorisations féministes de l'intersectionnalité », Diogène 225.1 (2009), pp. 70-88. Recent publications include Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2016) and Ange-Marie Hancock, Intersectionality. An intellectual history (Oxford, OUP, 2016). Matthew Reisz’s article in the Times Higher Education (19 May 2016) illustrates the spreading of the theory/concept to a wider public: “Intersectionality: ‘the most exciting theory in the world’”. 15. Although essentialism should not be rejected outright, as may be linked to the very process of thought, it is often associated with over-generalisation, disproportionate normative weight, biological determinism and the naturalising of socially and historically generated difference. For a critique of essentialism and its different meanings, see Anne Phillips, “What’s wrong with essentialism?” Distinktion: Scandinavian journal of social theory, 11.1 (2010), pp. 47-60. 16. See the Bar barometer 2014, https://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/media/1599997/ bsb_barometer_report_112pp_june_13.pdf, last consulted 26 May 2017, and Higher Education statistics, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php? option=com_datatables&Itemid=121&view=category&catdex=3, last consulted 26 May 2017. 17. Clare McGlynn, “The Status of Women Lawyers in the United Kingdom”, in Ulrike Schultz and Gisela Shaw (eds), Women in the World’s Legal Profession (Oxford & Portland (OR), Hart, 2003), p.145. 18. For instance, in the barrister’s branch of the profession, women made up 48% of those called to the Bar in 1998 (see Clare McGlynn, Ibid.., p.153); 52.2% in 2008 (Bar Council, “Annual Statistics as at December 2008”); and 48.8% in 2014-15 (Bar Standards Board, “Called to the Bar Statistics”). 19. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/18, last consulted 26 May 2017.
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20. For more detail on the comparator issue, see Sandra Fredman, Discrimination Law (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 99-100. 21. https://www.gov.uk/maternity-pay-leave/overview, last consulted 26 May 2017. 22. Edmund Phelps, “The Statistical Theory of Sexism and Racism”, American Economic Review 62.4 (1972), p. 659. 23. 2014 Bar Council Guidance. http://www.barcouncil.org.uk/for-the-bar/professional-practice- and-ethics/equality-and-diversity-guidance/maternitypaternityparental-leave-policies-things- to-think-about/, last consulted 26 May 2017. 24. 2016 version of the pack at http://www.barcouncil.org.uk/media/404121/ bar_council_tips__advice_and_resources_family_career_breaks_for_parents_and_carers_2016.pdf, last consulted 26 May 2017. 25. The BSB carried out research among women at the Bar in 2016 to improve their knowledge of the implementation and effectiveness of the Rules and to explore issues which may be contributing to a lack of retention, https://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/media/1773934/ women_at_the_bar_-_full_report_-_final_12_07_16.pdf, last consulted 26 May 2017. 26. As mentioned in the survey undertaken by the Commercial Bar Association (COMBAR), “Pupillage, Maternity Leave and Pro Bono Work. A Survey, 2005”. 27. Law Society, “Obstacles and Barriers to the career development of woman solicitors”, Report Prepared for the Law Society by Insight Oxford Ltd., 2010, p. 9. The issues at stake around flexibility in the legal profession differ from large-scale analyses of part-time work in Britain for instance. Indeed, these analyses often stress the fact that part-time work is frequently imposed on women, which leads to lower wages etc., as is underlined by Marie-Annick Mattioli, “Le marché du travail et les femmes au Royaume-Uni: précarité de l’emploi et mères-célibataires (2000-2015)”, in Florence Binard and Guyonne Leduc, Mères-célibataires, De la malédiction au libre- choix ? Regards croisés France/Grande-Bretagne (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2016), pp. 91-110. 28. Emanuela Lombardo, Petra Meier, Mieke Verloo, The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policy-Making, (London, Routledge, 2009), esp. p. 125. A similar analysis of the pervasive effect of the business case for gender equality has developed in the field of development, both at academic and institutional level. See for instance Ginger Ging-Dwan Boyd, “The Girl Effect: A Neoliberal Instrumentalization of Gender Equality”, Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development 15 (2016), pp. 146-180. 29. Hilary Sommerlad, “Women Solicitors in a Fractured Profession: Intersections of Gender and Professionalism in England and Wales”, International Journal of the Legal Profession 9.3 (2002), p. 215. 30. Daniel Muzio, David M. Brock and Roy Suddaby, “Professions and Institutional Change: Towards an Institutionalist Sociology of the Professions”, Journal of Management Studies 50.5 (2013) pp. 699-721. 31. Law Society, “Obstacles and Barriers to the career development of woman solicitors”, p. 8. 32. See in particular “‘A pit to put women in’: professionalism, work intensification, sexualisation and work–life balance in the legal profession in England and Wales”, International Journal of the Legal Profession 23.1 (2016), pp. 61-82. 33. Margaret Thornton, “Work/life or work/work? Corporate legal practice in the twenty-first century” International Journal of the Legal Profession 23.1 (2016), pp. 13-39. 34. Linda Tiedje, 2004, “Processes of Change in Work/Home Incompatibilities: Employed Mothers 1986–1999”, Journal of Social Issues 60.4 (2004), p. 788. 35. Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll, “Motherhood as a Status Characteristic”, Journal of Social Issues 60.4 (2004), p. 687. 36. The importance of applying an intersectional perspective to gender studies is put forward in a very intelligible way by Stephanie A. Shields in “Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective”, Sex Roles 59 (2008), pp. 301-311.
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37. The theory was introduced in the 1970s by Joseph Berger et al. (“Status characteristics and social interaction”, American Sociological Review 37.3 (1972), pp. 241-55) and developed in the 2000s by Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll (“Expectation States Theory” in John Delamater (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, (Springer, 2006) pp. 29-51). Expectation states theory seeks to explain the emergence of status hierarchies in situations where actors are oriented towards the accomplishment of a collective goal or task. 38. Cecilia Ridgeway, “Gender, Status, and the Social Psychology of Expectations” in Paula England (ed.), Theory On Gender/ Feminism On Theory, (Hawthorne (NY), Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 175-197. 39. Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll, “Motherhood as a Status Characteristic”, p. 697. 40. Hilary Sommerlad, “‘What Are You Doing Here? You Should Be Working in a Hair Salon or Something’: Outsider Status and Professional Socialization in the Solicitors’ Profession”, Web JCLI 2 (2008). p. 12. 41. Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec, “Ageism, Solicitors and Female Mature Entrants: An Awkward Combination”, in Hazel Conley and Tessa Wright (eds), Handbook of Discrimination at Work (London, Gower Publishing, 2011), pp. 219-233. 42. Hilary Sommerlad, “Women Solicitors in a Fractured Profession: Intersections of Gender and Professionalism in England and Wales”, International Journal of the Legal Profession 9.3 (2002), pp. 217-18. 43. Statistics from the Institute of Barrister’s Clerks website, http://www.ibc.org.uk/about/, last consulted 26 May 2017. 44. Lisa Webley and Liz Duff, “Women Solicitors as a Barometer for Problems within the Legal Profession – Time to Put Values before Profit?”, Journal of Law and Society 34.3 (2007), p. 375. 45. “The law of motherhood”, The Guardian, 28 April 2011. 46. All quotes and figures from Siân Heard & Fellows v Sinclair Roche & Temperley. Cases 2201499/02 & 2201637/02, London Central Employment Tribunal, 2004. 47. Interview 18. A similar remark was made concerning LGB lawyers: when they felt discriminated against, almost none of her interviewees engaged in a lawsuit (Chittenden, Tara (Law Society Strategic Research Unit), Career Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Solicitors, 2006, pp. 58-59). Robert Verkaik illustrated the phenomenon in The Independent, with his article ‘Law firm settles ‘homophobia’ discrimination case’ (21 August 2007). 48. Metaphor borrowed from Julia Jordan-Zachery, “Am I a Black Woman or a Woman Who Is Black? A Few Thoughts on the Meaning of Intersectionality”, Politics & Gender, 3. 2 (2007), pp. 254-63. 49. Joan C. Williams, “Hitting the Maternal Wall”, p. 17. 50. Michelle J. Budig and Paula England, “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood”, American Sociological Review 66.2 (2001), pp. 204-225. 51. Michelle J. Budig, Joya Misra and Irene Boeckmann, “The Motherhood Penalty in Cross- National Perspective: The Importance of Work–Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes”, Social Politics 19.2 (2012), p. 175. 52. Kristin, Rowe-Kinkbeiner, “Breaking Through the Maternal Wall: The Time is Now”, The Shriver Report, 1st April 2014. 53. Ibid. 54. Ernest Urtasun (Rapporteur), Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, ‘Report on equality between women and men in the European Union in 2014-2015’ (2016/2249(INI)), 23 February 2017.
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RÉSUMÉS
En dépit d’évolutions non négligeables depuis leur entrée dans les professions juridiques (1922, Angleterre/pays de Galles), nul ne peut ignorer que les femmes gravissent les échelons plus lentement, sont souvent cantonnées à certains domaines du droit et, par conséquent, ne représentent qu’une faible proportion de la magistrature. Pourtant, les statistiques des écoles de droit, et la parité observée en début de carrière depuis une vingtaine d’années, tendent à saper l’argument selon lequel les femmes perceraient petit à petit, tout n’étant qu’une question de temps : plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose ? Cet article offre une étude de cas centrée sur l’égalité femmes-hommes au sein des professions juridiques anglo-galloises, qui souligne le poids de la maternité dans la lente transformation des rôles selon le sexe dans les professions dites libérales. L’auteure y met en œuvre le concept de mur maternel. Ce concept, au-delà des écarts salariaux, s’intéresse à d’autres impacts de la maternité en matière de carrière et de discriminations ; il apporte un éclairage singulier à des témoignage d’avocates déclarant en entretien qu’il n’y avait pas de discrimination fondée sur le sexe dans leur profession, mais que celles fondées sur la maternité étaient très fréquentes. Sur le plan théorique, cette dissociation mène l’auteure à revendiquer la construction de la maternité en tant que facette identitaire intersectionnelle afin d’éviter le double écueil de la biologisation et de l’essentialisme. Sur le plan pratique, les horaires, les contraintes spécifiques d’emploi du temps, le rôle des clerks au sein des cabinets, tous ces éléments contribuent à une perpétuation du patriarcat. S’appuyant sur une enquête de terrain ainsi que sur la littérature existante, l’article tente de démontrer que, malgré l’existence d’un cadre légal adéquat et la mise en œuvre de mesures internes pour l’égalité dans un secteur en pleine expansion, c’est le déséquilibre qui continue de caractériser l’accès aux positions de pouvoir entre hommes et femmes avocat.e.s (et par conséquent chez les juges, ces professions étant intégrées dans la tradition de common law).
In spite of significant change since their entry into the legal profession in 1922 in England and Wales, the slower progression of women on the professional ladder, their relative confinement to certain areas of the law and, consequently, the small proportion they account for in the senior judiciary remain blatant. Yet, undermining the ‘trickle-up’ argument, women now outnumber men among law students, achieve better academic results on the whole, and have made up around 50% of the profession at entry level for about twenty years: plus ça change…? The article presents a case study focusing on gender equality issues in the legal profession in England and Wales that underlines the specific weight of motherhood in the slow transformation of women’s role vis-à-vis that of men. The author implements the concept of maternal wall (Swiss & Walker, 1993), which looks at the pay gap but also at other impacts of maternity in terms of career and discrimination. Applied to the English legal profession, this sheds light on the testimonies of women barristers and solicitors who have often said they believed there was no sex discrimination, but that discrimination on the grounds of maternity was rife. On a theoretical level, this leads the author to argue for the construction of maternity and motherhood as intersectional identity facets, so as to avoid the two-fold pitfall of naturalization and essentialism. On a practical level, the hours, the specific timetable constraints, the role of clerks in chambers, etc., all contribute to a perpetuation of patriarchy in the profession. By relying on examples derived from fieldwork as well as the existing literature on the subject, the paper aims to show that in spite of an accurate statutory frame and the enforcement of internal gender equality policies in a rapidly expanding sector, the overall imbalance of power between men and women lawyers (and therefore judges) has not shifted.
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INDEX
Mots-clés : genre, intersectionnalité, professions juridiques, mur maternel, ségrégation professionnelle, femmes Keywords : gender, intersectionality, legal profession, maternal wall, occupational segregation, women
AUTEUR
ALEXANDRINE GUYARD-NEDELEC
ISJPS, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne
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Déconstruire le patriarcat dans l’Église d’Angleterre : enjeux et résistances Deconstructing Patriarchy in the Church of England: Challenges and Resistance
Églantine Jamet-Moreau
Introduction
1 Le 26 janvier 2015, l’Église d’Angleterre célébra, pour la première fois, la consécration d’une femme évêque, Libby Lane1, mettant fin à l’exclusion des femmes du pouvoir ecclésial et laissant penser que l’égalité des sexes devenait enfin une réalité. C’est dès le début du XXe siècle qu’émergea la question des droits des femmes et de leur statut au sein de l’Église d’Angleterre. L’importance des changements que connurent les femmes durant tout ce siècle et l’évolution spectaculaire de leurs rôles dans la société civile sont loin d’être étrangers à l’intensification de leurs revendications. L’institution ecclésiale ne cautionna, certes, pas toutes les demandes des féministes, gardant une ligne plutôt conservatrice, mais elle dut s’adapter à la nouvelle organisation sociale et repenser plusieurs aspects de son discours concernant, notamment, la famille et le partage sexué des tâches. Les balbutiements du mouvement pour une plus grande égalité entre femmes et hommes dans l’Église furent concomitants de la première vague de féminisme du début du XXe siècle, lors de laquelle les femmes se mobilisèrent pour obtenir le droit de vote. L’Église dut s’interroger sur les modes d’élection démocratique qu’elle pratiquait et qui, eux aussi, excluaient les femmes de toute participation. Elle accorda aux femmes, en 1914, le droit d’élire les membres des Conseils de paroisse et d’y siéger au même titre que les hommes2. Les combats se succédèrent ensuite, de l’autorisation du prêche féminin, acquise en 1922, à la question du statut des travailleuses laïques et des diaconesses, avant d’évoluer dans la deuxième partie du XXe siècle, et sous l’impulsion de la deuxième vague de féminisme des années 1960, vers le débat autour de l’accès au diaconat (obtenu en 1985), de l’ordination à la
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prêtrise (obtenue en 1992), puis, finalement, de la consécration à l’épiscopat (obtenue en 2014).
2 La lutte pour l’égalité entre femmes et hommes dans l’Église anglicane se heurte aux mêmes obstacles que dans la société civile mais doit, par ailleurs, composer avec un système patriarcal qui semble légitimé par la volonté divine. En effet, le monothéisme est fondé sur la croyance en un Dieu tout puissant et créateur connoté masculin, le christianisme célèbre l’incarnation de Dieu sur la Terre à travers le corps d’un homme, la tradition judéo-chrétienne a stigmatisé le corps féminin comme impur et les Pères de l’Église ont contribué à l’institution d’une anthropologie chrétienne androcentrée, excluant les femmes du sacré puis les cantonnant à la maternité. La déconstruction du patriarcat dans l’institution ecclésiale se révèle, dès lors, bien plus complexe.
3 Cet article souhaite examiner la question de l’accès des femmes à la prêtrise et à l’épiscopat dans l’Église d’Angleterre dans sa dimension de remise en cause de l’ordre patriarcal. Car il ne s’agit pas simplement d’ordonner des femmes à côté des hommes sans repenser la question de la différence des sexes dans l’interprétation des textes sacrés, dans la tradition et l’enseignement de l’Église, dans les codes et les pratiques de l’institution, ou encore dans la conception du pouvoir et du ministère. Cette problématique est d’ailleurs commune à l’ensemble des Églises chrétiennes, et revêt un sens particulier chez les catholiques romains et chez les anglicans où le rôle du clerc conserve une dimension sacrée. À travers l’analyse des points centraux du débat sur le sacerdoce féminin, on interrogera les modalités de cette remise en cause du patriarcat. Quelles justifications théologiques utilisent les personnes favorables à la prêtrise féminine et leurs adversaires ? Quelle est la construction anthropologique qui sous- tend l’opposition à l’ordination des femmes ? Quelles résistances demeurent aujourd’hui malgré la consécration de femmes évêques depuis deux ans et l’ordination de femmes prêtres depuis plus de vingt ans ? Le féminisme et le christianisme sont-ils réellement compatibles ?
Un débat théologique
La hiérarchie masculin/féminin
4 Bien que la « valence différentielle des sexes »3, fondatrice de toute société humaine, soit antérieure à l’ère judéo-chrétienne, il demeure, néanmoins, que la transposition de la domination masculine dans la sphère religieuse permet a posteriori de donner une légitimité sacrée à cette domination et de la renforcer. Michelle Perrot souligne : « Les grandes religions monothéistes confortent cette représentation au nom de la morale et du sacré. La femme n’est pas seulement l’autre inférieure, elle est impure, porteuse du péché, du mal et du malheur qu’Ève a introduits dans le monde. Il faut se méfier de sa parole et de son corps.4 » La lecture littérale des textes établissant la nature seconde d’Ève et sa responsabilité dans la Chute de l’humanité5 conduit à considérer la domination masculine comme expression de la volonté divine et à exclure les femmes de toute fonction importante de la société, les cantonnant à la seule activité dont elles semblent capables : la maternité, activité qui ancre les femmes dans la sphère domestique. La vision des deux sexes comme ontologiquement différents et complémentaires est au cœur de l’argumentation des opposant-e-s du sacerdoce féminin6 et se trouve ainsi validée par la Parole de Dieu. Le théologien catholique John Wijngaards résume la justification de la subordination
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féminine fondée sur les textes bibliques : « It was God himself who subjected woman to man at creation.7 »
5 Les épîtres pauliniennes confirment cette lecture. Paul s’appuie, en effet, sur le récit génésique pour confirmer la nécessité de la soumission des femmes et leur interdire toute fonction liturgique : « Je ne permets pas à la femme d’enseigner ni de faire la loi à l’homme. Qu’elle garde le silence. C’est Adam en effet qui fut formé le premier, Ève ensuite. Et ce n’est pas Adam qui se laissa séduire, mais la femme qui, séduite, se rendit coupable de transgression.8 »
6 Paul établit une hiérarchie très claire qui place l’homme au-dessous du Christ mais au- dessus de la femme, démontrant bien le statut inférieur du sexe féminin9. Les partisan- e-s du sacerdoce féminin insistent sur le fait que les textes bibliques ont été écrits et interprétés dans le contexte de civilisations fortement patriarcales et sont convaincu-e- s du caractère culturel et non universel des prescriptions de Paul. La comparaison est faite entre la question de la subordination féminine et celle de l’esclavage, qui semble justifiée par les Écritures et est, pourtant, maintenant rejetée par l’Église. Toutefois, les adversaires de la prêtrise féminine, tel Graham Leonard, évêque de Londres de 1981 à 199110, réfutent l’invocation de la dimension culturelle des Écritures. Il déclara, lors du Synode général de 1978 : If both our Lord and saint Paul were so conditioned, what about us? By what criteria do we judge that our conditioning in this century accords with the Divine will but that in the earlier generations does not? 11
La question de la masculinité
7 Les opposant-e-s du sacerdoce féminin qui fondent leur argumentation sur les Écritures soulignent également que les douze apôtres choisis par Jésus étaient tous de sexe masculin. Les apôtres étant les seuls présents lors de l’institution de l’eucharistie au soir du Jeudi Saint, ils sont considérés comme les premiers prêtres, ceux qui ont été ordonnés par le Christ lui-même. C’est pourquoi on parle de la succession apostolique et, malgré leur schisme d’avec Rome, les Anglicans considèrent qu’ils n’ont pas brisé cette succession apostolique. En revanche, l’ordination de femmes à la prêtrise constituerait, selon ses adversaires, une rupture fondamentale de la succession apostolique. Une fois de plus, se pose la question de l’interprétation des textes bibliques. Les partisan-e-s du sacerdoce féminin comparent l’argument du sexe des apôtres avec les autres critères qui caractérisaient ces hommes. Si les douze apôtres étaient de sexe masculin, ils étaient aussi tous juifs, circoncis et habitants de la Palestine. La plupart d’entre eux étaient mariés et pères de famille12. Pourtant, les différentes Églises chrétiennes ordonnent, depuis deux mille ans, des individus qui ne possèdent pas forcément toutes ces caractéristiques. Ces différents critères ne semblent, donc, pas constitutifs de la nature du ministère. Seul le sexe du prêtre paraît fondamental et doit demeurer conforme à la tradition apostolique. La masculinité des apôtres est ainsi considérée comme un attribut tout à fait différent de leur judaïté. Pour les adversaires de l’ordination des femmes, l’égalité des sexes n’implique pas l’indifférenciation des rôles ni l’identité des fonctions. La théologienne catholique Janine Hourcade explique : « C’est dans cette articulation de l’égalité et de la différence que se justifient les deux rôles différents alloués dans l’Église à l’homme et à la femme et l’attribution à l’homme du sacerdoce ministériel.13 » On remarque l’importance d’un marquage très net de la différenciation des sexes et de la répartition sexuée des tâches dans la société comme
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dans l’Église. Margaret Hood, de l’association des femmes opposées à l’ordination des femmes (WAOW, Women Against the Ordination of Women) expliquait, en janvier 1986, qu’elle déplorait le féminisme militant qui avait pénétré l’Église. Son souhait était le suivant : « a ‘Christian feminism’ that recognized motherhood as the true fulfilment of a woman’s God-given nature.14 » L’opposition entre la maternité, fonction dévolue par Dieu aux femmes, et le ministère sacerdotal qui serait réservé aux hommes est, d’ailleurs, fréquemment utilisée dans l’argumentation des opposant-e-s de l’ordination des femmes. La dichotomie établie entre la figure du Christ, Dieu incarné sous la forme d’un être de sexe masculin, et la figure de Marie, femme choisie pour être la mère du Fils de Dieu, semble fonder cette distinction entre les rôles assignés par Dieu aux deux sexes.
8 Se pose également la question de la représentation du Christ par le prêtre. La masculinité du Christ paraît ainsi essentielle à certain-e-s, impliquant la nécessité que Jésus ne soit représenté à l’autel que par des individus de sexe masculin. C’est l’un des arguments majeurs de l’Église catholique et, chez les anglicans, des anglo-catholiques, étant donné qu’il s’agit d’une lecture sacramentelle du ministère ordonné. La déclaration papale de 1976, Inter Insigniores, souligne : « Le prêtre […] agit in persona Christi.15 » Le ministre doit, donc, avoir une « ressemblance naturelle » avec le Christ, ce qui exclut les femmes de la prêtrise. Graham Leonard insiste sur la dimension fondamentale de ce symbolisme et sur la hiérarchie qu’il préserve : The priest is representative and witness of the fact that Christ is the Head of the Church. […] If you give women the job of representing Christ, […] you are changing our understanding of God and you are changing our relationship to Him16.
9 Cette importance accordée à la masculinité du Christ est contestée par les partisan-e-s du sacerdoce féminin pour qui l'essentiel de l’Incarnation consiste en la venue de Dieu sous une forme humaine, quel que soit son sexe. Car, si l’on considère le sexe sous lequel Dieu s’est incarné comme un élément fondamental, alors on peut penser que les femmes sont tout bonnement exclues du salut que le Christ est venu annoncer. Selon Michael Peers, primat de l’Église du Canada, le problème de la représentation doit se poser dans les deux sens : The whole question is not Can a woman priest represent a male redeemer? But Can an exclusively male priesthood represent human redemption?17
Un débat anthropologique
Nature et vocation féminine
10 La conception androcentrée de la différence des sexes assimile le masculin à l’universel et cantonne le féminin dans une nature particulière essentialisée et passive. Selon Jonathan Sedgwick, prêtre anglican :
F0 F0 5B Misogyny5D results in a desire to categorize, to contain, and to patronize the opposite sex. As well as being a bruising rejection of individual women, it is of course also a loss to oneself for it is to run afraid from the variety of creation, and it is built not on strength but on weakness and fear18.
11 En attribuant aux femmes une vocation particulière, distincte de celle qui est dévolue aux hommes, on en revient à considérer qu’il existe une « nature » féminine. Et ce raisonnement a conduit à établir un parallèle entre la possibilité pour les hommes d’accéder au sacerdoce et l’existence d’une vocation féminine qui serait la maternité. La dichotomie entre maternité et prêtrise est d’autant plus révélatrice qu’elle implique
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une sorte de compensation masculine de l’impossibilité biologique de porter la vie. Ainsi, Graham Leonard compare le désir des femmes d’accéder au sacerdoce avec la frustration de certains hommes de ne pouvoir porter un enfant : I don’t particularly want to do that, but there are obviously some lovely things about being a mother and the point is, I cannot. I’m not a woman. I hope I can show motherly care in one sense, in my pastoral care, but for me it is a non-question and I feel very sad for those women who have been given the idea that they can think in terms of a vocation to the priesthood19.
12 La mise sur le même plan de la maternité et de la prêtrise, comme deux rôles distincts, mais aux fonctions similaires, dévolus aux femmes et aux hommes, prend une résonnance toute particulière à la lumière de l’hypothèse de Françoise Héritier concernant l’appropriation, par les hommes, de la fécondité féminine20. On pourrait, ainsi, évoquer une projection symbolique de cette appropriation dans la fonction sacerdotale. Jutta Brueck, prêtre anglicane, remarque : « In Jewish and Christian history, male priests have been given sacred power to counter the female power of creation.21 » La symbolique maternelle est présente dans la fonction du prêtre. Ces hommes en robe se font eux-mêmes appeler « Père », mais revêtent un rôle maternel vis-à-vis de leurs fidèles. C’est bien la logique des religions patriarcales, dans lesquelles le Dieu père tout- puissant est créateur, le féminin étant dépossédé de toute implication féconde. Si le sacerdoce peut être perçu comme une sorte d’appropriation symbolique de la fécondité par les hommes, dans le but de compenser la fécondité biologique propre aux femmes, on peut comprendre la menace que constitue pour ces hommes l’éventualité que des femmes soient ordonnées prêtres. Elles cumuleraient alors la fécondité biologique et la fécondité spirituelle, et les hommes seraient privés de tout rôle exclusif. En revendiquant l’accès au sacerdoce, les femmes se heurtent aussi à une conception misogyne et ancestrale de la différence des sexes, fondée sur le rejet du corps féminin.
Une incompatibilité biologique
13 Parce que c’est la religion de l’incarnation et que le symbole eucharistique fait directement référence au corps du Christ, livré pour sauver l’humanité, la symbolique du corps est primordiale dans la foi chrétienne. Or, le corps érigé en exemple est forcément masculin. La référence au Dieu unique est dominée par cette symbolique masculine qui exclut les femmes de la représentation divine et, donc, du sacerdoce. Le corps féminin est fréquemment diabolisé dans la tradition chrétienne, comme source de tentation et de corruption des hommes, ce qui a conduit l’Église à occulter le plus possible ce corps. Dans le débat sur l’ordination des femmes à la prêtrise, dès les années 1930, puis, par la suite, dans l’exercice quotidien des femmes prêtres, s’est posée la question de la pénétration dans le sanctuaire d’un corps féminin, stigmatisé pendant des siècles comme étant impur et, donc, incompatible avec la prise en charge de fonctions sacrées. Les anglicanes qui accèdent au sacerdoce font entrer dans le sanctuaire non seulement leur nature biologique, mais également leur sexualité, puisqu’elles peuvent être mariées et mères de famille. Helen Stanton écrit, en 1998 : Women priests have told me of being forbidden to preside at the Eucharist when menstruating, as though this were somehow unclean. One woman, in considerable distress, told me that when she informed her incumbent, a strong supporter of women’s ordination, that she and her husband intended to start a family, he declared that he couldn’t have a pregnant woman behind the altar22.
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14 La spécificité du corps féminin, dans sa capacité à porter et à mettre au monde des enfants, ne semble pas compatible avec l’exercice du ministère sacerdotal, alors même que le mystère de l’enfantement peut être considéré comme le lieu de la réalisation du sacré par excellence. Les théologiennes féministes croient en l’importance de la réhabilitation du corps des femmes, afin de pouvoir le réconcilier avec la vie spirituelle. La seule présence de femmes ministres dans le sanctuaire constitue déjà une avancée considérable.
15 Or, malgré une insertion globalement positive dans l’Église, les témoignages des femmes ordonnées depuis le printemps 1994 soulignent des manifestations régulières de rejet et d’humiliation, qu’elles prennent la forme de sexisme ordinaire, de harcèlement moral ou sexuel, d’exclusion ou encore d’insultes soulignant le caractère illégitime de leur présence au sein du clergé23. La question du corps féminin est prégnante dans ces témoignages, et la suspicion autour de la compatibilité de ce corps avec la sphère sacrée s’est trouvée, en quelque sorte, autorisée par un acte législatif adopté un an après l’ouverture du sacerdoce aux femmes, en guise de compensation et pour garantir la « protection » des opposant-e-s. Voté en 1993, l’Acte synodal a constitué un véritable retour en arrière et fut vécu comme une trahison par celles et ceux qui pensaient que l'égalité des sexes était acquise. Ce texte prévoyait la possibilité pour les paroisses qui le souhaitaient de refuser la nomination d'une femme vicaire et/ ou curé, mais il instituait également des évêques volants (flying bishops) qui n'ordonnent pas de femmes et ont donc, d’une certaine manière, « les mains propres » pour se charger de la protection épiscopale des paroisses opposées au ministère féminin. En laissant penser qu'on ne peut recevoir un sacrement d'un évêque qui ordonne des femmes car il serait contaminé, cette mesure légitime la doctrine de la souillure (taint)24 développée par le groupe anglo-catholique Forward in Faith. Dans cette logique, la présence des femmes dans le sanctuaire est impure et cela conduit certain-e- s paroissien-ne-s à refuser de recevoir la communion consacrée par une femme au cas où cette dernière aurait ses règles. On voit ainsi resurgir la croyance en l'impureté féminine, fondement de l'exclusion des femmes du sacré. En effet, la tradition juive interdit le mélange entre le lait et la viande, car le lait symbolise la vie alors que le sang symbolise la mort. Le corps féminin est donc intrinsèquement impur, puisqu’il réunit ces deux éléments antagonistes25. Par ailleurs, le sang menstruel des femmes a toujours éveillé un certain dégoût chez les hommes, ce sang « sale » qui s’écoule de manière involontaire étant opposé au sang du courage et de l’honneur que verse les hommes au combat. Les lois du Lévitique dans l’Ancien Testament établissent la condition impure des femmes durant leurs règles et pendant sept jours après (soit la moitié de leur cycle)26. Durant cette période, leur impureté est contagieuse et les personnes ou les meubles qu’elles touchent sont souillés ; elles ont alors l’interdiction de s’approcher du sanctuaire. L’anthropologue Alain Testart explique d’ailleurs que ces croyances ancestrales qui justifient un certain nombre d’interdits reposent sur la valeur du sang menstruel en tant que symbole et sur la nécessité de ne pas mêler ce sang avec un autre. Les femmes sont ainsi exclues de la prêtrise car seuls les hommes sont autorisés à entrer en contact avec le sang du Christ au moment du rituel de l’eucharistie27.
16 La législation de 1993 s’inscrit donc dans la continuité de cette perception du corps féminin comme ontologiquement incompatible avec l’espace sacré. Ce texte est considéré par les femmes prêtres comme un déni très blessant de leur identité et un frein à leur acceptation pleine et entière dans l'Église.
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L’illusion de l’égalité
17 C'est notamment parce que les femmes prêtres anglicanes voulaient éviter un texte reproduisant ces erreurs et les maintenant dans un statut de seconde classe qu'il a été si long et difficile de parvenir au vote d'un texte ouvrant l'épiscopat aux femmes. En effet, les opposant-e-s, pourtant minoritaires, se sont organisé-e-s pour se faire élire en masse au Synode Général et ainsi peser sur les choix de l'Église en faussant le rapport de force et en tentant d'obtenir des garanties pour se « protéger » contre les femmes évêques. C'est, donc, paradoxalement, au sein de la Chambre des laïcs que la majorité des deux-tiers fut la plus difficile à atteindre (la motion avait échoué à six voix près en novembre 2012). Contrairement à l'image donnée alors par le rejet de la législation, l'immense majorité des anglican-e-s soutenait l'ouverture de l'épiscopat aux femmes. L'échec de 2012 fut vécu comme une grande déception et presque une humiliation pour les femmes prêtres. Il donna l'image d'une Église en rupture avec la société civile. Si la motion avait de nouveau été rejetée en 2014, le Parlement britannique avait d'ailleurs menacé de lever l'exemption du Sex Discrimination Act dont l'Église bénéficie et d'obliger légalement l'institution à appliquer l'égalité des sexes. Le texte accepté le 14 juillet 2014 a permis la consécration d'une femme évêque dès 2015. En abrogeant le texte de 1993, il a également levé toute barrière légale empêchant les femmes d'évoluer dans la hiérarchie anglicane. Néanmoins, les opposant-e-s ne se sont pas tu-e-s et manifestent bruyamment leur refus d’accepter les femmes évêques lors de chaque célébration de consécration. Suite à une campagne de sensibilisation menée par WATCH (Women and the Church), l’Église d’Angleterre a finalement décidé, par la voix de l’archevêque de Cantorbéry, Justin Welby, d’interdire de telles manifestations. Comme l’indique le courrier envoyé par WATCH : Such interruptions create the perception that the Church is willing to allow a woman who has been called by God and the Church, and appointed by the Crown, to be publicly insulted and undermined. If that is so, it undermines and insults all women: and especially women for whom female bishops are potent symbols of a radical shift in the Church’s treatment of women. ‘Maybe things haven’t changed at all, underneath’, they might conclude28.
18 Malgré un long chemin parcouru et une certaine illusion de l’égalité, maintenant que les femmes ont accès à la fonction d’évêque, que près d’un tiers des prêtres sont des femmes (3677 en 201529) et qu’un-e ordinand-e sur deux est une femme, l’égalité réelle entre les sexes n’existe pas encore. Il demeure des enjeux importants pour prouver qu'il ne s'agit pas que d'un changement superficiel et pour reconnaître l’entière légitimité du clergé féminin. Un évêque hostile à la prêtrise féminine vient, par exemple, d’être nommé responsable du diocèse de Sheffield, marquant ainsi la possibilité assumée de la discrimination et plaçant les femmes prêtres dans une position inconfortable et humiliante. De manière générale, selon les statistiques de l’Église d’Angleterre30, les femmes sont pour l'instant sur-représentées dans le clergé bénévole, semblent freinées par un plafond de verre qui les empêche d’accéder aussi facilement que les hommes aux postes à responsabilité, subissent parfois encore la culture paternaliste de l'Église et peinent à proposer la liturgie inclusive dans les paroisses conservatrices. Face à ces résistances, on peut se poser la question de la compatibilité entre féminisme et foi anglicane.
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Une question féministe
Christianisme et patriarcat
19 La radicalité de la théologie féministe qui souhaite démasquer la pensée patriarcale et reconstruire totalement la perception des rôles des deux sexes dans l’Église pose la question de la compatibilité entre les positions féministes et la tradition chrétienne. Le Dieu chrétien est remis en cause en tant que figure patriarcale car, par ses caractéristiques exclusivement masculines, il justifie la domination des femmes par les hommes31. Tout le problème est de savoir si le christianisme peut résister à la déconstruction de son androcentrisme ou si cette dimension est constitutive de l’essence même de la foi chrétienne. Jonathan Sedgwick constate : It is true that some who began as Christian feminists have despaired of the ability of the Judeo-Christian tradition to break free from its seemingly inherent male- centredness, and have therefore left Christianity and concentrated instead on spiritual feminine themes of a wider reference.32
20 Les femmes anglicanes se heurtent à cette question de savoir si leur combat va réellement permettre de déconstruire la hiérarchie masculin/féminin dans l’Église et de proposer un nouveau modèle de relation entre les sexes ou si leur participation au ministère sacerdotal va demeurer une revendication égalitaire d’accès à une fonction. C’est pourquoi la théologie féministe essaie de combattre l’expression du monothéisme patriarcal. Les théologiennes féministes s’accordent pour dire que la Bible, en tant que collection de textes influencés par la culture patriarcale de leurs époques et de leurs rédacteurs, contient peu de personnages féminins et qu’elle ne souligne pas leurs réalisations. Pourtant, même lorsque les femmes jouent un rôle important dans un épisode biblique, il semble que la tradition de l’Église n’ait pas choisi de retenir ce passage dans la transmission de la foi. Il s’agit donc de rendre visibles les femmes de la Bible et de faire reconnaître leur importance. Nombre des femmes de la Bible ont été oubliées par la tradition ecclésiale, leurs noms ne sont, d’ailleurs, même pas connus. Du Nouveau Testament, l’Église a surtout retenu deux figures féminines : la Vierge Marie et Marie-Madeleine. Deux figures qu’elle a polarisées, opposant la corruption de la pécheresse à la pureté de la vierge33. Les théologiennes féministes ont également souligné à quel point Jésus s’était montré révolutionnaire dans son approche des femmes, ce que l’Église ne semble pas prendre en compte en rétablissant, dans son enseignement comme dans sa pratique, la hiérarchie des sexes présente dans la tradition de l’Ancien Testament.
Langage et symboles
21 La question du langage liturgique est aussi une préoccupation importante des théologiennes féministes, puisque la caractérisation uniquement masculine du divin exclut, de fait, les femmes de toute ressemblance à Dieu. Il s’agit, donc, de remettre en question l’utilisation de noms et de pronoms masculins pour faire référence à l’ensemble des croyant-e-s et de réfléchir à l’imagerie employée pour évoquer Dieu. La commission liturgique du Synode général de l’Église d’Angleterre a publié un rapport, « Making women visible », qui contient une liste des adaptations possibles de certains passages du livre liturgique The Alternative Service Book (1980) qui semblent exclure les femmes. Ainsi, bon nombre de paroisses anglicanes ont modifié leur liturgie et
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professent, lors du Credo, que le Christ n’est pas venu sur terre que pour le salut des hommes : « for us and for our salvation », et non « for us men and for our salvation »34. Plusieurs hommes d’Église qui soutenaient la cause des femmes ont même été jusqu’à utiliser le terme « femmes » à la place du mot « hommes », afin de démontrer le caractère exclusif de l’utilisation de l’un ou l’autre des deux genres35. Le langage épicène a, cependant, été accueilli moins facilement lorsqu’il s’agissait de modifier des hymnes ou des psaumes. Certaines femmes prêtres reconnaissent qu’il ne faut pas chercher à tout prix à éliminer le masculin, au risque de ne pas respecter la beauté de la liturgie. L’utilisation d’images féminines pour désigner Dieu est aussi beaucoup moins bien acceptée par les autorités ecclésiales.
22 La communauté de Ste Hilda qui rassembla, à la fin des années 1980, certain-e-s militant-e-s du Mouvement pour l’ordination des femmes (MOW) oeuvrait pour ce renouveau du langage utilisé dans la liturgie. Monica Furlong, l’une des fondatrices de la communauté, explique l’importance de cet enjeu : « Like the issue of ordaining women, a change in language indicates whether the change in church attitudes to women goes ‘all the way through’ or is merely cosmetic.36 » La communauté de Ste Hilda créa un livre de prière qui se voulait non sexiste et qui fut utilisé par les groupes de militant-e-s féministes durant la période précédant le vote de la motion autorisant les femmes à devenir prêtres. Les autorités anglicanes n’apprécièrent, toutefois, pas tellement cette initiative et certain- e-s ont même considéré qu’il s’agissait de pratiques blasphématoires37. Le masculin étant assimilé au neutre et à l’universel, le langage comme l’imagerie masculine choisis pour faire référence à Dieu ne doivent pas, selon la logique androcentrée, être compris comme excluant le féminin. Néanmoins, en pratique, l’image de Dieu se trouve masculinisée par l’évocation constante du « Père », du « Seigneur », du « Roi » ou du « Maître », termes hérités d’un ordre féodal. C’est pourquoi il est important de varier les images et de ne pas se contenter de renverser le modèle dominant pour en créer un autre. C’est ce qu’a souhaité faire la communauté de Ste Hilda en publiant en 1996 The New Women Included – a Book of Services and Prayers38, un livre de prières inclusives aux deux sexes. Les thèmes principaux développés par les théologiennes féministes sont ainsi présents dans le langage et dans la symbolique utilisés pour la liturgie et on constate la difficulté de concilier la tradition chrétienne et l’égalité des sexes. Dans le cadre du débat sur l’accès des femmes au sacerdoce, les féministes tentèrent également de développer une conception différente du ministère.
Culture et pratiques de l’institution
23 La volonté des femmes de bâtir un nouveau modèle de prêtrise est à la fois nécessaire et dangereuse. D’un point de vue féministe, il est, en effet, essentiel de ne pas limiter l’accès des femmes au sacerdoce à la simple ouverture égalitaire d’une fonction aux deux sexes, mais de prendre la mesure du combat qui s’impose pour déconstruire l’exercice androcentré du ministère. Toutefois, il ne faut pas pour autant s’égarer vers une vision essentialiste de la différence des sexes en arguant que les femmes vont instituer une autre manière d’être prêtre, en raison de qualités ou d’aptitudes qui leur seraient spécifiques. Dans cette perspective, la critique du mode d’exercice du ministère repose en grande partie sur l’organisation trop hiérarchique de la relation du prêtre et des croyant-e-s et sur l’importance accordée à la carrière et au pouvoir dans l’Église. Les féministes assimilent l’oppression patriarcale à cette structure ecclésiale
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fortement hiérarchisée et plaident pour la mise en place d’un ministère qui se rapproche du message des Évangiles : Is the priesthood as it is now experienced promotive of the values of personhood, love, cooperation, community, building, service, faith and justice? Or is it one more focused for elitism, judgmentalism, fear, competition, power, struggle, mistrust?39
24 Ces interrogations montrent la place qu’occupe, dans la réflexion des théologiennes féministes, cette volonté de refonte du ministère ordonné, selon un modèle plus horizontal de coopération avec les laïcs.
25 Il est cependant dangereux de simplifier les choses et d’opposer une façon masculine et une façon féminine d’exercer la prêtrise. Nombre d’hommes ne sont pas satisfaits de l’orientation qu’a prise le ministère au cours des siècles et, parmi les femmes souhaitant être ordonnées, certaines sont sans doute attirées par la dimension de pouvoir de cette fonction. Or, les fidèles peuvent avoir tendance à imaginer les qualités d’une femme prêtre de manière réductrice par rapport à la grande variété d’individus et de comportements, comme le souligne la théologienne Helen Stanton : One woman is welcomed into her new parish with an anticipation of the gentle and kindly touch she will bring to ministry; another is ‘useful’ for the way in which she soaks up the emotional stress and pain of parishioners; another is valued for being caring without being ‘too emotional’, yet another is criticised for not being ‘pastoral’40.
26 On constate ici la limite des préjugés et du dualisme simpliste qui consiste à opposer les deux sexes. Toutefois, les femmes prêtres anglicanes se trouvent confrontées à cette double difficulté d’essayer de lutter contre une pratique patriarcale du ministère, sans se laisser absorber par elle, tout en refusant d’être réduites à un rôle purement social et pastoral. Il leur faut inventer un nouveau mode d’exercice de la prêtrise permettant de concilier autorité, proximité et féminité. S’ajoute encore à cela une problématique qui ne devrait pas être féminine mais bien parentale, celle de la conciliation entre le ministère et la vie de famille41.
Conclusion
27 Le débat sur l’accès des femmes au sacerdoce est donc particulièrement complexe et se situe à divers niveaux. Les enjeux d’une telle évolution sont à la fois théologiques, anthropologiques, symboliques et sociologiques. Ce réseau d’arguments complexes qui font appel à des notions profondément ancrées dans les mentalités, puisqu’elles appartiennent au modèle dominant de la hiérarchie masculin/féminin, explique que le combat qui permit l’ouverture de la prêtrise et de l’épiscopat aux femmes ait été long et difficile et qu'il n'ait pas complètement aboutit à la reconnaissance de l'égalité des sexes.
28 Permettre aux femmes d’acquérir les mêmes droits et d’accéder aux mêmes fonctions que les hommes est une condition sine qua non de la réalisation de l’égalité. C’est un principe de justice. La représentation de l’humanité se doit d’être mixte pour être légitime et cette mixité est riche d’une plus grande diversité de parcours et de points de vue. Il n’est pas question de dire que les femmes sont, par nature, différentes des hommes. On l’a vu, c’est un discours essentialiste qui enferme, exclut et justifie la division sexuée des rôles et des tâches. En revanche, et notamment parce que l’égalité réelle est encore loin d’être réalisée, les expériences de vie des hommes et des femmes
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restent, pour la plupart, différentes, ce qui permet de sortir de l’androcentrisme, de mieux refléter la diversité des réalités humaines et, donc, de prendre en compte l’ensemble des personnes.
29 Toutefois, il serait illusoire de penser qu’il suffit aux femmes d’accéder aux mêmes fonctions que les hommes pour que la domination disparaisse. L’ouverture de la prêtrise et de l’épiscopat constitue une évolution considérable dans le contexte d’une institution ecclésiale conservatrice, et étant donné les freins théologiques et anthropologiques majeurs développés ci-dessus. On peut d’ailleurs parler d’une révolution, notamment si l’on considère la transgression que constitue l’acceptation de corps féminins dans la sphère sacrée et la reconnaissance de la capacité des femmes à transmettre la Grâce de Dieu, au rebours de la croyance en l’impureté féminine. Il n’en demeure pas moins qu’il faut du temps pour que cette révolution opère une réelle déconstruction de l’ordre patriarcal. Par ailleurs, elle est insuffisante si elle ne s’accompagne pas d’une réflexion sur le genre, afin de sortir des stéréotypes sexistes et de ne pas recréer une hiérarchie entre femmes et hommes au sein de l’institution elle- même. Outre la question de l’interprétation des textes et des dogmes religieux, cette réflexion passe, comme dans le monde politique et professionnel, par le questionnement de la culture, des codes et des pratiques hérités du patriarcat, par une éducation sans stéréotypes de sexe et par un partage des responsabilités, tant dans la vie professionnelle que dans la vie privée, afin de construire un rapport pleinement égalitaire entre les sexes.
30 Églantine Jamet-Moreau est Maîtresse de conférences en civilisation britannique à l’université Paris Nanterre, chercheuse au CREA (Centre de recherches anglophones, EA370). Ses recherches portent sur les questions de genre et d’égalité femmes/hommes.
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WALSH Clare, Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organisations, London, Pearson Education, 2001.
WATCH Women and the Church, « A Report on the Development in Women’s Ministry in 2015 », mis en ligne le 15 février 2016, consulté le 15 février 2017, http://womenandthechurch.org/ resources/a-report-on-the-developments-in-womens-ministry-in-2015/
WIJNGAARDS John, Did Christ Rule out Women Priests?, Great Wakering, Mc-Crimmon, 1986.
Women Priests : Which Way Will you Vote?, London, SPCK, 1990.
« Women as Clergy : The Continuing Debate », Religious Tolerance, mis en ligne le 6 janvier 2001, consulté le 20 janvier 2017, http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg7.htm
WOODS Mark, « Justin Welby : ‘We’ll stop protests at consecration of women bishops’ », mis en ligne le 9 août 2016, consulté le 15 février 2017, http://anglicanmainstream.org/justin-welby- well-stop-protests-at-consecration-of-women-bishops/
NOTES
1. BROWN Andrew, « First female Church of England bishop consecrated in York », The Guardian, 26 janvier 2015, consulté le 12 février 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/26/ first-female-church-england-bishop-consecrated-libby-lane 2. GILL Sean, Women and the Church of England – From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, London, SPCK, 1994, p. 208.
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3. HÉRITIER Françoise, Masculin/Féminin – La pensée de la différence, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1996, p. 24. 4. PERROT Michelle, « Les partages des sexes, histoire inachevée », Le Monde, 27 novembre 2003. 5. Gen 2 : 18 et Gen 3 : 6 à 16. 6. GILL Sean, Women and the Church of England – From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, op. cit., p. 247. 7. WIJNGAARDS John, Did Christ Rule out Women Priests ?, Great Wakering, McCrimmon, 1986, p. 10 : « C’est Dieu lui-même qui a assujetti la femme à l’homme lors de la création. » 8. 1 Tim 2 : 11 à 14. 9. 1 Cor 11 : 3 et 7 à 9. 10. Il rejoindra l’Église catholique romaine quand l’Église d’Angleterre autorisera les femmes à devenir prêtres et sera ordonné prêtre catholique en avril 1994.. 11. Cité dans GILL Sean, Women and the Church of England – From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, op. cit., p. 253 : « Si notre Seigneur et St Paul étaient aussi conditionnés par leur temps, alors qu’en est-il pour nous ? Par quels critères, pouvons-nous juger que notre conditionnement actuel s’accorde avec la volonté Divine, au contraire du conditionnement des générations précédentes ? » 12. « Women as Clergy : The Continuing Debate », Religious Tolerance, consulté le 20 janvier 2017, http://www.religioustolerance.org/femclrg7.htm 13. HOURCADE Janine, Des femmes prêtres ?, Paris, Mame, 1993, p. 181. 14. HOOD Margaret, « Woman’s Unique Bond with God », The Times, 18 janvier 1986 : « un féminisme chrétien qui reconnaisse la maternité comme le juste accomplissement de la nature féminine telle qu’elle a été créée par Dieu. » 15. « Inter Insigniores – Déclaration de la sacrée Congrégation de la Doctrine de la Foi sur la question de l’admission des femmes au sacerdoce ministériel », V : 25, Rome, 1976, consulté le 11 janvier 2017, http://www.womenpriests.org/fr/church/interlet.asp 16. LEONARD Graham, « Fighting for the Fundamentals », The Times, 8 August 1988 : « Le prêtre est le représentant et le témoin du fait que le Christ est la Tête de l’Église. (…) Si l’on accorde aux femmes la possibilité de représenter le Christ, (…) notre compréhension de Dieu et notre relation à Lui s’en trouvent bouleversées. » 17. Cité dans Women Priests : Which Way Will You Vote?, London, SPCK, 1990, p. 18. « La question n’est pas de savoir si une femme prêtre peut représenter un sauveur masculin, mais si une prêtrise exclusivement masculine peut représenter le salut de l’humanité entière. » 18. SEDGWICK Jonathan, Why Women Priests? The Ordination of Women to the Apostolic Ministry,
F0 F0 London, Affirming Catholicism, 1992, p. 21 : « 5B La misogynie 5D émane du désir de catégoriser et de limiter le sexe opposé, de le traiter avec condescendance. Il s’agit donc d’un rejet violent des femmes dans leur individualité, mais aussi d’une perte de soi-même puisque cela marque le refus de la variété de la création et qu’une telle attitude est fondée, non pas sur la force, mais sur la faiblesse et la peur. » 19. LEONARD Graham, « Fighting for the Fundamentals », The Times, 8 August 1988, op. cit., : « Je ne dis pas que j’aimerais avoir ce rôle ! Mais il est évident qu’il y a des éléments formidables dans le fait d’être mère, et la réalité, c’est que je ne peux pas y avoir accès. Je ne suis pas une femme. J’espère démontrer des qualités maternelles dans ma charge pastorale, mais je sais que je ne peux pas devenir mère, et je suis très triste pour ces femmes à qui on a laissé croire qu’elles pourraient devenir prêtres. » 20. HÉRITIER Françoise, Masculin/Féminin II – Dissoudre la hiérarchie, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2002, p. 201. 21. BRUECK Jutta, entretien du 14 février 2002 : « Dans l’histoire judéo-chrétienne, les prêtres se sont vus attribuer un pouvoir sacré en vue de contrer le pouvoir féminin de création. » 22. STANTON Helen, Christian Feminism – An Introduction, London, Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd, 1998, p. 46-47 : « Des femmes prêtres m’ont dit qu’on leur avait interdit de célébrer l’eucharistie lorsqu’elles avaient leurs règles, comme si d’une certaine manière cela était impur.
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L’une d’entre elles était particulièrement bouleversée. Lorsqu’elle avait informé son curé, un ardent défenseur de l’ordination des femmes, qu’elle et son mari avaient l’intention de fonder une famille, il lui avait répondu qu’il ne serait pas possible de voir une femme enceinte célébrer à l’autel. » 23. JAMET-MOREAU Eglantine, Le curé est une femme – L’ordination des femmes à la prêtrise dans l’Église d’Angleterre, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012, p. 241-258. 24. FURLONG Monica, Act of Synod – Act of Folly?, London, SCM P, 1998. 25. HÉRITIER 2002, p. 56. 26. Lev 15 : 19–30. 27. TESTART Alain, L’amazone et la cuisinière. Anthropologie de la division sexuelle du travail, Paris, Gallimard, 2014, p. 36. 28. WOODS Mark, « Justin Welby : “We’ll stop protests at consecration of women bishops” », 9 août 2016, consulté le 15 février 2017, http://anglicanmainstream.org/justin-welby-well-stop- protests-at-consecration-of-women-bishops/ : « De telles interventions peuvent laisser penser que l’Église cautionne le fait que l’on insulte et que l’on humilie publiquement une femme qui a été choisie par Dieu et l’Église, et nommée par la Reine. Si c’est le cas, ce sont toutes les femmes qui s’en trouvent insultées et humiliées, et particulièrement les femmes pour qui la consécration de femmes évêques est le symbole puissant d’un changement radical d’attitude de l’Église vis-à-vis des femmes. Elles risquent alors de penser que ‘les choses n’ont peut-être pas changé du tout’. » 29. WATCH Women and the Church, « A Report on the Development in Women’s Ministry in 2015 », 15 février 2016, consulté le 15 février 2017, http://womenandthechurch.org/resources/a- report-on-the-developments-in-womens-ministry-in-2015/ 30. Ibid. 31. PARMENTIER Elisabeth, « Rapports entre les théologies féministes et les théologies classiques », in Autour des théologies et des spiritualités féministes. Theoforum 34.1, 2003, p. 13. 32. SEDGWICK Jonathan, Why Women Priests? The Ordination of Women to the Apostolic Ministry, op. cit., p. 23 : « Il est vrai que, parmi celles qui se définissaient comme chrétiennes féministes, certaines ont désespéré de la capacité de la tradition judéo-chrétienne à se débarrasser de son androcentrisme apparemment inhérent, et ont par conséquent quitté le christianisme pour se concentrer sur des thèmes spirituels féminins plus généraux. » 33. STANTON Helen, Christian Feminism – An Introduction, op. cit., p. 13-15. 34. STANTON Helen, Christian Feminism – An Introduction, op.cit., p. 37 : « pour nous et pour notre salut », et non « pour nous les hommes et pour notre salut ». 35. Ibid. 36. FURLONG Monica, A Dangerous Delight – Women and Power in the Church, London, SPCK, 1991, p. 72 : « Tout comme l’ordination des femmes, un changement dans le langage utilisé indique si le changement d’attitude de l’Église envers les femmes va ‘jusqu’au bout’ ou s’il est purement superficiel. » 37. WALSH Clare, Gender and Discourse : Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organisations, London, Pearson Education, 2001, p. 170. 38. The St. Hilda Community, The New Women Included : A Book of Services and Prayers, London, SPCK, 1996. 39. CARROLL Elizabeth, « One part of the dialogue, a proper place for women in the Church », in GARDINER Anne-Marie (dir.), Women and Catholic Priesthood : An Expanded Vision – Proceedings of the Detroit Ordination Conference, New York, Paulist Press, 1976, p. 21 : « Est-ce que la prêtrise, telle que nous la connaissons actuellement, célèbre les valeurs humaines d’amour, de coopération, de communauté, de construction, de service, de foi et de justice ? Ou bien est-ce une fonction qui privilégie l’élitisme, le jugement, la peur, la compétition, le pouvoir la lutte et la méfiance ? »
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40. STANTON Helen, Christian Feminism – An Introduction, op.cit., p. 46 : « Telle femme est accueillie dans sa nouvelle paroisse avec l’idée qu’elle apportera au ministère une note douce et attentionnée ; telle autre est considérée comme ‘utile’ pour soulager la souffrance et le stress émotionnel de ses paroissien-ne- s ; une troisième est appréciée parce qu’elle est protectrice sans être ‘trop émotive’, et finalement on reprochera à telle autre de ne pas être assez ‘proche des gens’. » 41. JAMET-MOREAU Eglantine, Le curé est une femme – L’ordination des femmes à la prêtrise dans l’Église d’Angleterre, op. cit. , p. 380-387.
RÉSUMÉS
Cet article souhaite examiner la question de l’accès des femmes à la prêtrise et à l’épiscopat dans l’Église d’Angleterre dans sa dimension de remise en cause de l’ordre patriarcal. Car il ne s’agit pas simplement d’ordonner des femmes à côté des hommes sans repenser la question de la différence des sexes dans l’interprétation des textes sacrés, dans la tradition et l’enseignement de l’Église, dans les codes et les pratiques de l’institution, ou encore dans la conception du pouvoir et du ministère. A travers l’analyse des éléments centraux du débat sur le sacerdoce féminin, on interrogera cette remise en cause du patriarcat et la compatibilité entre christianisme et féminisme.
This paper aims to analyse how the issue of women’s access to priesthood and episcopacy in the Church of England has challenged patriarchy. Indeed, the point is not simply to ordain women alongside men, but to reconsider several issues such as the interpretation of Scripture, the teachings of the Church, institutional practices or even ministry itself, in the light of gender equality.
INDEX
Mots-clés : genre, égalité, femmes, anglicanisme, prêtrise, sexisme Keywords : gender equality, women, Anglicanism, priesthood, sexism
AUTEUR
ÉGLANTINE JAMET-MOREAU
Centre de recherches anglophones (CREA, EA370), Université Paris Nanterre
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“Cricket Has Given Me Everything”: Women’s Sport and the Women’s Movement in Twentieth-century Britain « Le cricket m’a tout donné » : le sport féminin et le mouvement des femmes en Grande-Bretagne au vingtième siècle
Rafaelle Nicholson
Introduction
1 “Cricket,” former international sportswoman Beth Morgan explained in our interview, “ has given me everything’”: I was a very shy kid...I was very socially awkward and struggled with any social situation really...But [cricket] completely gave me confidence and friends, a social network, and a confidence in myself and something that I was good at and enjoyed...I'm a completely different person...it's been my whole life.1
2 Viewed through a feminist lens, this account - from a 31-year-old woman who grew up playing cricket in the late 1980s and 1990s - suggests that cricket has proved an empowering experience for many of the women who have participated in it. Indeed, the theme of empowerment runs through many of the oral history interviews which I conducted with 27 female cricketers aged between 27 and 90 as part of my PhD research.2 Given this, it is surprising to find that major surveys of women in twentieth- century Britain such as Jane Lewis' Women in Britain since 1945 (1992), Sheila Rowbotham's A Century of Women (1997), and Martin Pugh's Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914-1999 (2000) contain almost no reference to the issue of women's sport.3
3 And yet a detailed examination of women's sporting lives can disrupt and alter our current understanding of women’s history. One example is that of the development of
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the women’s movement in twentieth-century Britain. Recent research in this area has sought to reevaluate women’s organisations which were not overtly “political” or “feminist” in character.4 One case in point is Catriona Beaumont's study of the Mothers' Union, Catholic Women's League, National Council of Women, Women's Institutes and National Union of Townswomen's Guilds, in which she suggests that the term “women's movement” needs to be expanded beyond its associations with feminism and recast in a way that includes the “dynamic networks of women” created by these conservative women’s organisations. Though all the groups under study rejected “feminism” and endorsed domesticity, Beaumont argues that they acknowledged the status of women as equal citizens and continually sought to inform and educate their members about the importance of democratic citizenship...[they] encouraged members to participate in local and national politics and campaigned to ensure that women benefited from the rights of equal citizenship bestowed upon them in 1928’.5
4 Beaumont’s definition of the “women’s movement” thus incorporates any network of women which advocated the advancement of their sex. This position is not uncontested: as Nancy Cott has written, there is concern that “expanding [the term feminism] to cover every worthy or new endeavor women take up equates the term with ‘what women did’ and renders it meaningless”.6 Many feminist historians of modern Britain, notably Lucy Delap, have highlighted the importance of whether or not historical subjects actively adopted or rejected the term feminist as being important signifiers of whether we can, as historians, consider them to have been part of the “women’s movement”.7 Nonetheless, the importance of Beaumont’s work is in her suggestion that “the term ‘women’s movement’ needs to be liberated from its exclusive association with feminism”.8 Thus all women’s organisations, including those whose members actively disavowed the term “feminism”, should be incorporated into any history of the “women’s movement”.
5 This article takes up Beaumont’s plea and adopts her definition of the “women’s movement”, arguing that sporting organisations, too, need to be reconceptualised as part of a thriving women’s movement throughout the twentieth century. They, too, were female-only spaces which allowed women autonomy and provided them with a support network. Women’s sport by its very nature requires women’s absence from the home in order to participate in an activity which is centred around their own enjoyment. As feminist sociologists have recognised, participating in sport is therefore a “feminist act” simply because it asserts women's right to time for themselves.9 While this does not necessarily make those who participated in sport “feminists”, it does suggest that women’s sporting organisations, which provided a space for women to escape from constricting gender norms and advocated female equality in leisure, need to be incorporated into our definition of the women’s movement. As will be shown, their continuous existence lends support to the claims of Beaumont, and others, that there is much greater continuity between first and second-wave feminism than historians have previously recognised, overturning our understanding of the ideological development of ideas about female empowerment across the twentieth century.
6 This article therefore makes the case that an examination of sport has the potential to transform our understandings of the women’s movement in 20th century Britain: both its chronology, and its ideological development. To do this, it uses a case study of one such sport, women’s cricket, and its governing body, the Women’s Cricket Association
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(WCA). A description of the development of the WCA is followed by an analysis of its evolution across the twentieth century during which, this article argues, many of its activities centred around female liberation from existing societal norms. While in many respects the WCA was a conservative organisation, enforcing stringent dress and playing regulations, it was still a site of empowerment, and including sporting organisations in a broader definition of the women’s movement is therefore crucial for historians, as we seek to make sense of women’s lives across the twentieth century. Sport, after all, was not just sport. It was a way of feeling valued as a woman in a male- dominated society.
The Women’s Cricket Association: conservative femininity?
7 The interwar years were a period of dramatic growth in the prevalence of women's sport. This has recently been documented by a number of scholars, including Jennifer Hargreaves, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska and Fiona Skillen.10 Hargreaves argues that the First World War was a “unique and liberating experience for many women, leaving them with confidence to flout old restrictions”.11 She highlights organisational growth in this period; for example, the Women's Amateur Athletics Association (WAAA) was formed in 1922, the first competitive events having been held during the war by munitions workers, and the All England Netball Association (AENA) was formed in 1926 at a meeting of the YWCA in London. By 1938 the WAAA claimed a membership of 20,000, and in the following year it was estimated that 160,000 women were playing in clubs affiliated to the AENA.12 Hockey expanded enormously: by 1939, 2,100 clubs and schools were affiliated to the All England Women's Hockey Association (AEWHA).13
8 Within this context came the formation of the Women’s Cricket Association (WCA), the brainchild of a group of female hockey players who in October 1926 travelled to Colwall in Herefordshire for several days of cricket on the Malvern College Ground. Among them was Marjorie Pollard, who recalled: After play was over we sat in the Park Hotel at Colwall...and discussed how cricket could become real for us – no longer to be an illusive thing, that one played half afraid of ridicule. We pondered, mused, talked.14
9 Out of this came the decision to form an association. At the first meeting of the WCA nineteen women met, elected a chairman and formed a committee to arrange fixtures around the country. Two aims were declared: “To encourage the foundation of cricket clubs throughout the country” and “to provide facilities for and bring together...those women and girls who previously have had little opportunity of playing cricket after leaving school and college”.15 This was a bold step, but it paid off almost immediately. For the 1927 season the WCA arranged a fixture list and 49 matches were played; by 1929 37 clubs and 39 schools were affiliated members and the first public women's cricket match was played on Beckenham Cricket Ground between London District and the Rest of England. In 1933, County Associations were formed in Middlesex, Lancashire, Kent, Nottinghamshire and Surrey along the same organisational lines as the male counties. An official magazine for the sport, Women's Cricket, was set up in 1930 and edited by Pollard until 1950. And in late 1934 an England team travelled to Australia and New Zealand for the first ever international women’s cricket matches. The enormous success in the venture is demonstrated by the affiliation figures for 1938: 105 clubs, 18
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colleges and 85 schools.16 Having said that, it is likely that up to 1939 and in the postwar decades the majority of participants were middle-class: generally, the sport required time and financial independence in order for women to purchase the correct equipment, pay club subscriptions, and travel to away matches. The 1934/5 tour was self-funded by the players, which effectively prevented any working-class women from participating; LEA syllabi stated that cricket for girls was “not worth attempting” due to the lack of suitable facilities within state schools.17
10 Perhaps as a consequence of its domination by middle-class women, from the outset the WCA adopted both the rules of the equally middle class-dominated governing body of men’s cricket, the Marylebone Cricket Club, and also, arguably, their conservatism: they dictated how their players dressed, and how they behaved on and off the pitch. It was necessary, wrote Marjorie Pollard in 1930, “to play in something that is above criticism ”; during the 1930s, the WCA rules dictated: Official WCA teams must play in white and wear long stockings. Dresses, divided skirts or tunics must not be shorter than four inches from the ground when kneeling. Coloured jerseys and sleeveless dresses are not allowed.
11 While after 1945, the Executive Committee amended the rules to allow for 'shorts', the length – not shorter than four inches from the ground when kneeling – was still carefully controlled, and knee length socks were required wear.18 Mollie Buckland, who joined the WCA in the 1950s, confirmed that appearing 'feminine' was a central concern during her early involvement: “they would never, never have worn trousers then. It was not the done thing...no way would you wear anything that looked male. No, never...because you were trying to keep feminine in a man's game”.19
12 Thus the WCA does not appear at first glance to have been a radical organisation which sought to undermine societal ideals about “femininity”.
13 Oral history interviews in which interviewees were questioned about their attitude towards “feminism” on the surface also appear to confirm this. The response of Norma Whitehorn, aged 82, was typical:
14 RN: The other thing is that the media seems to have labelled female cricketers as 'women's libbers' and seen you as feminists. I wondered what you made of that.
15 NW: Yes, I'm not greatly enamoured. I mean there's always somebody who will want to pick on something and chop and change it all around.
16 RN: So you don't think, did you see yourselves as fighting against inequality or anything like that?
17 NW: No, no, not really, no.20
18 For Norma, and for others, to represent their actions as “feminist” is to “chop and change ” them around, to misrepresent them. Cricket was a recreational activity, pure and simple. This supports the findings of other historians of women's sport that British sportswomen have generally wanted simply to participate in their sport of choice without viewing their actions politically, and have to that end almost with one voice disavowed the “feminist” label.21
19 Nonetheless, what female cricketers appeared to be rejecting was not the idea of equality, nor indeed the idea that playing cricket enabled them to transform societal expectations about the role of women, but any association with the radical strand of second-wave feminism which has, for a certain generation who lived through the
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1970s, come to define the feminist movement as a whole. Take this extract from my interview with Janet Bitmead, aged 64:
20 RN: Are you a feminist?
21 JB: Oh, I wouldn't have said so, no, no...to me a feminist is someone who is quite outspoken about things, and I don't think women's cricket, any one person is outspoken about anything like that... I suppose you're always trying to move the barrier, the men, trying to give you a few more facilities...
22 RN: So have any of the women that you've played cricket with been feminists, would you say?
23 JB: Oh I wouldn't have said so, no. That's all burning bras isn't it? I don't think any of them are like that! Obviously they like to show that they're as good as the men, and we have, we've bowled out a few men in our time playing in the friendly games and things...22
24 This abstract is very revealing about Janet's views of feminism. To her, a “feminist” is someone who is outspoken in public and who burns her bra. And yet she tacitly recognises that playing cricket did have the ability to improve female self-confidence and transform women's consciousness. While historians recognise that it is problematic to assign the “feminist” label to those who actively disavow feminism, therefore, this should not necessarily prevent us from viewing the WCA and its members as a central part of the women’s movement.23 As will now be shown, the WCA provided a space for the rejection of dominant societal values about gender throughout the twentieth century.
1926 - 1970: The WCA and resistance to gender norms
25 While women’s sport had grown enormously in the interwar period, this was not an uncontroversial development. In 1950 the editor of the Sportswoman's Manual summarised the situation as follows: It has been established that a woman may play games if she chooses, just as she may go into Law, Medicine or the House of Commons....But now that we need no longer struggle we must take stock. Some people look with alarm at women playing strenuous games. It is unladylike, it is unattractive, it stops them having children, and the rest of the century-old arguments are still with us.24
26 While women's cricket never faced the extreme opposition which women's football had to contend with – the Football Association, angry at the seriousness with which women's factory teams continued to play after the First World War and the massive crowds they were attracting, banned the sport in 192125 – the sport was from its early days subject to scrutiny as to its suitability as a sport for women. In the 1930s, the argument that women had no place in the masculine domain of cricket was fairly common, as was the criticism that the average female had no genuine interest in cricket but merely “goes to the ground to eat strawberries and be admired”.26 Hargreaves highlights that as women's cricketers staged public matches, rendering the sport increasingly visible, “antagonists became more vociferous”.27 The England cricketer Walter Hammond wrote in 1952 that: There are still a great many people who wonder whether feminine players are likely to do themselves harm if they try to play really hard. I must say that I myself do not like to see schoolgirls playing cricket, and I believe many doctors will agree that
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serious and permanent damage can easily be done at that age...There are some games women can play, in general, actually better than men, but the muscular differences of the sexes prohibits cricket from being one of them.28
27 Female cricketers were fully aware of this controversy. One of my interviewees stated that: “men pooh-poohed the women's game, on the whole”,29 and the President of the WCA was well used to receiving letters like the following, penned in 1948: Women should occupy themselves in doing things for which they are fitted and avoid trying to act and dress as men do... It is a most ridiculous thing for females to waste their time in going Overseas to play at Cricket. Yours faithfully, One who likes a woman to be a woman.30
28 This letter was published in Women's Cricket in 1948, without comment. Yet the implication is clear: despite an awareness that their choice of leisure activity was subject to criticism, female cricketers remained determined to participate nonetheless. Such a determination has strong feminist undertones, and suggests that the very formation of the WCA in 1926 was predicated upon the belief that women had a right to dictate their own leisure preferences.
29 In seeking to locate the WCA within the broader history of the women’s movement in Britain its status as a women-only space which provided its members with a support network should also not be overlooked. While the WCA may have shared similar values to those running men’s cricket, it was a completely independent organisation until it merged with the newly-formed governing body of men’s cricket, the England and Wales Cricket Board, in 1998. Right up until the 1990s, the WCA remained an organisation in which no man was permitted to take office or become a full member.31 Indeed, when discussing the role of men within the Association in 1950, the Executive Committee concluded that “of the fundamental principles on which the WCA was founded, one of the most important...was that women should run every aspect of it”.32 The Association was also keen to utilise female umpires and coaches throughout its history, and men were excluded from joining the WCA's “A” Register of umpires, from which all umpires for women's international matches were selected. Andrews sees the women-only status of the WI as significant because it offers an arena in which women can be themselves and thus develop their sense of self-worth.33 The same is clearly true of the Women's Cricket Association.
30 Caine writes that the interwar years were a period where “there was still immense pressure on [women] to devote themselves to family and home”.34 Additionally, the 1950s has been seen as a decade of “cosy domesticity”.35 Yet all evidence suggests that the WCA wholly rejected these norms. Jack Williams' assertion that before 1939 the general practice was for women to end their cricketing days upon marriage has recently been questioned by Skillen, who indicates that many married women were continuing with sport after marriage in the interwar period.36 Evidence from the postwar decade supports Skillen's conclusion. In 1952 at the England Women v The Rest match at Southampton, the secretary of Hampshire CCC wrote that: “Women's cricket is now so firmly established that one supposes there must already be husbands, or 'cricket widowers,' wondering when next their socks are to be darned – oh! glorious thought!”37
31 Reports in Women's Cricket of local club activities highlight a tendency for women at lower levels to continue with cricket both upon marriage and after having children. One article on Hampshire and Dorset WCA read:
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SALLY SMITH, who is married with two children, comes to the team as a medium fast off-break bowler...She is accompanied to all matches by her husband in a vehicle in which almost a whole cricket team and gear can be stowed...She is a great enthusiast and never says 'no' to a game of cricket.38
32 Birmingham WCC consisted of a number of players with small children and the Secretary, herself married with three children including one aged just six months, wrote: “I think we shall soon have to start a creche to enable cricketing mothers to play in matches!”39 Sympathy was very much with the women on this issue and older players advised: “If you must marry, be sure to choose an understanding cricketing husband”.40 In 1951 a poem appeared in Women's Cricket, entitled “The Married Woman's Apology to her Husband”: Tell me not John, I am so strange That from the scullery Of our good home and quiet life To bowl and bat I fly. True, a new venture now I chase, The Aussies must be beat; And with a firmer grip I brace My bat, my nerves, my feet. Yet this desertion from my hearth Which you, I know, deplore – I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not cricket more.41
33 Langhamer has argued of this period that “women's own individual leisure preferences were subsumed into those of the family, with ‘leisure’ becoming a vehicle for service to husband and children”.42 But the above evidence suggests that in fact, female cricketers viewed themselves as having a fundamental right to exercise their own leisure preferences, and did so.
34 What does this mean for our broader historical understanding of the women’s movement? Firstly, it supports the work of historians like Beaumont, who by showing that women's organisations like the Women's Institute, Mothers' Union and National Union of Townswomen's Guilds were encouraging women to participate in local and national affairs throughout the 1950s, and were acceptant of the reality of the working housewife and mother has demonstrated that “the years between so-called ‘first wave’ and ‘second wave’ feminism should no longer be called a ‘silent period’...the history of the twentieth- century women's movement is one of continuity”.43 The values espoused by the WCA presented here regarding freedom of choice in leisure and the placing of female leisure above that of their husbands and families suggest significant continuity with their pre- war activities. This adds further weight to the argument that the 1950s was a decade when feminist ideas, far from being fallow, were flourishing. Playing cricket in full view of the world was a powerful statement, and the idea that women’s primary responsibility was to their husbands and children had already been rejected by a significant group of women decades before so-called “second-wave” feminism established itself as a social movement.
The 1970s: Women’s Cricket and Women’s Liberation
35 The 1970s has generally been viewed by historians as a decade of transformation for the women’s movement in twentieth-century Britain. With their assertion that “the
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personal is political”, those active within Women's Liberation challenged male dominance in almost every sphere of British life: the home, marriage, the workplace, the body, and female sexuality.44 Yet arguably sport is one arena in which women made little progress towards equality in the 1970s. The Sex Discrimination Act, for example, outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex, but with several key exemptions, including that of “any sport...where the physical strength, stamina or physique of the average women puts her at a disadvantage to the average man”.
36 Nonetheless, many of the activities of female cricketers indicate a wholesale rejection of norms of femininity which was, after all, one of the main rationales behind the WLM. For example, despite the fact that marriage had become “virtually universal” in the 1960s,45 large numbers of women who played cricket remained unmarried. Oral histories can reveal the reasoning behind this. During my conversation with Norma Whitehorn, who played club and county cricket from the 1940s to the 1960s, the subject of her non-marriage arose:
37 NW:So when I go, the Whitehorn dynasty ends. Unless I decide to get married suddenly, and I don't think I will somehow! [Laughs]
38 RN:So you haven't ever been married?
39 NW: No. Never had any inclinations. As I used to say, “no, I'll take my hockey stick and cricket bat to bed thank you”. And that was, that was my way of life.46
40 Norma chose to reject marriage altogether. For her, cricket (and hockey) were a “way of life”. The subtext here is that both were too important to her to risk having to give them up on marriage.
41 Indeed, this was recognisably a risk for women growing up in the environment of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Mollie Buckland had met her future husband in her early 20s, just prior to the 1960/1 tour of South Africa. She was determined to go on tour even if it meant giving up their blossoming relationship: I had an inkling then that this was going to be, there was going to be a serious relationship, but I was not going to give up this chance to go abroad. I just wasn't. It was too – I knew that it was my big chance to go. But I also knew that if I did marry him, when I came back...I would never go again. Because I'd never have the money to do it...I said to Gerry, “well I'm going. Whatever happens I'm going.” And I was selected, so that was nice. And then when I came back, I thought, “well have I jiggered it now? Have I lost this?” But no. He said, “okay, now will you marry me?” And I said, “yes I will”...And I knew that if I did decide that I was going to get married, then I would lose my cricket...but I didn't care, I'd done it!47
42 Mollie wanted to get married, and was prepared to give up playing cricket once she had done so: she never represented England again after the 1960/1 tour (though she remained involved in WCA administration). Yet she was also prepared to put the possibility of marriage at risk in order to first fulfil her own cricketing ambitions.
43 Several other interviewees explained to me that continuing with cricket was non- negotiable as far as their choice of husband was concerned. Pat Siderfin, who took up cricket in the late 1940s and married Steve in 1962, had two children:
44 RN: ...has that ever been an issue for...you, in terms of having to stop playing when you had children?
45 PS: Not if I wanted it not to be. It's just that you dictate to the men and they accept it!
46 SS: I was there to be a taxi!
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47 Pat chose to marry Steve because, in her words, “he was a person who would let me do what I wanted to do...if I wanted to climb on Everest or go to the moon, I don't think Steve would have stopped me. Mind you, I don't think I'd have given him a chance to.”48
48 Many cricketers, too, were determined to combine motherhood and cricket. Enid Bakewell, for example, first went away on a four-month international tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1968/9, leaving her husband to care for their three-year-old daughter; she continued to go on tours right up until the 1982 World Cup in New Zealand when she left three children aged 15, 11 and 10 behind. All this took place in an era when John Bowlby's ideas of “maternal deprivation”, in which any kind of separation between a child and their mother was seen as neglectful, still held sway in much of society.49 One exchange of correspondence in Women's Cricket magazine in the 1960s was sparked off by a letter from Alison Littlefair of Kent, who asked for advice: “I have become the mother of a baby girl and...am determined not to stagnate in domesticity...how does one manage to resume playing and look after one's charge?”50 The practical advice contained in the replies received show a clear acceptance of combining cricket with motherhood within the women's cricket community.
49 Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, who gave birth to a son in the summer of 1974, was actually reprimanded by the WCA Executive for going home in the middle of the 1976 Edgbaston Test against the Australians in order to spend the night with her two-year-old. The policy was outlined by the Chairman as follows: All the players selected for 1976 were asked sometime before the Tour to ensure that home domestic matters and care of children were organised so that married players could give their undivided attention to playing the game for England. Rachael was no exception. A request had been made by players after World Cup 1973 that children should not be allowed in Dressing Rooms and that the team should be accommodated in hotels a day before the match started and during the match itself. This was agreed and no exceptions were to be made.51
50 In a societal environment whereby women were often defined principally in terms of their family relationships, and when working mothers “suffer[ed] constantly from the assumption that a ‘good’ and ‘proper’ mother should not leave her young child in order to go out to work”, this kind of attitude is remarkable.52
51 How did juggling motherhood and cricket work in practical terms? The fact that women’s cricket remained throughout this period a sport dominated by middle-class women helps answer this question; many were able to afford paid childcare, not to mention time off work to go away on tour for months on end, leaving their children behind. Yet there was an even more radical solution available. In an interview with Heyhoe-Flint in 1980 she laid out her ideas for the expansion of women's cricket, concluding: “What we have to do is present clearly the opportunities for women and it may mean the husband will have to stay home to look after baby”.53 A number of my interviewees reported precisely this arrangement, which seems to have been common. Indeed, the picture that emerges from Heyhoe-Flint's autobiography is of a shared responsibility for childcare, as the following passage highlights: During one match against a men's side in Notts, I looked up during my innings and spotted Derrick pushing Ben's pram around the boundary. It was an odd sight to me and I felt slightly perturbed. It wasn't right, I reasoned, that things were this way around. I wondered if Derrick was thinking the same, and that there ought to be a Men's Lib for him.54
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52 She also openly admitted that cricket left her with “little time for housework or ironing”: “her lonely husband has eaten so many frozen dinners that he's been treated for a chilblained stomach and has had a gas heater fitted in his igloo”, wrote Eric Morecambe in the foreword of her autobiography.55
53 Indeed it seems to have been widely accepted as natural amongst female cricketers that, if they were out for the day playing cricket, their husbands might usefully engage in their fair share of the housework. Netta Rheinberg reported in 1970 that one conversation amongst married female cricketers as to how far cricket might be compatible with marriage concluded with the following advice: “Nor was it advisable for your husband to accompany you, dutifully carry your bag, and then watch. Better for him to carry on with the chores at home”.56
54 Jane Lewis concludes that “the extent to which unpaid work in the family has remained women's work is seemingly one of the most unchanging aspects of post-war life”.57 Yet here was a group of women who, even before the onset of the second-wave feminist movement, challenged this kind of sexual division of labour within the home, as well as the idea that “good mothers” should not enjoy leisure activities separately from their children.
55 Sheila Rowbotham suggests that some of the crucial ideological elements of second- wave feminism were: challenging women's confinement to domesticity and unequal, dependent marriage; female empowerment; and giving women the power to control their own bodies.58 Yet what is striking is that many of these issues had always been absolutely central to the activities of cricketing women, and were ever-present in the way they chose to live their lives. Not only does this suggest greater continuity with the postwar women's movement and second-wave feminism than has previously been recognised, it indicates that sport provided a crucial way by which women could resist societal norms of gender, even despite its participants remaining outside the structures and organisations of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
The 1980s and 1990s: Continued resistance
56 A number of historians of modern Britain, writing during the 1990s, attempted to weigh up how far women had progressed towards equality by this period.59 Jane Lewis, for example, recognised that three fundamental social changes had occurred by 1992 which particularly affected British women: an increase in married women in paid employment; an increase in the divorce rate; and the rise of illegitimacy.60 Yet this focus on demographic changes, and in particular changes in the number of women in the workforce, failed to consider an important arena by which shifts in women's societal position might be measured: that of women's leisure. It was left to sociologists to highlight the continued difficulties women had in asserting their right to leisure opportunities. Studies conducted by Erica Wimbush (1986), Rosemary Deem (1986) and Eileen Green, Sandra Hebron and Diane Woodward (1987) all suggested that there were specific constraints on leisure for women: a lack of support with childcare, a shortage of time and money, the sexual division of labour, the attitudes of their husbands/ partners, and a strong sense that they did not have a right to demand leisure if they were not in full-time employment.61 While the phenomenon of the “working housewife” continued to increase during the 1980s, as the expansion of the service industries and the increase in part-time employment led to many more women entering the workforce, the expectation that women would still be largely responsible
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for domestic chores remained firmly in place.62 Thus, far from opening up more opportunities for leisure, female employment actually created a “double burden” for women, which decreased their leisure time even further. While leisure opportunities were broadly speaking growing in the 1980s – the availability of personal credit meant more money to spend on holidays and home entertainments – this did not necessarily alter the situation for married women. Deem recognised that the majority of women in her study who regularly participated in sport were single.63
57 Given this general trend, it is notable that several of the women who played for England in these years do not even seem to have even contemplated the possibility of having to give up cricket upon marriage. Janet Southgate, who captained England during the 1984 New Zealand tour, was married throughout her England career. A 1982 interview in her local newspaper revealed: “Janet and David...rarely see each other over summer weekends... ‘We are ruled by a fixture card in the summer,’ she admitted...'When we do see one another, we usually have about a week's conversation to catch up on.’”64
58 Another piece in The Times from the same year, which reported the following conversation between the couple, is also striking: “‘When the washing piles up, I'll ring you,’ [David] said to his wife.
59 ‘You'd better not,’ she replied. ‘I've left enough instructions. Every wall in the kitchen has notes stuck on it.’”65
60 While this does indicate a certain level of adherence to the prevailing division of labour, the very fact that Jan made the decision to go away on tour for five weeks indicates that she prioritised cricket over her domestic role.
61 A number of England players also juggled motherhood with cricket during the 1990s. Laura Newton, who represented England between 1997 and 2007, opened the bowling for England against India in 1999 just five months after giving birth to her first child; she repeated the feat three years later, choosing to go on a month-long tour of India while leaving her two sons, aged three and five months, at home with her husband.66 Jan Godman took time off from cricket to have four children during her England career, which lasted from 1991 to 1996, but returned to the squad afterwards each time. Once again, these events were reported on within the WCA's newsletter without any kind of fanfare, suggesting that continuing with cricket after having children continued to be accepted as normal within the women's cricket community. Thus, while The Times article quoted above concluded with Rachael Heyhoe-Flint's assurance that: “No one in the party claims to be a feminist. Certainly not”, the ongoing assertion of their right to exercise their own leisure preferences shows that female cricketers continued to promote feminist values during the 1980s. In a society where female access to leisure was still limited, women cricketers were once again going against the grain.
62 Cricket also remained an important way in which women could challenge discourses surrounding the frailty and physical weakness of female bodies. During the 1970s, discussions emerged over the ways in which women experienced their bodies, and activists campaigned to reclaim, in the words of one slogan of the Women's Liberation Movement, “power over our bodies, power over our lives”.67 Such discourses may well have influenced those participating in women's sport during the 1970s and 1980s, and were certainly reflected in interviews with those who participated in men's league cricket during the decade. For some women this was a practical way to assert the power of the female body. Cathy Mowat, for example, who represented England as a fast bowler
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between 1978 and 1984, played for a men's club side for several years during the 1980s, and reported: ... they always bowled faster at me. But I could get my own back, because if I ever got, I remember one famous occasion, a guy who obviously didn't rate me and had been making apparently dodgy comments, I got him out, and he was ribbed the whole evening in the bar. So you can get your own back!68
63 Carole Cornthwaite, an England cricketer who played for Fylde Cricket Club in Lancashire throughout the mid-1980s, also talked about her experiences: ... there was a couple of occasions where guys would get a bit carried away... Occasionally they'd sort of, you'd get the odd one, 'what on earth's a woman doing here?' But they soon learnt that I was quite capable of dealing with them. I think once I proved that I was quite capable of living in that company, then there was no problem, you were just sort of treated as an equal then.69
64 Ultimately, participation in men’s cricket and the demonstration of physical prowess on the pitch was a very physical, corporeal resistance to existing ideologies of gender.
65 Concomitantly, a number of my interviewees revealed that participation in cricket had increased both their sense of self-worth and their confidence levels. Carole Cornthwaite provides a good example:
66 RN: What difference do you think your involvement with women's cricket has made to you generally?
67 CC:... It certainly did make a big difference… Through playing cricket I've got, I've done quite a lot of speaking to organisations, things like that, and that's something that I would never ever have dreamed of being able to do, had I not, and it was only really being involved with the cricket. You don't, I'm not quite sure how it ties in with being able to stand up and talk in front of people, but I think it does. It just gives a certain amount of self-confidence.70
68 Participation in cricket could evidently be an empowering experience for women, transforming their sense of their own capabilities and their self-belief.
69 Again it must be asked what this all means for our understanding of the women’s movement? By 1983, as Bouchier acknowledged in his history of the Women's Liberation Movement, the feminist movement had “receded from consciousness...The organised feminist groups are politically becalmed and divided by deep theoretical disagreements...the movement itself is almost invisible”.71 Indeed, by the turn of the century, feminist ideas of equality had filtered through into wider society, but most feminist activists had become absorbed into mainstream male-dominated institutions, and the movement itself had consequently become deradicalised. Feminist ideas had taken root; yet the feminist movement itself was much less visible than it had been during the 1970s. Yet there remained some female-only spaces where a radical rejection of ideologies of gender remained possible, and where female empowerment was central. For historians, an exploration of the activities of the WCA and its members surely opens the door to a deeper understanding of the evolution of the women’s movement up to the turn of the century.
Conclusion
70 Why, then, is it so important for historians of women to pay attention to the sporting activities of women? Firstly, sport was clearly central to the lives of many women
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throughout the twentieth century, and the meaning of activities like cricket for women always went deeper than simply being a physical activity. Playing cricket was a way to challenge discourses surrounding female frailty and to assert female independence; the women I interviewed expressed definite feelings of empowerment as a result of their involvement. As an organisation, too, the WCA actively advocated placing the right to leisure above domestic commitments. It would be difficult, therefore, not to conclude that female cricketers should be seen as part of an evolving women’s movement across the century. No doubt a similar case can be made for other women’s sporting organisations, such as the All England Women’s Hockey Association: this is an obvious area for future research.
71 Secondly, and relatedly, it has been shown here that female cricketers continually, from the formation of the WCA in 1926, espoused so-called “second-wave feminist” ideals such as the freedom to control their own bodies, the importance of female autonomy, and a rejection of traditional models of domesticity, placing their own leisure needs above servicing the needs of their husbands. This in itself is significant, because it indicates that there were important continuities between the first and second-wave feminist movements which have previously gone unnoticed by historians. Yet it is not just that, as Beaumont has argued, women’s organisations like the WI promoted a public role for women; but that groups like the WCA were clearly espousing ideals such as bodily liberation and liberation from a regime of housework and childcare, right from the 1920s. Surely, as historians attempt to tease out the ideological precursors of second-wave feminism - not to mention its broader impact on British women - a deeper examination of women’s sport is therefore crucial, in order to create a more complete picture of the development of the women’s movement across the twentieth century. This article has sought to begin that process.
72 Raf Nicholson has recently completed a PhD thesis at Queen Mary University of London entitled “‘Like a man trying to knit?’ Women’s Cricket in Britain, 1945-2000”. Prior to this she gained a BA in Modern History and Politics at Merton College, Oxford, and an MSt in Women's Studies at Mansfield College, Oxford. She has published her research in History of Education and Women’s History Review, and has also written freelance on women’s cricket for, amongst others, ESPNCricinfo and Wisden.
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NOTES
1. Interview with Beth Morgan, 16 September 2013. All ages given are the age of the interviewee at the time of the interview. 2. Rafaelle Nicholson, ‘“Like a man trying to knit”? Women’s Cricket in Britain, 1945-2000’, (PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2015). 3. Jane Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992); Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States (1997; reprinted London, Penguin, 1999); Martin Pugh, Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914-1999 (Hampshire, Macmillan, 2000). 4. See for example Maggie Andrews, The acceptable face of feminism: the Women's Institute as a social movement (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1997). 5. Catriona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens. Domesticity and the Women's Movement in England, 1928-64 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 3. 6. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (London, Yale University Press, 1987), p. 9.
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7. Lucy Delap, ‘The “woman question” and the origins of feminism,’ in Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 320-22. 8. Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens, p. 3. 9. See for example Mariah Burton Nelson, The stronger women get, the more men love football: sexism and the American culture of sport (1994; reprinted London, Women’s Press, 1996). 10. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the body: beauty, health and fitness in Britain, 1880-1939 (Oxford, 2010); Fiona Skillen, Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013). 11. Jennifer Hargreaves, Sporting females: critical issues in the history and sociology of women's sports (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 113. 12. These figures are quoted in Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford, Oxford Unviersity Press, 1998), pp. 368-70. 13. All England Women's Hockey Association, Women's Hockey (from Village Green to Wembley Stadium) (London, MacDonald and Evans, 1954), p. 11. 14. Marjorie Pollard, Cricket for Women and Girls (London, Hutchinson & Co., 1934), p. 18. 15. Ibid., p. 21. 16. An account of the formation of the WCA is given in Jack Williams, Cricket and England: A Cultural and Social History of the Inter-war Years (London, Frank Cass, 1999), chapter 5. 17. Board of Education, Supplement to 1919 Syllabus of Physical Training for Older Girls (London, HMRC, 1927), p. 33. 18. WCA, 'Rules', WCA Yearbook, 1945, http://www.womenscrickethistory.org [accessed 1 July 2014]. 19. Interview with Mollie Buckland, 18 June 2014. 20. Interview with Norma Whitehorn, 14 May 2013. 21. Jean Williams, A Game for Rough Girls? A history of women's football in Britain (London, Routledge, 2003), p. 9. 22. Interview with Janet Bitmead, 21 October 2013. 23. See for example Nancy Cott, ‘What's in a Name? The Limits of "Social Feminism”; or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History’, Journal of American History, 76:3 (1989), p. 822; Cordelia Moyse, A History of the Mothers' Union: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation, 1876-2008 (Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2009), p. 10. 24. Susan Noel (ed.), Sportswoman's Manual (London, Hutchinson’s Library of Sports and Pastimes, 1950), p. 14. 25. Jack Williams and John Woodhouse, ‘Can play, will play? Women and football in Britain’, in Jack Williams and Stephen Wagg (eds.), British Football and Social Change. Getting into Europe (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1991), p.105. 26. Daily Mirror, April 21 1938. 27. Hargreaves, Sporting Females, p. 124. 28. Walter Hammond, Cricket's Secret History (London, Stanley Paul & Co., 1952), p. 155. 29. Interview with Mollie Buckland, 18 June 2014.
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30. Women's Cricket, 18 September 1948. 31. A handful of men were granted Associate membership, but this did not give them voting privileges at WCA meetings. 32. WCA Executive Committee minutes, 19 May 1950, WCA Archive, Lancashire. 33. Andrews, The acceptable face of feminism, p. 12. 34. Barbara Caine, English Feminism, 1780-1980 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 182. 35. See for example Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, chapter 10. 36. Williams, Cricket and England, pp. 95-6; Skillen, Women, Sport and Modernity, p. 202. 37. Women’s Cricket, 25 July 1952. 38. Ibid., 8 July 1955. 39. Ibid., June 1946. 40. Ibid., 3 September 1954. 41. Ibid., 18 May 1951. 42. Claire Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 144. 43. Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens, p. 217. 44. For histories of the Women's Liberation Movement, see Sheila Rowbotham, The past is before us, David Bouchier, The feminist challenge: the movement for women's liberation in Britain and the USA (London, Macmillan, 1983), and Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet freedom: the struggle for women's liberation (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987). 45. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, p. 72. 46. Interview with Norma Whitehorn, 14 May 2013. While lesbianism appears to have been relatively common amongst female cricketers, this was seemingly not a route Norma chose to pursue. See Nicholson, ‘Like a man trying to knit’?, p. 86. 47. Interview with Mollie Buckland, 18 June 2014. 48. Interview with Pat and Steve Siderfin, 27 May 2014. 49. Bowlby was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose theories held that separation between a child and their primary caregiver (the mother in most instances) would be harmful for the child, and could cause trauma leading to significant mental health problems in later life. See Matthew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford, 2013), chapter 3. 50. Women's Cricket, 5 May 1963. 51. Sylvia Swinburne, 'Haywire, a reply to Heyhoe!', WCA Archive, Lancashire. 52. Sue Sharpe, Double Identity. The Lives of Working Mothers (London, Penguin, 1984), p. 137. 53. Sport and Recreation, January 1980. 54. Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, Heyhoe! The autobiography of Rachael Heyhoe-Flint (London, Pelham Books, 1978), p. 131. 55. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 56. The Cricketer, August 1970.
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57. Lewis, Women in Britain, p. 88. 58. Rowbotham, The past is before us, introduction. 59. Examples include Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, Pat Thane, 'Towards Equal Opportunities? Women in Britain since 1945', in Terence Gourvish and Alan O'Day (eds.), Britain since 1945 (London, Macmillan, 1991), and Rowbotham, A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States, chapter 10. 60. Lewis, Women in Britain, p. 2. 61. Erica Wimbush, Women, leisure and well-being (Edinburgh, Centre for Leisure Research, 1986); Rosemary Deem, All work and no play?: a study of women and leisure (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1986); Eileen Green, Sandra Hebron and Diane Woodward, Leisure and gender: a study of Sheffield women's leisure experiences (London, Sports Council, 1987). 62. Martin Pugh, Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, p. 336, p. 343. As a percentage share of the total labour force, women's work increased from 37% in 1971 to 45% in 1987. See J. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, p. 65. 63. Deem, All work and no play?, p. 71. 64. Newspaper clipping, 7 October 1982, private collection, Surrey. 65. The Times, 8 January 1982. 66. The Times, 2 June 1999; The Cricketer, January 2002. 67. Rowbotham, The past is before us, p. 61. 68. Interview with Cathy Mowat, 17 September 2013. 69. Interview with Carole Cornthwaite, 10 July 2013. 70. Interview with Carole Cornthwaite, 10 July 2013. 71. Bouchier, The feminist challenge: the movement for women's liberation in Britain and the USA, p. 1.
ABSTRACTS
This article examines the formation of the governing body of women’s cricket in 1926 and its subsequent activities, arguing for a reinsertion of women’s sport into the history of women and the women’s movement in twentieth-century Britain. The centrality of sport to many women’s lives is clearly demonstrated; it is argued that playing cricket was a way to challenge discourses surrounding female frailty, and a way for women to reject traditional models of domesticity, placing their own leisure needs above servicing the needs of their husbands. Overall it is suggested that a detailed examination of women’s sporting lives can disrupt and alter our current understanding of women’s history, revealing new continuities in the ideological development of the women's movement. Including sporting organisations in a broader definition of the women’s movement is therefore crucial for historians, as we seek to make sense of women’s lives across the twentieth century.
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Cet article étudie la création, en 1926, de l’organisation qui gouverne le cricket féminin, et ses activités, afin de plaider pour la réinsertion du sport féminin dans l’histoire des femmes britanniques et de leur mouvement au vingtième siècle. L’importance capitale du sport dans la vie de nombreuses femmes est clairement démontrée et il est suggéré que jouer au cricket était une manière de mettre à mal les discours concernant une prétendue fragilité féminine, ainsi qu’une manière de rejeter des modèles traditionnels de domesticité, puisqu’elles donnaient la priorité à leurs propres loisirs plutôt qu’aux besoins/attentes de leurs maris. Regarder de manière détaillée la vie sportive des femmes peut altérer notre point de vue sur leur histoire, en faisant apparaître de nouvelles continuités dans le développement idéologique de leur mouvement. Inclure les organisations sportives dans une définition plus large du mouvement des femmes est donc essentiel pour les historien.ne.s si nous espérons faire sens de la vie des femmes au vingtième siècle.
INDEX
Keywords: Sport, leisure, gender, women’s movement, feminism Mots-clés: sport, loisir, genre, mouvement des femmes, féminisme
AUTHOR
RAFAELLE NICHOLSON
Queen Mary University of London
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Agents of Change? The Women's Suffrage and Trade Union Movements Forces de transformation ? Le mouvement suffragiste et le mouvement syndical
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The Missing Two Million: The Exclusion of Working-class Women from the 1918 Representation of the People Act Les Deux Millions d’oubliées : l'exclusion des ouvrières de la Loi sur la représentation du peuple de 1918
Anna Muggeridge
Introduction1
1 By the turn of the twentieth century, women had gained many legislative rights and freedoms that they had not had fifty years earlier, including the right to property ownership; the right to attend University (although not always to be awarded degrees) and the municipal vote. Despite this, women were unable to truly consider themselves citizens of Britain as they still lacked the right to vote in parliamentary elections. The suffrage movement developed a new sense of resolve around this point, with the two largest suffrage organisations, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), being established in 1897 and 1903 respectively.2 By the outbreak of war in 1914, these groups had been joined by many other smaller organisations, including those such as the People’s Suffrage Federation, which launched in 1909 to campaign for enfranchisement for all men, as well as women.3 Although these myriad groups all ultimately sought the same end goal —women’s right to vote in Parliamentary elections—their methods of campaigning and reasons for taking up the struggle were many and varied. Regardless of whether an individual woman considered herself a constitutional suffragist or militant suffragette (and research has shown that many women crossed this boundary and were members of more than one organisation, particularly during the early stages),4 almost all of those involved in the campaign for votes for women wanted more than just legislative change
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that ensured women would be entitled to vote in General Elections alongside men; many, as Sandra Stanley-Holton has noted, “were also seeking an overall reform of the political and social systems of Britain” that would change social attitudes towards women.5
2 Women’s ability to affect this reform and change—both legislative and social—was determined in a large part by their ability to participate in the democratic process as voters. Despite the progress made in other areas, their ability to effect change was necessarily hampered by their lack of parliamentary enfranchisement until 1918. The passage of the Representation of the People Act in this year marked the culmination of decades of work by suffrage organisations in Britain. But it also left millions of women still without the vote. It is well-known that women were only allowed to vote once they had reached the age of 30. However, there is limited understanding of the exclusion of two million working-class women from the vote, even once they had reached 30, due to the property-based nature of the 1918 Act, which in effect forced women to “buy into” the franchise, by requiring women voters to be either property owners, or local rates payers. It therefore excluded the poorest women from the franchise. It was not until the passage of the Equal Franchise Act in 1928 that these women were finally enfranchised, along with women aged 21 to 30. This article will examine in detail the circumstances of the two million women who remained without a vote under the terms of the 1918 Act, and the lack of response by the post-war suffrage movement to their plight. In so doing, it will argue that although partial enfranchisement did result in both legislative change and a change in social attitudes towards some women, both the continued exclusion of these two million working-class women over the age of 30 from the franchise, and the lack of concern over their exclusion shown by the suffrage movement, reflect the prevalence of class biased attitudes within the women’s movement, which persisted into the 1920s.
3 The most comprehensive overviews of women’s suffrage after 1918 remain Johanna Alberti’s Beyond Suffrage6 and Cheryl Law’s Suffrage and Power,7 but neither focus on the largely working-class women over the age of 30 who remained excluded from the vote in any great detail. Law does note that, although some of the unenfranchised women over 30 were professional or businesswomen lodging in business premises or unfurnished rooms (through which they failed to meet the property qualifications required for enfranchisement), most of those over 30 who failed to qualify were “shop assistants and domestic workers who lived-in”; “daughters living at home” and the very poorest working-class women, but she does not go on to examine the impact of continued unenfranchisement on such women.8 Jo Vellacott’s 2007 book Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote offers a detailed analysis of how and why the 1918 Act came to be so restrictive, examining how splits within the NUWSS during the First World War left the organisation under the control of “a small group of middle and upper-class Londoners” with “virtually no representation of the industrial north” or working-class women from 1915.9 These women were prepared to accept the age and property restrictions of the 1918 Act, rather than holding out for suffrage on equal terms with men. Although Vellacott explains how the restrictions on female voters came to be, she does not examine the effects of this after 1918. Meanwhile, the other leading women’s suffrage organisation, the WSPU, had effectively disbanded for the duration of the war: on its the outbreak, the Pankhursts called for an immediate suspension of militancy for the duration. June Purvis argues that “the WSPU did not abandon the campaign for votes for women...but changed its strategy”, with the Pankhursts using “patriotic feminism” to “take control of the
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discourse, drama and spectacle of war to serve their own ends and further the campaign for female citizenship”.10 However, this decision lacked support from many members, and the WSPU was much diminished when it remerged as the Women’s Party in 1917; after Christabel Pankhurst failed to win the seat she contested in the 1918 election, the Party “faded away”, disbanding in 1919.11
4 Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the suffrage movement after 1918 and the impact of partial enfranchisement on women’s involvement in politics: a 2013 special edition of Women’s History Review focused on feminists and feminism post- suffrage, whilst 2014 saw the publication of The Aftermath of Suffrage, edited by Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye. Both collections include articles that focus on working-class feminism in the interwar period in general,12 but there is no discussion in either on the exclusion of older, poorer working-class women from the franchise. Where articles do focus on the franchise extension campaign, such as Adrian Bingham’s examination of the media fear surrounding the enfranchising of the so-called “flapper voters” in 1928, the focus is on women voters aged between 21 and 30, rather than those over 30.13
5 This article, then, seeks to address this gap in the existing literature. It will begin by examining working-class women’s exclusion from both the 1918 Act, and the suffrage movement itself in the decade between partial and full enfranchisement, as suffragists chose to largely focus their efforts on obtaining “votes at 21”, at the expense of poorer, working-class women who did not meet the property requirements stipulated by the original Act. The paper will then go on to examine the relationship between legislative changes and changes in social attitudes; how these concepts are interlinked, and what drives gendered social change. In so doing, this paper seeks to engage with ongoing debates about the suffrage movement and in particular feminism in the aftermath of suffrage, and also with debates about the intersections of class and gender in Britain.
The “Missing Two Million”: working-class exclusion from the franchise and the suffrage movement, 1918— 1928
6 The 1918 Act disqualified all women from voting in Parliamentary elections until they had reached 30 years of age, leaving approximately five million women aged between 21 and 30 unenfranchised until 1928, when the Equal Franchise Act was passed.14 Previous research has never before established the exact number of women over the age of 30 who continued to be excluded from the franchise. Through close analysis of the data from the 1921 Census I have shown that 1,941,165were also left without a vote until 1928. To calculate this number, the number of women aged over 30 on the electoral roll in any given county of England and Wales was subtracted from the total population of women aged over 30 in that county, per the 1921 census.15 In each county, there were several thousand women who, despite having reached the age limit stipulated by the 1918 Act, were still not present on the electoral register, and who were therefore excluded from the Parliamentary franchise, most likely due to the restrictive, property-based nature of the 1918 Act.16
7 Some degree of caution must be applied here. The census was taken on 19 June 1921, and recorded where an individual was residing on that night, which was not necessarily the individual’s permanent address, where they were registered as a voter. A degree of
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mobility in the population is therefore to be expected, and will have had an impact on the calculation, using this data, of the number of unenfranchised voters. It is also important to note that, as today, not all potential voters would be interested in, or even know how to, register to vote. Kathryn Gleadle has argued that women could often face cultural pressures that discouraged them from becoming involved in politics; some women may have lacked the necessary cultural capital that enabled them to understand the registration or voting process.17 Although her work focuses on women in the nineteenth century, it is likely that these obstacles persisted to an extent following the passing of the 1918 Act; a small percentage of the unenfranchised two million may have lacked the cultural capital that enabled them to engage in the voting process. These factors, and others, may therefore have contributed to some of the missing two million’s absence from the electoral register.
8 However, it is clear from comparing the figures for male unenfranchisement in this period that there is a stark gendered difference in the number of unregistered voters. The same data set was used, but this time the number of men aged 21 and over in the county was subtracted from the total male population of that county. In total, 546,147 men aged 21 and over were not registered to vote in 1921.18 This is, on average, 5.3% of the male population of Great Britain aged over 21. In contrast, the almost two million unenfranchised women account for 21.1% of the female population aged over 30. This is an enormous difference that cannot be explained solely by allowing for a degree of population mobility or apathy. This therefore indicates that the property-based qualifications that affected women voters, but not men, served to exclude more of these women from the vote than any other qualification in the Act.
9 There were a number of different ways a woman could qualify for the franchise once she had reached 30. If she was a property owner, or paid local rates, she could become enfranchised, and if she was married to a man who was a property owner or local rate payer, she would also qualify—although it is worth noting that, if her husband was too poor to afford local rates payments, he would still qualify to vote even though his wife would not. Women graduates of universities (including those who had completed exams at Oxford and Cambridge) were entitled to the vote, but a woman married to a man who was a university graduate did not become an elector by virtue of her husband’s degree. The rules were complicated and often erroneously misapplied as a result. For example, Cheryl Law notes that, prior to the completion of demobilisation after the First World War in 1922, some electoral officials denied the wives of servicemen the right to vote on the grounds that their husbands were still away on active military service. Although there was nothing in the 1918 Act that served to prohibit women in the military, or the wives of men in the military, from voting once they had reached the age of 30, Law notes that “the confusion did considerable damage to women’s understanding of their legal entitlement”.19 Neither the women themselves, nor, in some cases, officials overseeing the registration process, seemed to fully understand the terms of the Act due to the numerous and complicated clauses it contained.
10 The property requirements of the 1918 Act did, in some cases, affect middle-class women, but such women had more opportunities to work around them than working- class women. Businesswomen living in unfurnished rooms were prevented from voting, for example (although businessmen living identical circumstances were not). However, they were simply advised by an NUWSS pamphlet of 1918 to “buy their own furniture [which qualified them to vote] and rent an unfurnished room or rooms, whether in the house of
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their own people or with strangers”.20 Not only would this suggestion have been an impossibility for almost all working-class women, they far outnumbered the middle- class businesswomen who were also affected by this qualification.
11 It is worth drawing particular attention to the fact that these property qualifications also left women who worked in domestic service unenfranchised during the decade that followed the 1918 Act. By 1921, 1,335,389 women in Britain worked in domestic service. Although this represents a slight fall from 1901, when 1,459,884 were employed in service, a number of factors, including the economic depression of the 1920s and the slow expansion rate of light manufacturing, meant that the number of women working in live-in domestic service actually increased as the 1920s progressed. Indeed, by 1931 the number of women working in service had reached 1,554,235—a higher number than at the turn of the century.21 Women were expressly excluded from the franchise if they shared a house with their employer, which, of course, included all those who worked as live-in servants. Those who received lodgings as part of their salary—school teachers, for example—could still qualify for the franchise.22
12 Although domestic service employed a predominantly young workforce, in the interwar period about 50% of servants were aged 25 or younger.23 This still left those servants aged over 30—just under half of the total workforce—disenfranchised despite meeting the age qualification. This is significant not just because it shows that a large number of women were still excluded from the franchise on the basis of their occupation, even after they had turned 30, but also because domestic service was such a large employer of working-class women—indeed, “it employed the largest numbers of women of any labour market sector in Britain”.24 This was not, therefore, a relatively small anomaly that affected only a very few women living in very specific circumstances. This was an exclusion of a large proportion of working-class women, and an exclusion of all women working in the single largest sector of female employment at the time.
13 Where feminist societies continued to campaign for equal enfranchisement, almost without exception they did so on the basis of obtaining votes for the “under thirties”; working-class women over 30 who were not property owners, or who could not afford local rates payments went without mention in their campaigning. In 1927, anticipating the passing of the Equal Franchise Bill, the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), the post-war incarnation of the NUWSS, produced a pamphlet designed as a history of the suffrage movement from partial enfranchisement in 1918 to equal enfranchisement in 1928. The booklet offers a year by year overview of key events, demonstrations, petitions and setbacks, with some commentary. It aimed to be “a short summary” of what “practically every important women’s organisation is working [on] ”.25 What is immediately noticeable, however, is its almost total lack of acknowledgement of the two million unenfranchised women over 30; the chief focus is on those aged between 21 and 30. Indeed, at no point does this official contemporary history of the suffrage movement post-1918, produced by the largest suffrage organisation in Britain, note the existence of a large number of women older than 30 who were excluded from the franchise, nor does it explain why they were excluded. The pamphlet’s author does make two vague references to “inequalities in the present law between men and women”,26 but never explicitly states what these other inequalities in the law actually were.
14 July 1927 saw a large demonstration in Hyde Park by over 40 women’s societies, pressuring the government to act on the issue of equal suffrage. The societies involved
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set out their demands on the government in a letter: they called for “an immediate Government measure giving votes to women at 21 on the same terms as men” with a second demand for “Peeresses in their own right a seat, voice and vote in the House of Lords”.27 The emphasis of the letter was, once again, placed on securing age parity with male voters. Indeed, although it could be argued that the phrase “on the same terms as men” encompassed all the disparities in the current law, the fact that the present women’s franchise was based largely on property qualifications was not highlighted, whilst the age difference was. It is quite clear to see which factor was prioritised by the organisations. Perhaps more tellingly, the need for women to be able to sit in the House of Lords on the same terms as men was considered an equally pressing issue as franchise reform.28 Although this would have undoubtedly been a symbolic victory for women generally, it is arguable how much of an impact the gender composition of an unelected Upper House would have had on working-class women, compared with the impact of being allowed to vote in Parliamentary elections.
15 It should not simply be assumed that, with such a strong contemporary focus on votes at 21, the exclusion of poorer women aged over 30 from the 1918 Act was not understood at the time. There is a significant body of evidence that indicates that a number of seasoned suffrage campaigners were aware of the problem of the property- based franchise system, and particularly its impact on excluding older working-class women from the franchise. Eva Hubback and Elizabeth Macadam, in their capacity as secretaries to NUSEC, protested against “the absurd anomalies which at present prevent...two million women above [30], because they are poor in this world’s goods, from entering into their rightful inheritance of responsible citizenship”.29 Hubback and Macadam’s figure of two million is corroborated by analysis of data from the 1921 Census; as examined earlier, the total number of unenfranchised women aged over 30 in England and Wales in 1921 was 1,941,165—or just under two million. Their comments also suggest that those who held senior organisational roles within the post-war suffrage movement were aware of the discrepancies in the 1918 Act that left a large number of women unenfranchised because of its various qualifications that were tied to wealth and property. Elsewhere, an anonymous article entitled ‘Demonstration on Equal Franchise’ which was sent to Time and Tide magazine in 1927 notes that, in addition to women under 30 not being enfranchised, “under existing laws, 14 out of 15 of our women wage-earners are disenfranchised”.30 Although the article’s author gives no indication as to how this figure was calculated—and it is worth noting that it seems to be something of an over-estimate compared with other calculations—it does suggest that the unenfranchisement of older working-class women was understood, even when the exact number of women affected was somewhat misunderstood.
16 The issue was also mentioned in various Parliamentary debates on the possibility of extending the franchise. Ellen Wilkinson noted that, “[w]hen I was first elected [at 33] having neither a husband nor furniture, although I was eligible to sit in this House, I was not eligible for a vote,”31 whilst fellow Labour MP Margaret Bondfield commented that, “ [s]ince I have been able to vote at all, I have never felt the same enthusiasm because the vote was the consequence of possessing property rather than the consequence of being a human being”.32 Conservative MP Katharine Stewart-Murray was present at a debate on equalising the franchise in 1924, where she “queried whether women really wanted [equal franchise]” but nonetheless did acknowledge that something should be done about some of the anomalies that existed in the 1918 Act, specifically referencing the women over 30 who were still unenfranchised.33 Nonetheless, such comments were rare, and not acted upon
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until the Equal Franchise Bill was passed, and the general picture suggests that there was very limited discussion of, or campaigning against, the exclusion of working-class women over 30 from a franchise system that was property-based.
17 Finally, in July 1928 the Equal Franchise Act was passed, removing all pre-existing anomalies in the 1918 Act. Although the focus of much of the campaigning for the equalisation of the franchise during the ten year period between the two Acts was on obtaining votes at 21, rather than removing the property qualifications for voting that most affected poorer working-class women over 30, women were, in the end, granted the right to vote on equal terms with men. After 1928, all previously excluded women were enfranchised. With this end result—a victory for all women, regardless of age, social class or any other factor—why does it matter that some working-class women had been excluded from the original Act, and that they were largely ignored by those working towards equalisation of the franchise? The second section of this article will attempt to answer this question by considering the relationship between legislative change, and broader changes in social attitudes towards women, both prior to the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918, and afterwards.
The persistence of class biased attitudes within the suffrage movement and politics, 1918—1928
18 Although the 1918 Act was the first to allow (some) women the vote in Parliamentary elections, thus granting them full citizenship rights, it was not the first piece of legislation that allowed women to participate in the democratic process. Evidence suggests that in some areas, women were voting in parish elections as early as the 1840s,34 whilst from 1888, women could vote in borough and county council elections. Changes in legislation that allowed women the right to vote in local elections helped to change social attitudes towards women’s role in the public sphere, increasing their area of influence, which in turn assisted in increasing the pressure on successive governments to pass legislation granting women the Parliamentary franchise.
19 Of course, this pressure was mostly kept up by the suffrage movement. Women from across the political spectrum were united in their desire for the vote, even when their methods of campaigning differed. It is also significant that women from all social classes, including the working-class, were involved in the campaign.35 However, the relationship between the working-class women and the middle- and upper-class women in the movement was a complex one, and reflected entrenched social divisions. For example, in the early twentieth century, as domestic service was the most common form of female employment, most women involved in the suffrage movement would have experienced either employing, or working as, a servant.36 As Laura Schwartz argues, domestic servants were undoubtedly active in the suffrage movement but due to the nature of their work, they often found it “difficult to participate in the regular round of meetings and demonstrations”.37 Furthermore, her analysis of servants’ correspondence in journals such as Common Cause suggests that servants were aware of, and unafraid to point out, “the hypocrisy of those claiming to fight for women’s emancipation while benefitting from the exploitation of women workers in their own home”.38 The failure of feminists in the period 1918—1928 to fight for the enfranchisement of the two million women who were unable to meet the property-based qualifications in the 1918 Act, which included all live-in domestic servants over the age of 30, suggests that in this case, legislative
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change enfranchising some women did not lead to a corresponding shift in attitudes towards all women. The relative lack of interest in the very poorest women and domestic servants was prevalent within the women’s movement before 1918, which in part accounts for their exclusion from the legislation; the failure of feminists to fight for their enfranchisement alongside that of younger women suggests a degree of continuity in class relations within the suffrage movement between 1918 and 1928.
20 Considering attitudes towards the new woman voter in the press and party literature is also useful in assessing the relationship between legislative change and social change. Women were quickly accepted as voters by the media, although with some caveats. They were expressly encouraged to vote in the 1918 election, but were encouraged to do so by considering the impact that politics had on their children, homes and welfare. Millicent Fawcett, writing in the Daily Express on polling day, implored women to vote for “the education of your children, the guardianship laws that concern them, your homes [and] your citizenship” with several other feminist writers using domestic issues to encourage women to vote.39 It is significant that women were accepted as voters by the media, with even the Daily Mail reversing its pre-war opposition to women’s enfranchisement and encouraging women to vote.40 But it is equally significant that they were encouraged to do so through domestic issues. In the Victorian period, when women began to be involved in local politics, they were most often to be found exerting influence “over the delivery of state welfare policies”.41 Such topics had been gendered as “women’s issues”, and this continued after partial enfranchisement, on a national level as well as local.
21 As this article has argued, the two million women over 30 who were excluded from the franchise appear to have been mostly forgotten by the suffrage movement as a whole. In addition, they were also largely ignored by the political parties in their appeals to women voters. Research by David Thackeray suggests that women were most often appealed to as housewives and consumers, by highlighting issues such as the cost of milk, rather than as waged workers in their own right; he contends that this decision could have been influenced, at least in part, by the fact that there was not yet full enfranchisement for women.42 The very poorest women’s concerns were not addressed in party literature, and instead, this was aimed instead at well-heeled housewives (the “acceptable” face of the new woman voter).43 Those who were not enfranchised were— like the issues that affected them—ignored by political parties. Although political parties, like the popular press, both accepted and attempted to appeal to the new woman voter, they were uninterested in protesting the exclusion of the very poorest women from the franchise.
22 All this suggests that the relationship between legislative and social change is complex. Changes in social attitudes and legislation meant that women’s sphere of influence had expanded by 1918, which contributed to the passage of the 1918 Act. Through this, both social change and legislative change can be seen to drive each other. This is also illustrated in what did not change. In 1918, legislative change excluded two million working-class women from the vote, and there was no campaign by suffrage activists to rectify this—the focus for equalising the franchise was solely on the “under thirties”. It is significant that the poorest women were still excluded from both the franchise and the suffrage campaign, as this indicates a degree of continuity from the earlier period, when the poorest women, and particularly domestic servants, also faced a measure of exclusion from the movement.
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Conclusion
23 When considering the impact of the 1918 Act, Maria DiCenzo has cautioned against applying unrealistic expectations to the rate at which society could have changed as a direct result of the passage of this legislation: Given that it took another ten years just to achieve equal voting rights and another fifty to pass equal pay legislation for women, critics have underestimated the extent to which the concerted efforts of feminists met with sustained opposition on the part of constituencies and institutions whose interests would not be served by addressing grievances and extending rights to large numbers of women.44
24 Even an Act that had guaranteed women voting rights on equal terms with men from the beginning would not have been enough to overcome such institutional opposition, and this is worth bearing in mind, when considering how much change the Act brought to the lives of even those women it did initially enfranchise. It should also, of course, be acknowledged that the Act itself, for all its restrictions, was, and remains, of immense significance to feminists. It marked the culmination of decades of work by those who had campaigned for suffrage rights. And the vote as a concept had always been about more than just the ability of an individual woman to place a cross in a ballot box come election time; it had always, in part, been about “acknowledging women as human beings”. 45
25 Nonetheless, it is important to consider what the Act did not do as much as what it did, and in particular consider the place in society of the two million working-class women who were excluded by its terms. The relationship between social change and legislative change is complex; both can drive each other forward, and at times it is hard to see direct causality from legal change to social change, or vice versa. When laws were changed to first allow Victorian women to stand for election to local councils, their presence there helped to change perceptions of women’s role in the public sphere, changing social attitudes towards women, which in turn contributed to the passage of the 1918 Act. Legislative change—in both the earlier period and post-1918—did not result in an overnight change in attitudes towards women, but it did help to drive gendered social change forward by legally defining women’s right to take up certain spaces. Excluding certain groups from the 1918 Act, then, left these women not only without a vote, but also excluded from the more general shift in opinions on what was —and was not—considered acceptable for women. If the vote had always been, on some level, about acknowledging women as human beings, were those women who remained unenfranchised in the decade that followed 1918 somehow not fully recognised as human beings? It is hoped that this article has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the legislation surrounding women’s enfranchisement in Britain. It is therefore perhaps worth considering who the 1918 Act excluded, as well as who it included, when considering the extent to which this piece of legislation drove forward social change in the decade to 1928.
26 Anna Muggeridge completed an MA by Research at the University of Warwick in June 2016. She is currently working towards a PhD at the University of Worcester, which is kindly funded by a studentship from the university. Her research examines the extent to which war and conflict politicised women in the Black Country in the period 1914 to 1948.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alberti, Johanna, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914-1928 (London, Macmillan, 1989).
Alberti, Johanna, ‘“A Symbol and A Key”: The suffrage movement in Britain, 1918—1928’, in June Purvis & Sandra Stanley-Holton (eds.), Votes for Women (London, Routledge, 2000).
Andrews, Maggie, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women's Institute as a Social Movement (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2015).
Beaumont, Caitriona, Housewives and citizens Domesticity and the women’s movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013).
Bingham, Adrian, ‘Enfranchisement, Feminism and the Modern Woman: Debates in the British Popular Press, 1918—1939’, in Julie V Gottlieb & Richard Toye (eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918—1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013).
Breitenbach, Esther & Wright, Valerie, ‘Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c. 1918– 1939’, Women’s History Review, 23(3), 2013, pp. 401—420.
Census Data, ‘Preliminary Report on the population data of the thirteenth Census of England and Wales’, compiled by the Registrar General S. P. Vivian, 18 August 1922, available at
Cowman, Krista, ‘“Incipient Toryism”? The Women's Social and Political Union and the Independent Labour Party, 1903–14’, History Workshop Journal, 53 (1), (2002), pp. 128—148.
Cowman, Krista, Women of the right spirit: Paid organisers of the WSPU, 1904–18 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011).
Crawford, Elizabeth, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (London, Routledge, 2000).
Delap, Lucy, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011).
Dicenzo, Maria, ‘“Our Freedom and Its Results”: measuring progress in the aftermath of suffrage’, Women’s History Review, 23 (3), 2014, pp. 421-40.
Giles, Judy, The Parlour and the Suburb Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (London, Bloomsbury, 2004).
Gleadle, Kathryn, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain 1815—1867 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009).
Hannam, June, ‘Women and Politics’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850—1945 An Introduction (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 217—245.
Hannam, June & Hunt, Karen, ‘Towards an archaeology of Interwar Women’s Politics: the Local and the Everyday’ in, Julie V Gottlieb & Richard Toye (eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918—1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013).
House of Commons, House of Commons Debate, vol. 215, column 1405, 29 March 1928.
Law, Cheryl, Suffrage and Power: the women’s movement 1918–1928 (London, IB Tauris, 1997).
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Law, Cheryl, ‘The old faith living and the old power there: the movement to extend women’s suffrage’, in Maroula Joannou & June Purvis (eds.), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 201—214.
Leneman, Leah, ‘A truly national movement: the view from outside London, in Maroula Joannou & June Purvis, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester, Manchester University Press 1998), pp. 37—50.
Liddington, Jill & Norris, Jill, One Hand Tied Behind Us: Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement (2nd ed., London, Rivers Oram Press, 2000).
Llewellyn-Davis, Margaret, ‘The People’s Suffrage Federation’, Common Cause, 21 October 1909, pp. 356—7.
Macmillan, Chrystal, And shall I have a parliamentary vote?: being a description of the qualifications for the women's parliamentary and local government vote in England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland, with particulars as to how to get on the register (London, NUWSS, 1918).
Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Maitland Sara Hallinan Collection, MSS.15X/ 2/349/1, ‘Equal Franchise 1918—1928’, September 1927.
Muggeridge, Anna, ‘To what extent were working-class women excluded from the franchise 1918 —1928?’, (MA by Research dissertation, University of Warwick, 2016).
Myall, Michelle, ‘“No surrender!”: the militancy of Mary Leigh, a working-class suffragette’, in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds.), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New feminist perspectives (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 173—187
Purvis, June, ‘The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 4 (1), (1995), pp. 103—133.
Purvis, June, ‘The Women’s Party of Great Britain (1917–1919): a forgotten episode in British women’s political history’, Women’s History Review, 25(4), 2016, pp. 638—651.
Richardson, Sarah, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, Routledge, 2013).
Schwartz, Laura, ‘A Job Like Any Other? Feminist Responses and Challenges to Domestic Worker Organizing in Edwardian Britain’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 88, (2015), pp. 1—19.
Stanley-Holton, Sandra, ‘Women and the vote’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850—1945 An Introduction (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 277—305.
Takayanagi, Mari, ‘Parliament and Women, c.1900-1945’, PhD dissertation, King’s College London, 2012.
Thackeray, David, ‘From Prudent Housewife to Empire Shopper: Party Appeals to the Female Voter 1918—1928’, in Julie V Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918—1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013), pp. 37—53.
Todd, Selina, ‘Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900—1950’, Past and Present, 203, 2009, pp. 181—204.
Vellacott, Jo, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War (London, Palgrave, 2007).
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The Women’s Library, London School of Economics, Equal Political Rights Campaign Committee Correspondence and Papers, 5ERI/1/B, ‘Letter demanding equal franchise sent to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’, 1926.
The Women’s Library, London School of Economics, Equal Political Rights Campaign Committee Correspondence and Papers, 5ERI/1/B, ‘Demonstration on Equal Franchise’, 6 July 1927.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on my original draft, and the editors of this special edition. Additional thanks to my supervisors at the University of Warwick, Dr Laura Schwartz and Professor Sarah Richardson. I am also very grateful to Professor Maggie Andrews for her advice. 2. For the most comprehensive guide to the numerous different organisations, see: Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928, (London, Routledge, 2000). 3. Margaret Llewellyn-Davis, ‘The People’s Suffrage Federation’, The Common Cause, 21 October 1909, p. 356—7. 4. Leah Leneman, ‘A truly national movement: the view from outside London, in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 37—50, p. 31. 5. Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘Women and the vote’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850 —1945 An Introduction, (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 277—305, p. 277. 6. Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914-1928, (London, Macmillan, 1989). 7. Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: the women’s movement 1918–1928, (London, IB Tauris, 1997). 8. Ibid., p.183. 9. Jo Vellacott, Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: The Erosion of Democratic Suffragism in Britain During the First World War, (London, Palgrave, 2007), p. 95. 10. June Purvis, “The Women’s Party of Great Britain (1917–1919): a forgotten episode in British women’s political history”, Women’s History Review, 25(4), 2016, p. 639. 11. Ibid., p. 647. 12. In particular, see Esther Breitenbach and Valerie Wright, “Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c.1918– 1939”, Women’s History Review, 23(3), (2013), pp. 401—420 and June Hannam and Karen Hunt, “Towards an archaeology of Interwar Women’s Politics: the Local and the Everyday” in, Julie V Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918—1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013), pp. 124—141. 13. Adrian Bingham, “Enfranchisement, Feminism and the Modern Woman: Debates in the British Popular Press, 1918—1939”, in Julie V. Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918—1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013), pp. 87—104. 14. Law, Suffrage and Power, pp. 182—183. 15. Census Data, ‘Preliminary Report on the population data of the thirteenth Census of England and Wales’, compiled by the Registrar General S. P. Vivian, 18 August 1922. Available at http:// www.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/Show?page=Home, last accessed 06.07.2016. To calculate this figure, Table 7, ‘Population and parliamentary electors (parliamentary constituencies)’ was used for each county of England and Wales. This gives the population of women aged 30 and over in the county, per the Census of June 1921, and the number of women aged over 30 on the county’s electoral register, per the electoral roll of 1921. From this data, for each county the number of women aged over 30, but who did not appear on the electoral roll can be calculated. This data was collected as part of my MA thesis at the University of Warwick; full detail can be provided on
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request, as space necessarily precludes its inclusion here. Anna Muggeridge, ‘To what extent were working-class women excluded from the franchise 1918—1928?’, (MA by Research dissertation, University of Warwick, 2016). 16. It is worth noting that, due to availability of figures, these calculations were only done for England and Wales. Were Scotland and Northern Ireland to be included in the data, it can reasonably be assumed that the figure would well exceed two million unenfranchised women over 30. 17. Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain 1815—1867 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009). 18. Census Data, “Preliminary Report on the population data of the thirteenth Census of England and Wales”, compiled by the Registrar General S. P. Vivian, 18 August 1922. Available at
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31. House of Commons, House of Commons Debate, vol. 215, column 1405, 29 March 1928. 32. Ibid., column 1415. 33. Mari Takayanagi, “Parliament and Women, c.1900-1945”, (PhD dissertation, King’s College London, 2012), p. 113. 34. Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Abingdon, Routledge, 2013). 35. There is a large body of literature that considers the role of working-class women in the suffrage movement. See, for instance: Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement, 2nd Ed, (London, Rivers Oram Press, 2000); June Purvis, “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain”, Women’s History Review, 4 (1), (1995), pp. 103—133; Michelle Myall, “‘No surrender!’: the militancy of Mary Leigh, a working-class suffragette”, in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds.), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New feminist perspectives (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 173—187; Krista Cowman, “‘Incipient Toryism’? The Women's Social and Political Union and the Independent Labour Party, 1903–14”, History Workshop Journal, 53 (1), (2002), pp. 128—148; Krista Cowman, Women of the right spirit: Paid organisers of the WSPU, 1904–18 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 1—11. 36. Laura Schwartz, ‘A Job Like Any Other? Feminist Responses and Challenges to Domestic Worker Organizing in Edwardian Britain’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 88, (2015), p. 1. 37. Ibid., p. 4. 38. Ibid., pp. 6—7. 39. Bingham, “Feminism and the Modern Woman”, p. 91. 40. Ibid., p. 89. 41. June Hannam, “Women and Politics”, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850—1945: An Introduction (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 225. 42. David Thackeray, “From Prudent Housewife to Empire Shopper: Party Appeals to the Female Voter 1918—1928”, in Julie V Gottlieb and Richard Toye (eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918—1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013), pp. 38—39. 43. There is an extensive literature on how housewives of all social classes “became” citizens in the interwar years that considers how they were educated and involved in the political process. See, for instance: Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women's Institute as a Social Movement (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2015); Caitriona Beaumont, Housewives and citizens Domesticity and the women’s movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013) and Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb Domestic Identities: Class, Femininity and Modernity (London, Bloomsbury, 2004). 44. Maria DiCenzo, “‘Our Freedom and Its Results’: measuring progress in the aftermath of suffrage”, Women’s History Review, 23 (3), 2014, p. 421-40, p. 423. 45. Ibid., p. 429.
ABSTRACTS
This paper seeks to explore the extent to which the extension of the franchise to some women in 1918 resulted in a measureable change in attitudes towards women, and particularly working-
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class women. This article will demonstrate that roughly two million women over the age of 30 continue to be disenfranchised by the 1918 Representation of the People Act, the vast majority of them working-class women who were unable to ‘buy into’ the franchise through property ownership or local rates payments. The suffragists working on the extension of the franchise between 1918 and 1928 focused almost exclusively on the younger unenfranchised women, with almost no attention paid to the two million women over 30 who were still excluded from the franchise on the basis of their class. It will therefore argue that although partial enfranchisement did result in progress being made in (some) women’s legal status, many working-class women continue to be denied citizenship until 1928, while the class bias of the pre-war suffrage movement continued to pervade inter-war feminism.
L’accès de certaines femmes au suffrage en 1918 a-t-il produit un changement d’attitudes envers les femmes, tout particulièrement les femmes ouvrières ? Cet article démontrera qu’approximativement deux millions de femmes de plus de trente ans n’ont pas obtenu le droit de vote en 1918, en majorité des ouvrières qui n’étaient pas en mesure d’accéder au vote car elles n’étaient pas propriétaires et ne payaient pas assez d’impôts locaux. Les suffragistes qui continuèrent à faire campagne, entre 1918 et 1928, pour l’accès des femmes encore exclues au droit de vote, concentrèrent leurs efforts quasi exclusivement sur les femmes de moins de trente ans, en ignorant presque totalement ces deux millions de femmes de plus de trente ans exclues par leur appartenance de classe. Cet article en conclura que si l’accès partiel des femmes au droit de vote fut source de progrès dans le statut de certaines femmes, beaucoup de femmes ouvrières continuèrent à voir leur citoyenneté niée jusqu’en 1928, tandis que le biais classiste du mouvement suffragiste d’avant-guerre continua à irriguer le féminisme d’entre-guerre.
INDEX
Mots-clés: genre, classe sociale, suffrage des femmes, la loi sur la représentation du peuple de 1918, féminisme Keywords: gender, class, women’s suffrage, 1918, Representation of the People Act, feminism
AUTHOR
ANNA MUGGERIDGE
University of Worcester
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From Grunwick to Gate Gourmet: South Asian Women’s Industrial Activism and the Role of Trade Unions De Grunwick à Gate Gourmet : le militantisme des femmes sud-asiatiques et le rôle des syndicats
Sundari Anitha, Ruth Pearson and Linda McDowell
Introduction
1 The focus of this article is an analysis of the effectiveness of the trade union response to the participation of South Asian women workers in two industrial disputes: at the Grunwick photo-processing firm between 1976-78 and the Gate Gourmet food processing unit at Heathrow Airport in 2005. Both disputes involved first generation migrants to the UK, and both failed to achieve their aims, ending in discord between the strikers and their unions. The Grunwick dispute, which has since assumed an iconic status in British labour history, reflected the circumstances of the 1970s, a particular moment in British Labour history characterised by mass solidarity action during the heyday of industrial militancy. The Gate Gourmet dispute unfolded in a very different political, economic and regulatory framework for the trade unions, in an era of rapid industrial outsourcing and increasing precarity of the workforce. The research on which this article is based questions the on-going commitment of the British trade union movement to supporting migrant women workers while recognising that changes in industrial relations legislation, the normalisation of precarious employment contracts and the declining political power of trade unions have all contributed to weakening the room for manoeuvre of organised labour to effectively protect marginalised sections of the labour force.
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Background
2 The Grunwick strikers were predominantly Gujarati Hindus of East-African origin who had arrived in the UK between late 1960s and the early-1970s, largely from urban, English-language-educated and middle-class backgrounds. At the time of the Grunwick dispute they were mostly in their twenties and thirties. These workers have been described as “twice-migrants”1 who prospered in Africa under the colonial rule by occupying an intermediary class position between the colonial rulers and the native population.2 Though all the Grunwick strikers had previous experience of paid work in either East Africa or India, in keeping with their class status this had been in “respectable” occupations such as teaching, secretarial work or home-based work. Following policies of Africanization, they migrated as entire family units and without a “myth of return”,3 making a long-term commitment to settle indefinitely in the UK. This entailed women’s entry into the labour market in the UK, and accepting the types of low-status and low paid factory work typically available to women migrants at that time.
3 The women workers who were sacked at Gate Gourmet were Punjabi – mostly Sikh and some Hindu – direct migrants who came to the UK between late 1960s to the early 1980s from agrarian communities. At the time of the dispute in 2005, they were a relatively older workforce, in their fifties and sixties, living in the area around Southall, London, where Heathrow Airport was a major source of employment. Most of them had long working histories in the UK. They had responded to their employment in low paid, low status jobs by joining trade unions and had previous experience of industrial militancy in other workplaces such as Hillingdon hospital and Lufthansa Skychef as they struggled to evade managerial control and sought dignity, respect and better pay and conditions.
4 The research that we draw on here was carried out between 2007 and 2009, involving life-history interviews with five of the then-elderly Grunwick strikers, and 27 Punjabi women workers sacked by Gate Gourmet. Apart from the Grunwick strike leader, Jayaben Desai, the names of the women have been changed to protect their identity. Utilising life history methods enabled us to move away from an incident-centred analysis of the two industrial disputes to one where the research participants were able to reflect on their lives as a whole and enabled us to locate their working lives and their participation in the disputes in the context of their broader histories of migration and settlement, family and community relations and their current circumstances.
5 There is a large secondary literature on the Grunwick dispute as well as a range of political and journalistic accounts4 and video production including documentaries by Chris Thomas. We drew on these existing sources, undertook interviews with a number of key actors including members of the Grunwick strike committee and other strikers as well as drew upon archival sources including documents released under the 30-year Rule and Special Branch Files made publicly available over 2016-17. In contrast there are few published accounts of the Gate Gourmet dispute. In this case, in addition to the interviews with the workers, our research was informed by interviews with three senior officials in the TGWU (now UNITE), by direct observation of the proceedings of several cases that were heard at an Employment Tribunal in Reading, and by analysis of the full judgements of the 17 Employment tribunal cases heard between November 2006 and June 2008. These sources provide a unique perspective of the ways in which
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this group of South Asian women workers experienced the role of their trade union in the genesis, trajectory and official conclusion of their dispute.
6 Whereas the singular account of Jayaben Desai, the leader of the Grunwick dispute, had hitherto served to represent all the women strikers, we also interviewed four other women who participated in the strike. A principal objective of our research was to document the voices of a range of women involved, in a context where the ownership of the memory of the Grunwick dispute has been claimed by trade unions, particularly in the 30th and 40 th anniversary years when celebrations marking it were held. 5 In contrast the Gate Gourmet dispute continues to be ignored by the mainstream media, and there is little appetite for the participants’ alternative accounts of this dispute.
7 Focusing on these disputes enables us to explore the agency of two groups of South Asian women workers, to understand their engagement in mainstream trade union practices and render visible the experiences of women whose voices continue to be marginalised. We recount their stories of involvement in industrial militancy as a counterpoint to widely expressed surprise at South Asian women’s presence on a picket line: a surprise that has persisted despite a long history of South Asian women’s labour activism in the UK.6 These women’s dissent continues to be represented through familiar orientalist constructions - both in mainstream media and some trade union accounts7 - as exotic, impulsive and somehow unusual compared to the norm of the white male industrial worker.
Minority ethnic women in the UK labour market
8 In the period after the Grunwick dispute, women’s participation rate in the labour market (as a percentage of women of working age) in the UK increased from 60% of working population in 1981 to 76% in 2001.8 However, occupational and vertical segregation in the labour market continued to restrict many women to part-time, low- paid jobs primarily in the 5Cs sectors – caring, cleaning, cashiering, catering and clerical work.9 Particular aspects of gendered inequalities in the labour market that have been explored include the impact of marriage, child-bearing, life-stage, level of qualifications10 and ethnicity.11
9 However the employment patterns of women from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the UK have varied significantly.12 Labour Force Survey data for 1979 for example, just after the end of the Grunwick dispute, indicates that compared to 25% of the employed British-born white women who worked in manufacturing in 1979, the corresponding figures were 58% for Indian, 45% for African-Asian, 54% for Pakistani and 50% for Bangladeshi women.13 This pattern of relegation to low-paid, low-status occupations, described as the “ethnic penalty” in employment,14 has continued across the years between the two disputes. Among Black African, Black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers and Sikh women, who are most likely to be working in low-skilled jobs, almost one in 10 was working as a process, plant or machine operative in 2004, compared with approximately 3 percent of women in other groups.15 Such differences have been the focus of a small body of literature that addresses the implications of women’s different origins and backgrounds for their labour market positions and experiences at work.16 There is also a small but growing body of literature on the labour market experiences of particular categories of women workers.17
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10 Black and minority ethnic women’s struggles against gender-based and racial discrimination and disadvantage in the labour market have been documented, including references to particular examples of industrial action18 with or without the support of their union.19 Parrenas has analysed the ways in which life experiences and locations in terms of class, ethnicity, race and family situation combine to shape the identity and subjectivity of migrant women. 20 But these themes of intersectionality have been neglected in relation to migrant women’s experiences in the workplace, particularly their industrial militancy.21 According to Brah, the issues that are central to an understanding of the nature and experience of South Asian women in the UK labour force include the history of colonialism and imperialism, the timing of migrations, the restructuring of the national and global economies, the changing structure of labour markets, state policies, racial discrimination in the labour market and the segmentation of labour markets by gender, class, age and ethnic background.22 In spite of the research on labour force participation and documented examples of their activism, myths persist of these women’s assumed domestic orientation23 as well as a stereotypical assumption that minority ethnic women workers are difficult to unionise,24 paralleling the repeated media surprise at their presence on picket lines.
Trade unions and issues of gender, race and ethnicity: changes and challenges
11 Despite the long involvement of black and minority ethnic workers in working class organisations in Britain25 trade unions historically have failed to adequately address the needs of women and minority ethnic workers. This neglect has been attributed variously to the ambivalence or hostility of early trade unions towards tackling racism and discrimination at work,26 exclusion strategies against Black and women workers,27 reluctance to take on issues specifically affecting women members,28 and the unrepresentative nature of the union decision-making structures which were effectively dominated by white men:29a charge that holds to this day.
12 Some of the practices of trade unions in the 1960s and early 1970s included collusion with management policies of paying differential wages based on gender and race, barring certain groups of workers from promotion or selective redundancy strategies.30 Such discriminatory practices were the basis of disputes at Mansfield Hosiery in Loughborough in 1972 and at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester in 1974,31 where South Asian women workers organised against their employers as well their own unions, often with the support of community groups. During this period, strategies of separate organising were explored in the context of the trade unions’ neglect of issues of gender and the lack of representation of women in the union decision-making structures and practices in the UK.32 An initial trade union position that special policies to address the needs of black workers would discriminate against white union members gave way from the 1980s to the recognition of racial discrimination as an issue that required specific action, although measures such as positive action to tackle discrimination took somewhat longer to materialise.33
13 Since the 1990s, trade unions have taken a more engaged approach to questions of race and gender,34 though they have encountered new problems in reaching out to recent migrants who often work in low paid and precarious jobs where unions have little influence. This “ethnic division of labour”35 poses new challenges to trade unions’
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capacity to represent the most vulnerable sections of the workforce. More recent research documents efforts by unions to organise beyond traditional structures and alliances,36 in what has been termed “community unionism”.37 However, Martinez-Lucio and Perret challenge the stereotypical approach to black and minority ethnic union members, noting that deploying some notion of collectivity embedded within ideal constructions of “community” results in assumptions about the common interests of black and minority ethnic workers.38 This essentialist approach tends to assess black and minority ethnic workers in terms of their deviation from the accepted norm of the white worker, though the latter are rarely burdened with assumptions about common and collective interests on account of their own community membership.
Grunwick as the turning point in trade unions’ representation of minority women workers?
14 The management strategy at Grunwick was to continuously reduce labour costs by lowering the unit cost of production, whilst increasing the productivity of labour -what has been termed the “cheap labour” strategy.39 The recruitment strategy was to hire workers who exhibited all the classic characteristics of cheap labour - for example, labour that was readily available, that cost little or nothing to recruit, that was willing to accept low hourly and weekly wages, that offered flexibility in terms of hours, overtime and seasonal demand, and that was assumed to be docile, and therefore unlikely to resist continuous efforts to increase their productivity. According to George Ward, the joint owner of the firm, the Grunwick workforce in 1976 largely comprised migrant workers who fulfilled these desirable characteristics.40
15 Recruitment was by word of mouth, using the networks of existing employees. Jayaben Desai argued that the recruitment of South Asian workers was part of a deliberate strategy: They got more work out of us. Asians had just come from Uganda and they all needed work. So they took whatever was available. Grunwick put out ‘papers’ [leaflets]: ‘come and we will give you a job. We give jobs to everyone.’ Door to door. When I went, a friend of mine followed. And soon they were full of our people.
16 In line with the findings of other research on migrant workers,41 the Grunwick strikers articulated their sense of themselves as “good workers” in comparison with those previously employed at Grunwick, perhaps in response to dominant negative constructions of immigrants as undeserving and “spongers”, both then and now. As Jayaben Desai noted: “We never took tea breaks, did not take smoking breaks, so they got a good level of ‘production’. And gradually they started shifting the workers and replaced the white workers with Asian ones.”
17 The dispute started in the mail order and computer departments which were supervised by Malcolm Alden, one of the harsher managers according to contemporary accounts, whose responsibility was to oversee the automated system for producing invoices. He was responsible for the female Asian workers as they manually processed orders and payments for films, delivered at an increasing pace throughout the summer. Jayaben Desai recalls how the pressure of work escalated as the company expanded, a view corroborated by the Scarman Inquiry:42
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The managers were in a glass cabinet. They could see us, and if they called us in to their office, the rest of the workers could see them, but could not hear what was going on. Such was their game plan. We used to work out of fear.
18 The pressures on the workforce were partly a consequence of Grunwick’s business model which hinged on processing customers’ photos at low cost and with a rapid turnover, an important element in meeting the new consumer demand from the 1960s for instant photos from holidays in the UK and abroad. According to Levidow, the automation undertaken at Grunwick to meet this demand was “lopsided” with the chemical processing and accounting phases being subjected to an extreme automation while the clerical handing of film was undertaken by a menial, highly labour intensive routine.43 This made the clerical department the bottleneck or pressure point for keeping up with the high turnover necessary throughout the peak summer months.44 The management sought to maximise productivity in this department through constant threats of dismissal if workers did not respond to efforts to increase output, and by employing students on casual contracts during the summer. As Jayaben Desai recalled: They had made ‘rules and regulations’ that you had to get permission to go to the toilets. This woman said to me that she felt ashamed to ask to go to the toilet, so she held back and was in extreme discomfort and feel a burning sensation. I told her, ‘When he has no shame making you ask loudly, why should you feel ashamed?
19 This pressure resulted in a significant problem of labour turnover. In the mail order department, turnover was particularly high: between 1 and 20 August 1976, 32 out of 102 workers left, 27 of whom departed in the six weeks leading up to the strike.45
20 Compulsory overtime was also a key aspect of meeting high demand with a flexible workforce. The management typically insisted on overtime shortly before the normal end of the working day.46 This had a particularly impact on women, as it interfered with their second shift of childcare and domestic work in the evening. According to Jayaben Desai in her evidence to the Scarman Inquiry, women were also scared of going home late in the evenings.47
21 Management controls played on the gender, race and migrant status of the workers, escalating the demand for higher productivity, while seeking to reduce any control or autonomy of the workforce over the labour process. The Grunwick strikers came from households that previously had employed servants; they were used to the status and respect that accompanied their relatively privileged social status in East Africa. This fuelled their resentment at what they perceived as degrading treatment relating to use of toilets, as well as the arbitrary imposition of compulsory overtime. Their grievances were about issues other than or as well as the low pay and poor working conditions common in many small businesses during the 1970s. Although it was the issue of compulsory overtime that spurred the initial walk-out, a range of arbitrary management procedures, experienced as disrespectful and challenging their dignity as people as well as workers, were also contributory factors.
22 The workers who participated in the initial walk out subsequently joined the white collar trade union APEX, and their demands came to be centred on the right to union recognition and collective bargaining. After several months of local picketing, the tactic of mass picketing - developed during the miners’ strike in 1972 - was vigorously deployed at Grunwick with support coming from a range of traditional unions, as well
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as from feminist and anti-racist groups, swelling the ranks of the pickets to an estimated 20,000 on a Day of Action in July 1977.
23 In spite of the Union of Postal Workers action to boycott mail from Grunwick – on which the firm depended to reach its client base and the recommendations of the Scarman Inquiry,48 George Ward, backed by the National Association For Freedom, (NAFF) refused to recognise the union or reinstate the sacked workers. The political climate became more hostile as an increasing unpopular Labour Government struggled for survival. The TUC and APEX retreated from mass picketing and effectively withdrew their support from the Grunwick strikers. With dwindling backing from the labour movement the frustrated strikers held a hunger strike outside the TUC headquarters in November 1977, protesting at the fact that, as Jayaben Desai, put it “Support from the TUC is like honey on your elbow: you can see it, you can smell it but you can’t taste it!” In the end, the strike was abandoned on 14 July 1978, without any of the strikers’ demands being met.
24 What began as resistance to managerial control and a protest in defence of workers’ dignity and respect became transformed into a dispute about pay and union recognition. Though it ended in a defeat, the Grunwick dispute is widely celebrated as an example of labour solidarity in Britain in support of women and minority workers, and is constructed in trade union accounts as a turning point in their representation of minority and women workers.
The changing context of the labour market and industrial relations regulation
25 The Grunwick dispute took place at the beginning of an era characterised by the transformation from Fordist to post-Fordist methods of industrial production and a strengthening of the workers’ legal rights. However, this was paralleled by the weakening of other rights which had facilitated collective bargaining, including compensation for the work of union shop stewards.49 In 1979, a newly elected Conservative Government introduced a set of measures that profoundly changed the regulatory framework in which unions operated.
26 Five major pieces of trade union legislation were introduced, which together served to constrict the legal space for collective action enjoyed by trade unions. Severe restrictions on the ability of unions to organise lawful industrial action were imposed, whilst also making them liable to claims for damages in the event of unlawful action. Strict controls over unions’ internal governance and voting arrangements were introduced, removing all immunity in the case of secondary (solidarity) action.50 This latter restriction was to have significant implications for the Gate Gourmet dispute in 2005.
27 In the decades between the two disputes, union membership declined and collective bargaining increasingly gave way to the regulation of workplace relations through the codification of statutory individual employment rights associated with the national minimum wage, parental and maternity benefits and anti-discrimination legislation51 – in what Deery and Mitchell characterize as an assertion of “the primacy of the individual relationship over the collective”.52 Employment Tribunals (originally named Industrial Tribunals) created by the Industrial Training Act 1964 were originally intended to
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strengthen workers’ statutory individual rights and received just over 40,000 claims in 1978-9,53 the year in which the Grunwick strike ended. The number of claims made to Employment Tribunals rose across the decades, reaching over 130,000 in 2005-6, the year the Gate Gourmet dispute began, and 236,100 in 2009-10,54 only to decline subsequently as upfront fees were imposed on workers taking on cases against their employer.
28 According to Colling, there is a link between the decline in unionisation and the rise in individual claims at Employment Tribunals, reflecting the government’s view that “the definition of union services should focus on those services received by union members as individuals”.55 A range of observers consider that collective bargaining has been marginalised as trade unions have been recast as providers of services and advice for individual workers, including redress through recourse to employment tribunals.56 Novitz (2002:1) argues that the unions’ role has been reduced to one that is “essentially individualistic in character, procedural in form, and unitary in specification”,57 although Bagguley insists that these changes represent merely a change in the “repertoire of contention” and that the pursuit of individual cases to achieve economistic class interests is still largely dependent on collective actors such as unions.58 Alongside these regulatory changes, subsequent flows of migration have led to the incorporation of new categories of workers into the lowest rungs of the labour market in a context where globalisation and outsourcing have led to the re-composition of “ disposable labour”.59 Inevitably these shifts have had a profound impact not only on the nature of industrial activism, but also on the role of trade unions in recruiting and supporting their members.
The Gate Gourmet dispute
29 The Gate Gourmet dispute took place in the wake of these changes and so followed a different trajectory from the Grunwick strike 30 years earlier. Many of the South Asian women employees of Gate Gourmet were part of the slow incorporation of minority ethnic women into trade unions, and were members of TGWU at the time of the dispute in 2005. Following BA’s outsourcing of in-flight meals in 1997 and the subsequent loss of a Virgin Atlantic contract by Gate Gourmet in March 2005, the union had been attempting, with little success, to moderate the cost-cutting changes in pay and conditions imposed by the management. In this context, arbitrary management practices, including control and harassment in relation to women’s use of the toilets, discussed in relation to the Grunwick strike, were also mentioned by Gate Gourmet workers: They even began to time you when you went to the toilet. I had just come back from the toilet one day when the manager sent for me. There were 4–5 managers sitting there. He began questioning me again and again, ‘What were you doing there?’ I asked back, ‘Why do people go to the bathroom?’ He would not stop. The same question, again and again. So I lost all caution, I thought, this shameless man, let me give him such an answer that he feels shame himself. I said, ‘I went to change my pad!’ He was quiet. What else could he say? I had said it aloud, and he felt shame. He just sent me back to the belt. After that he would pick on me for everything. (Sukhwant, a sacked Gate Gourmet worker)
30 There is considerable evidence from other research on women workers in a range of production situations - manufacturing, assembly, horticulture60 - that managerial
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control over women’s access to toilets is a frequent gendered strategy that is rarely deployed with male workers who have more autonomy over their physical mobility as well as different biologically-based needs. It is not possible to ascertain from the few contemporary ethnographies of women workers in the UK whether this is a generalised practice across UK industry and/or whether it is a strategy that is more usually found when workers are women of migrant origin. Both the Grunwick and the Gate Gourmet workers felt humiliated by it.
31 Management attempts to introduce new working practices aimed at speeding up the through-put of meal packs through the assembly process met with sustained resistance from the exclusively female and predominantly South Asian workers in this section: It [work to rule] happened three times in six months. First time was when they said they did not want to give us 15 minutes to change and report for work – they said we would have to do all that in our own time. […] So those who had put down their names for overtime withdrew their names and it went on like this for three days. The floor manager - he had been on his holidays at that time - he flew back straight on a Sunday and landed on the shop floor! ... He backtracked and said, ‘If you need the 15 minutes to change, that’s OK by me. Please don’t delay the Concorde, I will lose thousands of pounds’. (Satvinder, a sacked Gate Gourmet worker)
32 Such mechanisms of collective resistance and bargaining are part of the general repertoire of action available to trade union members, and are not new. The women workers who were informally accepted as “leaders” frequently initiated such action at Gate Gourmet and received the backing of other women in their unit, often bypassing the shop stewards, the majority of whom were men. It was in the context of a history of shop floor resistance to continual attempts by management to introduce non- negotiated cost reducing measures that the Gate Gourmet dispute unfolded.61
33 On the morning of the 10th August 2005, the installation of agency workers on the assembly line during the tea break was seen by the workers as a deliberate provocation by the management. Some 200 workers, a majority of whom were women from the tray-set department, left their work station and assembled in the canteen to discuss this development in the presence of at least one of their shop stewards - an action which had been deployed many times in the past. They were soon joined by the union convener, Mr Dhillon. When the management issued a verbal warning through a loudspeaker, asking the workers to return to work or face dismissal, the shop stewards demanded that the management rescind the warning before the workers would resume work. After three warnings, the workers were sacked by megaphone and, when they refused to return their ID cards, they were detained for six hours in the canteen by security guards. About 700 workers were dismissed that week, and subsequent dismissals took the total number of sacked workers to 813.
34 The TGWU’s initial position was that the women were provoked, which is why the union initially supported the walk-out. However, according to the prevailing legislation this constituted unballoted action and so the union did not use the term “strike”. The workers were not given “strike pay” but instead received payments of £50 per week from the union “hardship fund”. Union officials were aware that they had to acknowledge this as unballoted action under S.26 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (as amended) to protect themselves against any claims for damages. However, this effectively meant ignoring the alleged role of their own shop stewards in advising the workers against returning to the shop floor, despite management warnings of dismissal. The issue of whether action by shop stewards
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constitutes direct representation of union policy or mandate is contested.62 This posed a problem for the TGWU not just in relation to the Gate Gourmet shop stewards, but also in relation to the solidarity actions of other workers at Heathrow, who were also TGWU members. BA baggage handlers, bus drivers and ground staff staged solidarity strike action on August 10 2005, paralysing flights for 48 hours and costing BA about £42 million. The response of the TGWU president was to assert the illegality of secondary action, at the same time representing the walk-out as an expression of community support rather than workers’ solidarity: “The law did not allow for these women's husbands, sons, neighbours and friends to come to their aid.”63 By constructing the secondary strike action as personalised, depoliticised support for sacked family members and friends rather than as an act of class solidarity based on their common interests as workers,64 Woodley was reaching for the all too familiar stereotypes that construct black and minority ethnic workers’ industrial action as exotic, as community- based and somehow different from the norms and practices of mainstream trade union members.65 Twelve months later, The Guardian revealed that the TGWU had made payments totalling £600,000 to the two shop stewards involved in the secondary action to compensate them for losing their jobs. In turn the two men agreed not to talk publicly in the face of allegations that they were following union orders by organising the secondary strike.66
35 Having initially supported the women, the union’s position changed rapidly. Three weeks into the dispute, the TGWU announced that a Compromise Agreement had been negotiated with the management.67 The terms of this agreement included: re- engagement for some select workers on worse terms and conditions and compulsory or voluntary redundancy for the remaining workers who would be offered statutory redundancy payment. Subsequently, a meeting of the sacked workers and their union representatives was organised to discuss the Compromise Agreement. 56 workers eventually refused to sign it.
36 According to the women workers we interviewed, at that meeting the TGWU officials recommended that all workers accept the agreement negotiated by their union. Without being given the opportunity to read the full text of the agreement, those present were asked to indicate their acceptance by a show of hands. Many of our interviewees reported that there were no interpreters present and that they were not fully informed about the terms of the agreement: “They did not read out the deal to us, they just showed us the papers, just like that [waves an imaginary sheet in the air].” (Lata, a sacked worker).
37 The circumstances in which the workers’ agreement was secured has subsequently been questioned by some members of the TGWU Executive Council, one of whom spoke to us, although requesting anonymity: “We [The Executive Council] were told it [the Compromise Agreement] was going to be taken to the workers, that they would have to agree. I couldn’t believe it when I heard, I mean ‘What, didn’t you actually vote on it?’.” The union leadership has consistently refused to engage with any criticism of their role and has continued to put the blame for negative outcomes from the dispute firmly on the shoulders of the workers.
38 More than 700 sacked workers subsequently took their case for unfair dismissal to an Employment Tribunal. Since their union had not officially authorised the walk-out, the Tribunal dismissed their claim on the grounds that it was their “own choice” not to return to work. However, the written judgement corroborates the women’s accounts,
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stating that Mr Dhillon (the shop steward) “followed the advice given to him by Mr (Brendan) Gold the National secretary (of the TGWU) which was to seek a withdrawal of the threat of dismissal before the staff returned to work”.68 The judgement went further: What none of the tribunal could understand is why having heard how the respondent (Gate Gourmet) viewed this congregation of employees Mr Dhillon (the convenor) did not address the entire group to advise them that … they should return to work. Had he done so none of these problems would be before this tribunal.69
39 As a result of this union-sanctioned agreement Gate Gourmet was allowed to select for redundancy those workers who had been active members of their union and hence deemed to be “radical”,70 as well as other “undesirable” less productive workers, including those who had health issues and/or were older. Drawing upon information from Gate Gourmet’s own website, Hendy and Gall note that of the 813 workers who were sacked, 272 were reinstated on worse terms, 411 given the equivalent of (statutory) redundancy pay, while 130 received neither employment nor compensation. Gate Gourmet was able to shed 541 workers’ jobs “by paying the equivalent of redundancy to 411”.71 Additionally, the changes to workers’ contracts, including reduced annual leave and sick leave, enabled Gate Gourmet to increase productivity and reduce the rights of long-standing employees to labour protection.
Conclusions
40 In spite of the way in which the British trade union movement has constructed the now historic Grunwick strike as an emblematic turning point in its representation of black and minority ethnic and women workers, trade unions’ structures, procedures and legal frameworks have arguably not delivered any genuinely held aspirations to serve minority women effectively.
41 Since Grunwick, the trade unions in the UK have adopted a variety of strategies and frameworks to address issues of diversity.72 However, it has been argued that union strategies for mobilising and representing black and minority ethnic workers have focused on recruitment and campaigning issues.73 The underlying assumption has been that minority ethnic and women workers lack a propensity to unionise, which has precluded any radical re-examination of trade union structures and practices that might serve to exclude particular interests. On the whole, trade union approaches to gender have been more effective than to issues of race/racism. Additionally, issues raised by multiple forms of inequalities experienced by intersectional location of black and minority ethnic women workers remain largely unrecognised as race and gender have tended to be examined in discrete ways and initiatives have remained piecemeal and fragmented.
42 At Grunwick and Gate Gourmet, changes in the labour process combined with different elements of the women workers’ experience and identity and propelled them into collective action against their employees. The issues of dignity and fairness were central to both the disputes. The Grunwick dispute was a spontaneous act of resistance to managerial control while the underlying grievances behind the Gate Gourmet dispute were downward pressures on pay and conditions and the growing use of agency and contract labour.74 The workers involved in both the disputes resorted to collective action as the result of cumulative experience of injustice based in large part on the
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discordance between their perceptions of themselves in terms of their identities as women and as workers and formed as much by their experience of migration and their class dislocation, as by any overt racist or discriminatory practices. A useful framework for understanding their position is offered by feminist analyses of intersectionality, which stress the significance of interlinking different aspects of identities. As both the disputes indicate, resistance comes not just from the experience on the production line; it is also the result of the intersection of a range of factors embodied in the workers themselves—their class, ethnic and gendered identities and their experiences of migration, all of which intersect and contribute to their perception of injustice and the need for collective action to restore their sense of worth and dignity that has been affronted by unjust treatment in the workplace. Both these disputes were about recognition as well as rights.
43 This dimension of industrial relations echoes Nancy Fraser’s argument that “only by integrating recognition and redistribution can we arrive at a framework that is adequate to the demands of our age”.75 It would seem timely to apply this analysis to the structures and processes of trade unions in Britain to forge new strategies which support the legitimate aspirations and expectations of minority women workers such as the South Asian women who protested about their treatment by both the company and their union at Gate Gourmet. But this remains a formidable challenge in a period when trade unions remain constrained by both nature of labour market in an era of globalisation and restructuring and by increasing restrictions on trade unions imposed by a neo- liberal state in the UK.
44 In 2016, sections of the British union movement collaborated in celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Grunwick strike,76 seeking to locate the historic struggles of the 1970s within the current context of the “gig economy” characterised by the quasi self- employment status of those working for technology-enabled companies such as Uber (taxis) and Deliveroo (meal deliveries). In spite of some significant legal victories, these burgeoning service sectors which employ large numbers of migrant workers remain largely unorganised. The trade union movement is currently exhibiting greater awareness of the need to represent and defend these new segments of the working class, but, like the food preparation workers of Gate Gourmet, there has been little significant progress in changing the conditions faced by the majority of these workers.
45 As the trade union movement in the UK celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Grunwick strike, it became clear, however, that the legacy of this dispute has not been a wholehearted welcome by the labour movement of migrant workers. The events at Gate Gourmet indicate that championing the rights of migrant women workers has not been the main priority of all trade unions in the twenty first century. Not only the changing labour market referred to in this article, but also the austerity policies imposed by Conservative Governments in the post-2008 financial crisis have in part underlined the subsequent growth of anti-migrant sentiment across broad sections of the working class in the UK, manifest in the vote to leave the EU in June 2016. However, there are also indications that broad sections of the progressive left, including the leadership of the TUC are forging new alliances which have within them the possibilities of re- modelling union organisation and practice to more effectively embrace the priorities of migrant and women workers in the UK.
46 Sundari Anitha has researched and written in the two areas of labour market experiences of South Asian women in the UK, and on violence against women and
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girls in the UK and India. Following her research on the Grunwick and Gate Gourmet disputes, she worked with Ruth Pearson to produce educational resources for young people, including a comic on life stories of two South Asian women workers, available at: www.striking-women.org. She has previously managed a Women’s Aid refuge and worked as an Advice Worker for Asha Projects, a specialist refuge, and has been active in campaigns and policy-making to address violence against women since 1999. She has just published, with Ruth Pearson, Striking women: South Asian women workers’ struggles in the UK labour market from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet.
47 Ruth Pearson is a feminist economist who has researched and written widely on women, work, migration, development and globalisation. She is also an activist and trustee of a number of women's organisations in the UK and internationally. She is the co-author of the classical article on women workers in export production : “Nimble Fingers make Cheap workers”. More recent books and articles include Thailand's Hidden Workforce: Burmese Migrant Women Factory Workers; Globalization, Export-Orientated Employment and Social Policy: Gendered Connections; Women and Credit: Researching the Past, Refiguring the Future; Corporate responsibility and Labour Rights: Codes of Conduct Economy in the Global Economy; Feminist Visions of Development: Gender Analysis and Policy. She has just published, with Sundari Anitha, Striking women: South Asian women workers’ struggles in the UK labour market from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet.
48 Linda McDowell is a feminist geographer and labour ethnographer who has written about bankers, working class men and migrant women’s working lives. She currently is a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow, looking at poverty in coastal towns in England.
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Phizacklea, Annie and Miles, Robert, Labour and Racism (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
Ramdin, Ron, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot, Wildwood House, 1987).
Race Today, ‘The Imperial Typewriters: The Continuing Story’, Race Today August (1974), pp. 223-225.
Rossiter, Anne, ‘Risking Gossip and Disgrace’, Spare Rib 54(1977)pp. 18-19.
Raghuram, Parvati, ‘Migrant Women in Male-dominated Sectors of the Labour Market: A Research Agenda’, Population, Space and Place 14(1) (2008), pp. 43–57.
Rogaly, Joe, Grunwick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977).
Salway, Sarah. M., ‘Economic Activity Among UK Bangladeshi and Pakistani Women in the 1990s: Evidence for Continuity or Change in the Family Resources Survey’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33(5)(2007), pp. 825-847.
Scarman Report,
Smith, Paul and Morton, Gary, ‘Nine Years of New Labour: Neoliberalism and Workers' Rights’, British Journal of Industrial Relations 44 (3) (2006), pp. 401- 420.
Terry, Michael, ‘Employee representation: Shop Stewards and the New Legal Framework’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995), pp. 257-284.
TUC, Women’s Pay and Employment Update: A Public/private Sector Comparison (London, Trades Union Congress, 2012).
Ward, George, Fort Grunwick (London, Temple Smith, 1977).
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Wills, Jane and Melanie Simms, ‘Building Reciprocal Community Unionism in the UK’, Capital and Class 82(2004), pp. 59–84.
Wills, Jane, May, Jon, Datta, Kavita, Evans, Yara, Herbert, Joanna and McIlwaine, Cathy, ‘London’s Migrant Division of Labour’, European Journal of Urban and Regional Studies 16(3) (2009), pp. 257– 271.
Wilson, Amrit, Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (London, Virago, 1978).
Woodley, Tony, ‘Gate Gourmet and Beyond’, Address to the IER Conference, London, 31 January 2007.
Wrench, John, ‘Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism’, in Richard Jenkins and John Solomos (eds), Racism and Equal Opportunity Policies in the 1980s (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 160-186.
Wrench, John, ‘Trade Union Responses to Immigrants and Inequality in Denmark and the UK: The Context of Consensus and Conflict’, European Journal of Industrial Relations 10(1) (2004), pp. 7–31.
Wrench, John and Virdee, Satnam, ‘Organising the Unorganised: “Race”, Poor Work and Trade Unions’, in Chris Smith, Peter Ackers and Paul Smith (eds) The New Workplace and Trade Unionism: Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisation (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 240–78.
Wright, Melissa, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (London and New York, Routledge, 2006).
NOTES
1. Parminder Bhachu, Twice-migrants: East-African Sikh Settlers in Britain (London and New York, Tavistock Publications,1985). 2. Joanna Herbert, “Oral Histories of the Ugandan Asians in Britain: Gendered Identities in the Diaspora”, Contemporary South Asia 17(1): 21, 2009. 3. Mohammad Anwar, The Myth of Return: Pakistanis in Britain (London, Heinemann, 1979). 4. See Jack Dromey and Graham Taylor, Grunwick: The Workers’ Story (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1978 and 2016); Les Levidow, “Grunwick: The Social Contract Meets the 20th century Sweatshop,” in Les Levidow and Bob Young (eds), Science Technology and the Labour Process, Vol. 1. (London, CSE Books, 1981), pp.123–171; Joe Rogaly, Grunwick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977); Ann Rossiter, “Risking Gossip and Disgrace”, Spare Rib 54:18,1977; Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (London, Virago, 1978). 5. A community group, Grunwick 40, has been set up by Brent Trades Council, Willesden Town Team, Brent Museum & Archive and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to mark the 40th anniversary of the Grunwick strike over 2016-18. 6. Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha, and Ruth Pearson, “Striking Narratives: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the ‘Great Grunwick Strike’, London, UK, 1976-1978”, Women’s History Review 23(4): 754-75, 2014. 7. Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, “Striking Similarities: Representing South Asian Women’s Industrial Action in Britain”, Gender, Place and Culture 19(2):133-152, 2012. 8. Florence Jaumotte, Female Labour Force Participation: Past Trends and Main Determinants in OECD Countries, OECD Economics Department Working Papers No. 376, (Paris, OECD Publishing, 2003).
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9. TUC, Women’s Pay and Employment Update: A Public/private Sector Comparison (London, Trades Union Congress, 2012). 10. Shirley Dex, Susan Macran, Heather Joshi, and Andrew McCulloch, “Women's Employment Transitions Around Childbearing” Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 60:97-115, 1998; Jane Elliot, Angela Dale and Muriel Egerton, “The Influence of Qualifications on Women's Work Histories, Employment Status and Earnings at Age 33”, European Sociological Review 17:145-168, 2001. 11. Angela Dale, Joanne Lindley, and Shirley Dex, “A Life-course Perspective on Ethnic Differences in Women’s Economic Activity in Britain”, European Sociological Review 22(4): 459-476, 2006. 12. Sue doi:10.1093/indlaw/dwl011 Botcherby, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean Women and Employment Survey: Aspirations, Experiences and Choices (Manchester, Equal Opportunities Commission, 2006); Lisa Buckner, Sue Yeandle and Sue Botcherby, Ethnic Minority Women and Local Labour Markets (Manchester, Equal Opportunities Commission; 2007) ; Joanne Lindley, Angela Dale and Shirley Dex, “Ethnic Differences in Women’s Demographic and Family Characteristics and Economic Activity Profiles 1992-2000”, Labour Market Trends, April:153-65, 2004. 13. Christian Dustmann and Francesca Fabbri, “Immigrants in the British Labour Market”, Fiscal Studies 26(4):423–470, 2005. 14. Anthony Heath and Sin Yi Cheung, Ethnic Penalties in the Labour Market: Employers and Discrimination (London, Department for Work and Pensions, 2006). 15. ONS, Employment Patterns (London, Office for National Statistics, 2004). 16. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, Routledge, 1996); Irene Bruegel, “Women as the Reserve Army of Labour: A Note on Recent British Experience”, Feminist Review 3:12-23,1979; Linda McDowell, Migrant Women’s Voices; Talking About Life and Work in the UK Since 1945 (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 17. Angela Dale, Joanne Lindley, and Shirley Dex, “A Life-course Perspective on Ethnic Differences in Women’s Economic Activity in Britain”, European Sociological Review 22(4): 459-476, 2006; Parvati Raghuram, “Migrant Women in Male-dominated Sectors of the Labour Market: A Research Agenda”, Population, Space and Place 14(1):43–57, 2008; Sarah Salway, “Economic Activity Among UK Bangladeshi and Pakistani Women in the 1990s: Evidence for Continuity or Change in the Family Resources Survey”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33(5):825-847, 2007. 18. Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (London, Virago,1985); Heidi Safia Mirza, Black British Feminism: A Reader (London, Routledge, 1997); Pratibha Parmar, “Gender, Race and Class: Asian Women in Resistance”, in The University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (ed.), The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London, Hutchinson & Co., 1992), pp. 236-76; Amrit Wilson, Finding A Voice: Asian Women in Britain (London, Pluto Press, 1978). 19. John Wrench and Satnam Virdee, “Organising the Unorganised: “Race”, Poor Work and Trade Unions”, in Chris Smith, Peter Ackers, and Paul Smith (eds), The New Workplace and Trade Unionism: Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisation (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 240–78. 20. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Servants of Globalisation: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001).
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21. Anne McBride, Gail Hebson and Jane Holgate, “Intersectionality: Are we Taking Enough Notice in the Field of work and Employment Relations?”, Work, Employment & Society 29(2):331-341, 2015. 22. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, Routledge, 1996). 23. Sundari Anitha, Ruth Pearson and Linda McDowell, “Striking Lives: Multiple Narratives of South Asian Women’s Employment, Identity and Protest in the UK”, Ethnicities 12(6):754–775, 2012. 24. John Wrench, “Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism”, in Richard Jenkins and John Solomos (eds), Racism and Equal Opportunity Policies in the 1980s (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 160-186. 25. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, Pluto, 1984); Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot, Wildwood House, 1987). 26. Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles, Labour and Racism (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); John Wrench, “Trade Union Responses to Immigrants and Inequality in Denmark and the UK: The Context of Consensus and Conflict”, European Journal of Industrial Relations 10(1):7–31, 2004. 27. Linda Dickens, Gender, Race and Employment Equality in Britain: Inadequate Strategies and Role of Industrial Relations Actors”, Industrial Relations Journal 28(4): 282-291, 1997; John Wrench and Satnam Virdee, “Organising the Unorganised: “Race”, Poor Work and Trade Unions”, in Chris Smith, Peter Ackers, and Paul Smith (eds), The New Workplace and Trade Unionism: Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisation (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 240–78. 28. Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles, Labour and Racism (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); John Wrench, “Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism”, in Richard Jenkins and John Solomos (eds), Racism and Equal Opportunity Policies in the 1980s (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 160-186. 29. Cynthia Cockburn, Strategies for Gender Democracy (Brussels, European Commission, 1995); Linda Dickens, “Gender, Race and Employment Equality in Britain: Inadequate Strategies and Role of Industrial Relations Actors”, Industrial Relations Journal 28(4): 282-291, 1997; Gill Kirton and Anne-Marie Greene, “The Dynamics of Positive Action in UK Trade Unions: The Case of Women and Black Members”, Industrial Relations Journal 33(2):157–72, 2002. 30. John Wrench, “Unequal Comrades: Trade Unions, Equal Opportunity and Racism”, in Richard Jenkins and John Solomos (eds), Racism and Equal Opportunity Policies in the 1980s (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 160-186. 31. Mala Dhondy, “The Strike at Imperial Typewriters”, Race Today July:201-5, 1974; Race Today, “The Imperial Typewriters: The Continuing Story”, Race Today August: 223-225, 1974. 32. Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith, “Feminism, Diversity, Identities and Strategies of Women Trade Union Activists” Gender, Work and Organization 7(4):242-57, 2000; Jane Parker, “Women’s Groups in British Trade Unions”, British Journal of Industrial Relations 40:23-48, 2002.
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33. John Wrench, “Trade Union Responses to Immigrants and Inequality in Denmark and the UK: The Context of Consensus and Conflict”, European Journal of Industrial Relations 10(1):7–31, 2004. 34. Mary Davis, Roger McKenzie and Wilf Sullivan, Working Against Racism: The Role of Trade Unions in Britain (London, TUC, 2006). 35. Jane Wills, Jon May, Kavita Datta, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert and Cathy McIlwaine, “London’s Migrant Division of Labour” European Journal of Urban and Regional Studies 16(3): 257–271, 2009. 36. Jane Wills and Melanie Simms, “Building Reciprocal Community Unionism in the UK”, Capital and Class 82:59–84, 2004. 37. Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “Meanings and Dilemmas in Community Unionism: Trade Union Community Initiatives and Black and Minority Ethnic Groups in the United Kingdom”, Work, Employment and Society 23(4):693-710, 2009. 38. Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “The Diversity and Politics of Trade Unions' Responses to Minority Ethnic and Migrant Workers: The Context of the UK”, Economic and Industrial Democracy 30(3):324-347, 2009. 39. Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing”, Feminist Review 7:87– 107, 1981; Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan, The Anatomy of Job Loss: The How, Why and Where of Employment Decline (London, Methuen, 1982). 40. George Ward, Fort Grunwick, p. 30 (London, Temple Smith, 1977). 41. Kavita Datta, Cathy McIlwaine, Yara Evans, Joanna Herbert, Jon May, and Jane Wills, Work, Care and Life Among Low-paid Migrant Workers in London: Towards a Migrant Ethic of Care (London Queen Mary, University of London, 2006). 42. In June 1977, the Labour government set up a court of inquiry under Lord Scarman to inquire into the causes and circumstances of the Grunwick dispute and to make recommendations. 43. Les Levidow, “Grunwick: The social contract meets the 20th century sweatshop,” in Les Levidow and Bob Young (eds), Science technology and the labour process, Vol. 1 (London, CSE Books, 1981), pp.123–171. 44. See Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell, “Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Industrial Dispute at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet”, Industrial Relations Journal, 41 (5):408-428, 2010, for a detailed account of the labour process at Grunwick. 45. Joe Rogaly, Grunwick (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977). 46. Les Levidow, “Grunwick: The social contract meets the 20th century sweatshop,” in Les Levidow and Bob Young (eds), Science technology and the labour process, Vol. 1 (London, CSE Books, 1981), pp.123–171. 47. Minutes of Proceedings of the Court of Enquiry on 5 July 1977, from the Shorthand Notes of W.B. Gurney & Sons (photocopy from the Warwick University Contemporary Records Centre). 48. The Scarman Report is available at: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111943 (Accessed 30 August 2016). 49. Colin Crouch, “Atavism and Innovation: Labour Legislation and Public Policy Since 1979 in Historical Perspective”, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 2:111-124, 1996. 50. Ibid.; Kenneth Miller and Mairi Steele, “Employment Legislation: Thatcher and After”, Industrial Relations Journal 24(3):224–235, 1993
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51. Linda Dickens, “Individual Statutory Employment Rights Since 1997: Constrained Expansion”, Employee Relations 24(6):619-637, 2002. 52. Stephen Deery and Richard Mitchell, “Individualisation and Union Recognition in Britain in the 1990s”, in Stephen Deery and Richard Mitchell (eds.) Employment Relations: Individualisation and Union Exclusion, An International Study (Sydney, Federation Press, 1999), pp. 1-16, see p. 4. 53. Gill Dix, John Forth and Keith Sisson, Conflict at Work: The Pattern of Disputes in Britain Since 1980. London, ACAS, 2008), p. 9. 54. Ministry of Justice, Employment Tribunal and EAT statistics 2009-10 (GB) (London, Tribunal Service, Ministry of Justice, 2010), p. 2. 55. Trevor Colling, “What Space for Unions on the Floor of Rights? Trade Unions and the Enforcement of Statutory Individual Employment Rights”, Industrial Law Journal 35(2):140-160, 2006, see DTI 2003:40, cited in Colling 2006:143, fn 26. 56. Ibid.; William Brown, Simon Deakin, David Nash and Sarah Oxenbridge, “The Employment Contract: From Collective Procedures to Individual Rights”, British Journal of Industrial Relations 38(4):611-629, 2000; Paul Smith and Gary Morton, “Nine Years of New Labour: Neoliberalism and Workers' Rights”, British Journal of Industrial Relations 44 (3):401- 420, 2006. 57. Tonia Novitz, “A Revised Role for Trade Unions as Designed by New Labour: The Representation Pyramid and 'Partnership'”, Journal of Law and Society 29:487-509, 2002, see p.1. 58. Paul Bagguley, “The Individualisation of Class Struggle”, Available at: http:// www.sociology.leeds.ac.uk/about/staff/bagguley.php (Accessed 14 July 2016). 59. Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (London and New York, Routledge, 2006). 60. Ruth Pearson and Gill Seyfang, “‘I’ll Tell You What I Want…’ : Women Workers and Codes of Conduct”, in Rees Jenkins, Ruth Pearson and Gill Seyfang (eds) Corporate Responsibility and Labour Rights: Codes of Conduct in the Global Economy (London, Earthscan, 2002) pp. 43–60. 61. We have put together this account of the events on 10th August 2005 based on interviews with the sacked Gate Gourmet workers, newspaper reports and the evidence presented at the Employment Tribunal hearings. 62. Michael Terry, “Employee Representation: Shop Stewards and the New Legal Framework”, in: Edwards, P. (ed.) Industrial relations: Theory and Practice pp. 257-284 (Oxford Blackwell, 1995). 63. Tony Woodley, “Gate Gourmet and Beyond”, Address to the IER conference, London, 31st January 2007. 64. Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson, “Striking Similarities: Representing South Asian Women’s Industrial Action in Britain”, Gender, Place and Culture 19 (2):133-152, 2012. 65. Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “The Diversity and Politics of Trade Unions' Responses to Minority Ethnic and Migrant Workers: The Context of the UK”, Economic and Industrial Democracy 30(3):324-347, 2009. 66. David Hencke, “£600,000 for Shop Stewards Fired Over Gate Gourmet Strike” The Guardian, 18 September 2006. 67. Details of the Compromise Agreement can be found on www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen (Accessed 3 April 2017).
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68. Abbas and Others v Gate Gourmet London Ltd., paragraph 54. 69. Ibid., paragraph 75. 70. Mark Milner, “Gate Gourmet Chief Refuses to Take Back 'Militants'” The Guardian, 1 September 2005. 71. John Hendy and Gregor Gall “British Trade Union Rights Today and the Trade Union Freedom Bill”, in Keith D. Ewing (ed.), The Right to Strike: From the Trade Disputes Act 1906 to a Trade Union Freedom Bill 2006 (Liverpool, Institute of Employment Rights, 2006), pp. 247-277, see p. 249. 72. John Wrench and Satnam Virdee, “Organising the Unorganised: “Race”, Poor Work and Trade Unions”, in Chris Smith, Peter Ackers, and Paul Smith (eds), The New Workplace and Trade Unionism: Critical Perspectives on Work and Organisation (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 240–78; John Wrench, “Trade Union Responses to Immigrants and Inequality in Denmark and the UK: The Context of Consensus and Conflict”, European Journal of Industrial Relations 10(1):7–31, 2004. 73. Miguel Martinez-Lucio and Rob Perrett, “The Diversity and Politics of Trade Unions' Responses to Minority Ethnic and Migrant Workers: The Context of the UK”, Economic and Industrial Democracy 30(3):324-347, 2009. 74. See Ruth Pearson, Sundari Anitha and Linda McDowell, “Striking Issues: From Labour Process to Industrial Dispute at Grunwick and Gate Gourmet”, Industrial Relations Journal, 41(5):408-428, 2010. 75. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (London, Routledge, 1997), see p. 12. 76. Available at: https://grunwick40.wordpress.com (Accessed 3 April 2017).
ABSTRACTS
Through a focus on two examples of industrial militancy by South Asian women workers in the UK that took place thirty years apart – the Grunwick and Gate Gourmet disputes - this article explores the effectiveness of the trade union movement in representing minority ethnic women workers. We examine these two disputes in the context of the changing nature of the labour market and the significant shift in industrial relations legislation between the 1970s and the 2000s. We reflect on what these two disputes indicate about the extent to which the British trade union movement has changed to reflect the priorities and experience of migrant women workers in the UK over the last four decades.
À travers deux exemples de militantisme de femmes sud-asiatiques au Royaume-Uni qui eurent lieu à trente années d’intervalle – les disputes de Grunwick et Gate Gourmet – cet article s’interroge sur la capacité du mouvement syndical à représenter de manière efficace les femmes appartenant à des minorités ethniques. Nous examinons ces deux disputes dans le contexte d’un marché du travail en pleine mutation et de transformations profondes des lois régissant le droit du travail entre les années 1970 et les années 2000. Nous nous interrogeons sur ce que ces deux disputes nous disent de l’évolution du mouvement syndical, depuis quarante ans, dans sa capacité à refléter les priorités et les expériences des travailleuses migrantes au Royaume Uni.
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INDEX
Mots-clés: Grunwick, Gate Gourmet, syndicats, travailleuses migrantes, intersectionalité, néolibéralisme Keywords: Grunwick, Gate Gourmet, trade unions, migrant women workers, intersectionality, neoliberalism
AUTHORS
SUNDARI ANITHA
University of Lincoln
RUTH PEARSON
Emeritus Professor, University of Leeds, Global Development Research Group
LINDA MCDOWELL
University of Oxford
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History, Memory and Politics Histoire, mémoire et politique
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The Women’s Equality Party: “And Everything Old is New Again…” Le Women’s Equality Party : « Et tout ce qui était vieux est neuf à nouveau… »
Véronique Molinari
“Women can best serve the nation by keeping clear of men’s party political machinery and traditions which, by universal consent, leave so much to be desired”, Women’s Party, 1917.1
Introduction
1 In November 2015, a new player in British politics announced it would contest the following May elections to the devolved Scottish and Welsh Parliament as well as those to the London Assembly and London Mayor. After only a year of existence, the Women’s Equality Party, co-founded in March 2015 by Catherine Mayer and Sandi Toksvig and led by journalist Sophie Walker, decided to put up candidates in an attempt to push “for equal representation in politics, business, industry and throughout working life,” attracting in the process not only wide press coverage but a small –yet not insignificant– share of the votes as well. The Women’s Equality Party (WE) is not the only one of its kind in Europe as more than thirty women’s parties have contested elections at national or European level in the past twenty years,2 including, in the British Isles, the cross-party Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition. Although no reference has ever been made to it by the media, it is not the first one of its kind in the UK either. Both its name and the fact that it is based on a 6 point-programme are direct reminders of Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Party and Margaret Haig’s Six Point Group, both launched in the context of women’s enfranchisement in 1918 together with other attempts at creating a women’s party in Parliament and local government. That such a party should have come into existence in 2015 in the UK and bear such similarities with events that are now one hundred years old cannot fail to raise a number of questions, not only as to the reasons that account
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for its emergence (and notably the progress that has been achieved in the fields targeted as key policy goals), but also as to what may still motivate women today to organize separately from mainstream political parties rather than contribute to changing things from the inside and the relevance of such a choice. That in the space of little more than one year, it should have managed to build a membership exceeding that of UKIP also makes it quite remarkable. By placing WE in a wider historical perspective, this article will not only try to determine to what extent the party can be considered as innovative rather than a close replica of past –and more or less successful– initiatives, it will also provide some special insight into the changes and continuities in the strategies, motivations and recruitment of women-only British campaigning groups. In this respect, the choice made by its members to claim the inheritance of the suffragette movement rather than that of other groups it bears more resemblance to will also need to be looked into.
The Women’s Equality Party: aims and strategies
2 The Women’s Equality Party was born in the wake of the Women of the World Festival that was held in London in March 2015, following a suggestion by British author and journalist Catherine Mayer. After a first meeting with other political journalists, including Suzanne Moore, Sophie Walker and Hannah McGrath, held later in the month, Mayer was joined by comedian and political activist Sandi Toksvig. On 20 July 2015, Walker was announced as the party's leader and, two days later, the Women's Equality Party was registered with the Electoral Commission.
3 In its mission statement, WE presented itself as “a new collaborative political force in British politics uniting people of all genders, diverse ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, beliefs and experiences in the shared determination to see women enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men so that all can flourish”.3 Equality for women, its leaders insisted, was not a women’s issue only. “When women fulfil their potential” one could read on the party’s website, “everyone benefits. Gender equality means better politics, a more vibrant economy, a workforce that draws on the talents of the whole population and a society at ease with itself. The Women’s Equality Party is working towards such a society.”4
4 The party's set of policies launched by Walker at Conway Hall on 20 October 2015 thus included six core objectives related to areas in which women were said to be lagging far behind men.5 These were: Equal representation in politics, business, industry and throughout working life; Equal pay (including transparency on gender pay, zero tolerance against workplace discrimination, investing in childcare, boosting women’s pensions); Equal parenting and caregiving (including shared parental leave of six weeks at 90% for both partners, and free childcare from nine months, more flexibility in the work-place for both men and women and shared responsibilities at home); Equality in education (including challenging gender stereotypes as well equal opportunities in teaching and school leadership); Equal treatment of women by and in the media; End to violence against women (including improving support for victims, prosecuting violence against women, and ending traffic and sexual exploitation).
5 Six months after its creation, the party could already boast 45,000 members and more than 65 local branches across England, Scotland and Wales, a success which its leaders attributed to a deep disillusion with mainstream politics, exasperation at not feeling
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represented and frustration with the lack of attention that was being paid to gender equality –the very reasons which, Mayer and Toksvig say, had made them want to create the party in the first place. Because that situation was in their opinion partly to be explained by the under-representation of women in politics (only a quarter of the candidates who had contested the May 2015 general election and less than a third of the 650 MPs elected were female), WE advocated that women should make up at least 66% of the future candidates selected to replace retiring members of Parliament at the following elections and, to reach that target, recommended the use of all-women shortlists.
6 Like the women’s parties that have contested elections at national or European level, WE considers itself as a “focused mainstream party”6 and refuses to take a party line on issues outside their remit. The fact that their aim should be not so much to gain access to power as to influence the policy commitments of the larger parties by pressuring them to take up their issues (and planning to disband once action has been taken)7 would however tend to make them more of a hybrid between a party and a pressure group. Just as the appearance of Green parties throughout Europe may have incited other parties to adopt green preoccupations or right-wing parties like UKIP in the UK or the Front National in France may have caused mainstream parties to veer to the right in recent elections, it was hoped that a women’s party might exert pressure on the main parties and scare them into adopting its agenda for fear of losing votes to a competitor. 8 The fact that the rare successes experienced by other women’s parties had occurred in electoral systems using some form of proportional representation while the UK’s first- past-the-post implied very little chance of success in Westminster no doubt contributed to the WE’s decision to run for elections in the devolved parliaments and assemblies, which all use electoral systems involving PR.
The May 2016 elections
7 Four WE candidates were put forward for the National Assembly of Wales and two for the Scottish Parliament, all of them on regional lists (the only ones to use PR); eleven candidates were fielded for the London Assembly and the leader of the party, Walker, stood for mayoral elections. As a new player on the political scene, the party preferred not to ask for all of the electorate’s votes, which might have left them with eventually getting none, but rather to go for only one out of the electorates’ two possible votes. London voters were therefore told that they had four votes, two for London Mayor (first and second choice) and two for the London Assembly (one for their local area and one for a ‘London wide’ representative), and that by giving half of them to WE, they would contribute to advance the cause of equality. Similarly, Welsh and Scottish voters were encouraged to give one of their two votes (one constituency vote, one regional vote) to the party list. “Women”, the argument ran, “are half the population, it’s only right to give half of your vote to helping them achieve equality”.9 As far as the London campaign was concerned, WE explained that the four million women living in London were experiencing the UK’s biggest pay gap, most expensive childcare, highest sexual violence rates and highest levels of child poverty. As regards sexual violence, billboard adverts were used to highlight the number of rapes taking place every day in the capital city (“230 Rapes Every Day? Who Gives A Damn? We Do.”) and a campaign was
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launched on Twitter, encouraging victims of sexual assault to pinpoint where their attack had taken place so that a map of violence against women in the capital could be created –an echo of the “Reclaim the Night” campaign launched in the mid-seventies and revived in the early 2000s. The manifestos published for Scotland and Wales, on the other hand, offered no striking difference with the general UK platform, with the same six points being put forward as key objectives and no position being taken, in the case of Scotland, on the independence issue. As a result of the campaign, WE took 1.2% of the vote in Scotland (3,877 in Lothian and 2,091 votes in Glasgow) and exactly the same percentage in the South Wales Central region (2,807 votes), with a particularly strong showing in Cardiff. In London, where it obtained 92,000 votes for the Assembly list (3.5%) and came ahead of UKIP in some boroughs, the party did not win any seat and Sophie Walker only secured 2% of the votes in the mayoral elections (53,055 votes).
8 Although no reference has ever been made to it in the course of the campaign, the idea of a women’s party in Britain is nothing new. Following the 1918 Representation of the People Act and Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, as the aim pursued by women’s organizations had shifted from suffrage to social and political reforms, the question had rapidly been raised as to whether the best way to achieve these was through the existing political parties or a separate women’s party. While, for some, maintaining separate women’s organizations now that there was no impediment for them to join the mainstream political parties would only contribute to maintain a gendered division of roles,10 for others, women’s special contribution to politics would be more easily achieved without partisan ties. Given the difficulty for women to be heard within traditional parties, some leaders and members of the women’s movement were naturally tempted by the creation of a separate women's party. Women then enjoyed a 40% share of the electorate and the organisations that had replaced pre-war suffragist groups (such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship) had well-defined programmes and members with a long experience of politics. That, it seemed, could well be turned into a new party. As it was, the widespread belief that war had rendered the old parties somewhat obsolete and discredited meant that the emergence of such party was expected by a good many politicians11 and it was partly to fight its emergence that the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberals strove so hard to attract women to their own ranks through massive propaganda efforts and electoral promises.12
Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Party
9 The first attempt at forming a national women’s party in the UK came from the leaders of the pre-war suffragette movement, the Pankhursts. Although this organisation was, politically speaking, very remote from the current, left-leaning, Women’s Equality Party, it does allow interesting comparisons. In November 1917, as it was now certain that some measure of female suffrage would soon be granted, the Women's Social and Political Union wound up and was replaced by the Women's Party with Emmeline Pankhurst as its treasurer. The party presented itself as women's voice in politics and argued that women, thanks to their moral values, could purify the political sphere –a continuation of the ideas which had previously been defended by the WSPU to ask for the vote. If women wanted to contribute something new to politics, the party argued,
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they had to keep clear of men's traditional political organisations and not lose their identity inside worn-out male parties. In her inaugural address, Christabel Pankhurst thus explained: We have formed the Women's Party because our opinion has been, and is, that it would not be a good thing for women, the new brooms in politics, to go into those hopelessly dusty old places known as men's political parties. What would our fight for the vote, and our dreams of what it would enable us to do, be worth, if we were simply to go into the party political grooves which men have made and which now the best of them are so anxious to get out of?13
10 In a speech made at Queen's Hall (London) in the same month, she insisted again that, “ by starting fair and square, the Women's Party [could] avoid many of the mistakes that men's parties have made in the past”.14 While assuring its electorate that the WP was in “no way based on sex-antagonism” (an accusation WE would also have to face one hundred years later), it was felt that women could best serve the nation by keeping “clear of men's party political machinery and traditions which, by universal consent, leave so much to be desired”.15
11 The party received financial help from the British Commonwealth Union, favourable echoes in Northcliffe’s press –the Daily Mail in particular– and the sympathy of the Coalition government. The reason behind such support, however, mostly had to do with the fact that the party was a nationalist as much as –and probably more than– a feminist one. As it was, proposals concerning women’s rights and the improvement of women's condition were not given priority in the party's manifesto but came after a long list concerning the resolution of the conflict and how Britain should be ruled after the war (including upholding the authority of the national Parliament and not surrendering to the League of Nations, excluding from the British public service officials who were not of long British descent and wholly British connection or again maintaining the union between Ireland and Great Britain).16 Although under the heading “Special Women's Question”, the WP’s manifesto then placed equal pay, equal marriage laws, equal parental rights, equal opportunities of employment, the raising of the age of consent and equality of rights and responsibilities in regard to the social and the political service of the nation, this feminist agenda was, to use Nicoletta Gullace’s words, “grafted… onto the patriotic tree that had served the WSPU so well in their wartime quest for the vote,”17 not the reverse.
12 Christabel Pankhurst stood for the first elections that followed the war, disputing the Smethwick constituency in December 1918 with Lloyd George’s coupon and lost by only 775 votes. She then tried in 1919 to dispute a by-election (Westminster) but, lacking support and money, was heavily defeated. This, however, should not be taken as evidence that a women’s party was doomed to fail. First of all, Gullace, in her study of the Smethwick election, argues that, had women been enfranchised on the same terms as men (that is to say at 21 rather than 30), it is highly likely that Christabel Pankhurst would have won the elections as she enjoyed widespread popularity “among a set of patriotic, independent munitions girls”.18 Besides, not only was Pankhurst the WP’s only candidate but, more important, the party never had the support of the main women’s organizations, which insisted that the name “women’s party” was misleading and that no link whatsoever existed between the party and their movement.19 As it was, this failed attempt was not regarded as significant and the creation of a separate women’s party continued to be discussed by these same women’s organisations in the following years. The question became all the more relevant as it soon became obvious that
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women were failing to make themselves heard within their respective parties and to be selected as parliamentary candidates (the percentage of women MPs only rose from 0.1 in 1918 to 2.3 in 1929 before falling to 1.5 in 1935). While the slow progress of legislation regarding divorce, the guardianship of infants or equal pay continued to fuel discussions about the desirability of a women’s party, political allegiance, it seemed, was too great an obstacle to overcome.20
13 Interestingly, among the reasons which Gullace identifies as having contributed to the electoral failure of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Party was the decision to give it such a gendered name, which she sees as both “a bold and perhaps fatal one.”21 Voting for a party called the “Women’s” Party would have been, she notes, as unlikely for a man as “ to wear a woman’s hat to the polls, however pleasing the platform might have been”.22 In this respect, the WE’s choice, one century later, to adopt an almost identical name may have had a similar impact, as has the decision to only put forward women candidates. This, together with the fact that its website and Facebook page have featured almost exclusively women, means that WE, although it welcomes both genders as members and insists that equality for women is not a women’s issue only, may have given the feeling that it is solely aimed at women.
The Six Point Group
14 Following the Pankhurts’ initiative, the 1920s and 30s witnessed several other attempts at organising women voters, candidates and MPs, this time on a cross-party or non- partisan basis. Nancy Astor, for one, who was the first woman to have taken her seat in the House of Commons in 1919, attempted to organize a women’s party among a small group of women MPs, including Margaret Wintringham (Lib.), Dorothy Jewson (Lab.) and Lady Terrington (Lib.). The failure of the last three members to get re-elected in 1924 however put an end to the prospect, the remaining MPs being too strongly attached to their party to consider a cross-party collaboration of this kind. In March 1921, Astor was also responsible for bringing together some forty organisations to form a Consultative Committee of Women's Organisations whose aim was to act as a link between MPs and women’s organisations and organise voters in support of equality reforms.23 The increase in the number of women elected to the House of Commons in 1929 (from 4 to 14) encouraged her to resume her attempts at forming a women’s party within Parliament but, once again, party loyalty proved too strong. More than half the fourteen women MPs were Labour and felt they had been elected to deal with unemployment and standards of living, not specifically “women’s issues”, not to mention the fact that neither their party nor their voters would have liked to see them collaborate with Conservative MPs.
15 Local government in the interwar period also witnessed several initiatives aimed at securing the election of women to local bodies by finding suitable candidates, raising funds and supplying canvassers. That was the case of London’s Women’s Municipal Party, of Glasgow’s Women’s Local Representation Joint Committee, or again of Cambridge’s Women’s Citizens Association, within which Liberal candidates sought election as non-party women defending the reforms for which the NUSEC was fighting for. Even though women were elected on local councils in far greater proportion than in Parliament (in the 1930s, one in six councillors in the London Boroughs was a
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woman), it became increasingly difficult, at local level too, to contest elections on an independent platform.
16 The organisation which offers the most striking similarities with the current WE, however, both in terms of political platform and of strategy is undoubtedly the Six Point Group, which was founded in 1921 by Margaret Haig (Lady Rhondda), with former militant suffragists in its ranks such as Rebecca West, Dorothy E. Evans, Monica Whately or Helen Archdale, to coordinate the efforts of the various women’s groups through a single body that would concentrate on a small number of realistic reforms. The organization took its name from the six areas of reform they wanted to achieve in priority for women: 1) legislation on child assault; 2) legislation for the widowed mother; 3) legislation for the unmarried mother and her child; 4) equal rights of guardianship for married parents; 5) equal pay for teachers and 6) equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service. These later evolved into six general points of strict equality for women: political, occupational, moral, social, economic and legal. Point n°2, because the target was reached, and point n°4, because it was not expected to progress for a while, were replaced in 1926 by equal political rights and equal working rights. Where the Women’s Party had blended feminism with a radical-right and imperialist ideology, the SPG, although it always emphasised its non-party stance, was far more left-leaning and staunchly anti-fascist.
17 In terms of strategy, the group aimed at mobilizing women voters, encouraging them to set aside party loyalty and vote for or against certain candidates according to their level of support for the reforms they were hoping to achieve. To do so, the group kept a careful record of the votes, speeches and actions of all MPs in regard to the six points and, on the occasion of three general elections (1922, 1923 and 1924), published Black lists and White Lists aimed at directing the female voters’ votes.24 While the MPs targeted on the Black List were reported to have been slightly penalised in the process, this was not enough however to affect the final results, except in some very rare cases where the contest had been a tight one, and the strategy was abandoned after 1924. Two years from the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, when looking at the points that formed the basis of the SPG in the 1920s (whether in their initial or in their revised form), and comparing them to the six points put forward by WE, one cannot fail to be struck again by the similarity between the two as regards political, economic and social rights. The fact that, one century later, the same objectives should be defended obviously raises the question of whether so little progress has really been achieved in these areas. In terms of political representation, the percentage of women in the House of Commons rose from 1.5% in 1935 to 18% in 1997 and currently stands at 32% (following the 2017 general elections) while that for peeresses increased from 0.4% in 1959 to 7% in 1997 and currently stands at 25%; this is not to mention the fact that women represent 35% of the members of the Scottish Parliament and that the leaders of the three main parties in Scotland are female while Wales was the first legislature in the world to achieve gender equality in 2003 and could boast more than 40% AMs at the time of the election. This is not equal representation but represents significant progress. Similarly, as far as equal pay is concerned, while on average women in the mid-1930s earned less than half men’s wages for four hours less work a week,25 the gender pay gap for median hourly earnings of full-time employees today is 9.4 per cent (November 2015), the lowest figure since the survey began in 1997.26 The cost of childcare, the lack of value given to unpaid caring work or the low rates of women’s
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pensions on the other hand are issues which have been raised by feminist organisations throughout the past century without much progress being achieved. Though not as audible in WE’s discourse before the May 2016 elections (or not as clearly relayed in the press) as those raised above, these contribute to maintain many women in poverty or financial dependency by preventing their full participation in the economy.
Non-partisanship then and now
18 Like WE today, the interwar parties and organisations mentioned above were resolutely non-partisan27. From the beginning of the fight for women’s suffrage, it had been expected that women voters would bring a special contribution to politics and help improve society; political parties, because they had been established by men and were male-dominated, could not be the means through which such transformations could be achieved. For most of the women involved in parliamentary parties at the time, especially Labour members, such a strategy however was ill-thought out: if separate women's organisations might be useful for the promotion of special aims such as equal political rights or temperance, adhesion to a mainstream party, they believed, was necessary for general political work and for a greater efficiency in the promotion of these aims.28 Thus, Minnie Pallister, from the ILP, while recognizing that it was “ necessary at the present to concentrate upon the woman's question” which had been injured by “many years of Capitalism and traditions”, insisted on the fact that feminism should only be a staging post towards a socialist system in which total equality between men and women would forbid any distinction between “women's” and “men's questions”29. Similarly, Helen Fraser, a NUSEC member and a Liberal candidate to the 1923 elections, while acknowledging the necessity for women to work through non-party or “all party” organisations of their own, stressed that it was not possible to govern a country with MPs elected on individual programmes. 30 The choice between putting pressure on political parties and politicians from without or exploiting the position of women within political parties to obtain support for egalitarian reforms was regularly debated by feminists in the years that followed both their access to their electorate and to Parliament. In fact, the two strategies coexisted for some years. Putting pressure on political parties and politicians by threatening them with a mobilization of the women’s vote also worked to some extent in the ten years or so that followed the Representation of the People Act insofar as the “female vote” remained for a while a largely unknown element (the first opinion polls only appeared after 1937 in Britain) and some feared women might vote as a bloc. After a while, however, as the women’s vote became less threatening and the trend evolved towards a growth in the female membership of political parties and a decline in the membership of women’s associations, these methods lost in efficiency and slowly disappeared, together with the idea of a women’s party. The decision, in 2015, to renew such a strategy through the creation of WE and the adoption of a strictly non-partisan stance raises more questions. Distrust for political parties (to be understood as male-dominated political parties) never truly disappeared from the feminist discourse. Radical feminists in the 1970s argued that sexuality and violence –which they identified as the keys to women’s oppression– could only be fought outside mixed-sex groups (which implied a rejection of double affiliations with either trade unions or the Labour Party) and that if, to take up Kate Millet’s words, the campaign for women’s rights was “more about changing the recipe of the cake than
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getting an equal slice”31, then it had to be fought outside the party system. In this respect, however, the discourse adopted by the leaders of WE bears more similarity with that of interwar organisations as their aim has not so much been to keep clear of political parties as to threaten them into action. Thus, for Mayer, joining the mainstream parties and lobbying for women’s equality from within would have been far less effective than campaigning from without: “the one way you can very quickly change the minds of mainstream parties is threatening them at the ballot box,” she declared on the launch of the party’s manifesto. Walker confirmed: “When there’s a political risk for mainstream parties, they begin to listen and change policies.” 32 Is the situation today such as to justify the adoption of methods which proved inefficient one century ago, at a time when the context looked rather favourable? Some elements would tend to indicate that it might be: since the 1980s, women have not only represented a majority of the electorate, they have represented a majority of British voters too.33 This, together with the reappearance of a small gender gap at the beginning of the 2000s34 (the female vote is now being globally more favourable to Labour),35 means that political parties have recently proved eager to win women’s votes, as illustrated by initiatives such as Labour’s controversial pink bus in the May 2015 elections. The fact that women voters may be considered by some, both politicians and feminists, as a “decisive bloc”36 has also recently led groups such as the Fawcett Society or the YWCA to encourage them to make use of their vote and to use the threat of a “female vote” to put pressure on political candidates. 37 As far as WE is concerned, Walker considered that, despite their failure in the May 2016 elections to secure more than 2% of the votes in the London mayoral race and to have any candidate elected, their strategy had paid off: her party’s campaign was, in her opinion, what had led Labour candidate Sadiq Khan to declare, in March, that he would be a “proud feminist” in City Hall, pledging to close the gender pay gap and increase police presence on public transport at key times to lower the number of sexual assaults. Similarly, Zac Goldsmith’s promise to tackle violence against women was put down to their being “in the race.”38
19 Yet, the fact that WE not only sought to put pressure on parties but also tried to get candidates elected raised another issue, that of a possibly counterproductive effect. In that respect, the criticisms the party had to face are very similar to those levelled at the interwar attempts at organizing women separately. Some Labour supporters thus argued that the party, rather than advance the cause of women’s equality, risked weakening it by further fracturing voters, particularly on the left. For Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff, women seeking change should use the platform of existing parties to “shake things up” from within rather than contribute to split the progressive feminist vote any more than it already is and take away votes from Labour and the Liberal Democrats (which would ultimately benefit the Conservatives)39 while in Scotland, Emma Ritch, the executive director of Engender, questioned the strategic benefits for a relatively timid UK policy platform to stand against candidates from parties “whose gender equality commitments may be bolder.”40 As it turned out, the Labour Party was reportedly deeply annoyed with WE following the May elections as the latter was believed to have dented their share of the vote in the capital –an accusation based on the premises that the votes given to WE would have gone to Labour had their women candidates not contested the election.41 Just as, back in the 1920s, the link between their members and women’s non-party organisations had been a source of debate and tension (in 1925 a Labour party conference only narrowly rejected a resolution aiming at forbidding its women members to belong to a feminist
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organisation),42 reports of would-be supporters being shut out of Labour for having supported WE (or -allegedly- merely “liked” their Facebook page) began to circulate in late 2016, one journalist and political activist even explaining how she was expelled from the Labour Party for being an affiliate WE member.43 Finally, the party has been criticised for being essentially a white, London-based middle-class experiment, fighting to obtain equality within the existing system rather than challenging this system, and providing yet another example of liberal feminism. WE has thus been accused of focusing on issues that are not generally controversial, such as employment and politics, while failing to address the issue of how gender discrimination could be linked with race, disability and class-based oppression. The fact that WE refused to take a line on Sharia law in Britain –despite the latter’s implications for Muslim women– also affected the credibility of the party. On the eve of the election, Walker felt it necessary to answer some of these attacks by pointing out that their London candidates were “30% BAME and 30% LGBT” and, on the occasion of her leadership speech made at the inaugural party conference the following year lamented the fact that the party was still attracting few women from ethnic minorities and other frequently under-represented groups, admitting that many had not joined the party “ because they feel it is not for them”. WE, she now wanted to make clear, would fight to help the poorest households as well as promote the rights of non-white women, disabled women and the LGBT.44 While WE’s discourse, as it was relayed in the press and on their social networks before the May 2016 elections, could be criticized by some as disregarding inequalities and oppressions at the intersection between gender and other types of inequality, it has now become much more explicit, notably in its denunciation of connections between gender and socioeconomic inequality, calling among other things for a reform of the tax system that would reduce inequality, value unpaid work and provide “universal, affordable childcare” and denouncing the impact cuts to social care funding have had on disabled children, adults, family carers, and the care sector, from a gender perspective.45
“Modern suffragettes?”46
20 Although it is with interwar feminism and, as we have shown, more particularly with some non-partisan attempts to organise the newly enfranchised women as an electoral bloc, that WE offers the most striking similarities, it is not this movement (nor more recent ones such as the Women’s Liberation Movement and the six demands it adopted between 1971 and 197547) whose inheritance WE has chosen to claim. Since its creation, great efforts have been made to link the party to the pre-war militant suffrage movement: using a black and white picture of suffragists on their Facebook page for the launch of the party in March 2015,48 adopting green and purple –the colours of the WSPU– as the colours of their logo or again organizing a special screening of Suffragette,49 which had just been released in the UK, to formally launch the group’s policy platform of gender equality in Edinburgh in October 2015. Similar references multiplied in the following weeks, with a workshop organised by Brighton’s WE team being entitled “Deeds, not words”, the motto of the WSPU, and a variant, “Action, not words” being used for their call to close the gender gap. One year later, the decision to hold their first party conference in Manchester, birthplace of Emmeline Pankhurst and of the WSPU, provided WE with new opportunities to draw parallels between the two movements, including non-partisanship (“They understood that the movement to achieve
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equality was bigger than left or right,” Walker underlined in her inaugural speech), and to refer to the continuity between “their struggle” and “our struggle”.50
21 Claiming the inheritance of the suffragettes (a women-only, militant movement) rather than that of the constitutional and more moderate wider suffrage movement or the looser and more varied Liberation Movement of the seventies certainly has to do with the fact that their name, spectacular actions and period of time, make them more colourful and more distinctive than others. This is not to mention the fact that the WSPU has long proved more popular among feminist scholars, both in Britain and in the United States, a trend that Mayhall attributes to the work of the Suffragette Fellowship and their creation of a “master narrative” of the movement that “privileged the sequence of events leading from action on the part of women, to their arrest and incarceration” to the exclusion of other forms of militancy.51 The release of a movie of the same name, by contributing to make them better known to the wider public, no doubt provided additional encouragement to multiply references in the weeks that followed.
22 More than (possibly) good marketing strategy, however, the links with the suffragette movement may also be a means for the party to remind voters of how it has been necessary, in the past, for women to agitate for their rights in order to make things move forward. In that respect, using past battles or strategies to legitimize present ones is not rare and, as illustrated by Cowman and Mayhall, both first- and second- wave feminists before WE “interrogated aspects of women’s earlier opposition to patriarchy to shape and enhance contemporary organizational practices.”52 Just like the radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s before them,53 equating their actions, through the use of regular references, with those of the militant suffragettes can thus be for WE a way to assert a continuity between their two movements.
Conclusion
23 The creation of yet another women-only campaigning group, one hundred years after the campaigns for equality that followed women’s enfranchisement and half a century after the Women’s Liberation Movement, is evidence that organizing separately from male-dominated parties still appears to some British feminists as the best strategy to make themselves heard. That the agenda they are pressing for should not itself look much different from what it used to be at the time gives us additional insight as to the progress that remains to be achieved.
24 There is not much innovation in either the name, the strategy, or the programme of WE and a large part of the press coverage the party managed to enjoy in the early months of its existence is no doubt to be accounted for by the links that exist between its founders and the media. Still, one cannot ignore that in the space of little more than one year the party has managed to build a membership of 65,000 (far exceeding that of UKIP, which in July stood at 39,000, and superior to that of the Green Party, which amounted to no more than 55,500) and to attract more than a quarter million votes.
25 Disillusionment with the major political parties certainly provides part of the explanation for that success. Despite some slight fluctuations, the share of the votes for Labour and the Conservatives has regularly declined since 1992 and the prime beneficiaries of this trend have been the so-called third parties, some of whom might
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also be characterised as anti-system or populist parties –UKIP being the most obvious example. In the comments to be found on WE’s websites, many supporters thus mention the feeling of not being adequately represented by the major parties, not having their interests or their concerns taken into account. A majority however express dissatisfaction with the pace of reform concerning equality between men and women, which no doubt represents the main impulse behind the support for the party. In this respect, whatever the reservations one may have about their strategies and motivations, and even though electoral success seems out of reach, it cannot be denied that WE, thanks to media coverage, have managed to bring publicity to some issues more successfully than long-standing groups such as the Fawcett Society, whose campaign was totally overshadowed in the context of the last elections. In so doing, they have probably contributed to pressure some politicians into positioning themselves on some of the points on their programme, such as sexual assault and domestic violence or equal pay (David Cameron announced in July 2015 measures to fight against the phenomenon),54 and thus partially reached their aim.
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NOTES
1. Women’s Party pamphlet, 1917, Fawcett Library, 324.24102. 2. That includes Sweden, Poland, France and Germany. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, Iceland’s Women’s List (Kvenna Listin) drew just over 10% of the electorate at national level and gained some seats in the Althing. More recently, in the 2014 European elections, Swedish Feminist Initiative (F!) attracted 5.3% of the votes and won their first seat. 3. Women’s Equality Party, Our mission statement, http://www.womensequality.org.uk/about, consulted 8 March 2016. 4. Ibid. 5. Women’s Equality Party, Policy Document, 20 October 2015, https:// d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/womensequality/pages/405/ attachments/original/ 1445332098/WE_Policy_Launch.pdf?1445332098, p. 4, consulted 8 March 2016. 6. Ibid.
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7. Sophie Walker, WEP policy launch, 10 October 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=kZQOUYcFnY0, consulted 2 December 2016. 8. “When you start threatening the vote share of the other parties, that’s when your agenda becomes their agenda”, Sophie Walker declared on the eve of the elections. “Five minutes with Sophie Walker”, 26 April 2016, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ politicsandpolicy/five-minutes-with-sophie-walker/, consulted 8 May 2016. 9. A series of videos were issued under the slogan “Give half your vote to equality”, featuring both public figures and ordinary people explaining: “I’m giving half my vote to Labour and half my vote to women’s equality because… I would like an end to harassment and stalking/ I would like childcare to be affordable to everyone/I want to see more flexible working hours…”. Give half your votes to equality on 5 May, WE think that’s fair, Women’s Equality Channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL3p- gWQdbmdg6-Te0va17ZDJBXbPU7FBg&v=0n-6pT0_uso, consulted 8 May 2016. 10. “Inside or Outside the Parties?”, Woman’s Leader, 15/6/1923, p. 156. 11. Ethel Snowden, To Women Voters, National Union leaflet n°1878, 1918, pp. 2-3. 12. Véronique Molinari, Citoyennes, et après ? Le droit de vote des femmes et ses conséquences en Grande-Bretagne, 1918-1939 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 35-72. 13. Britannia, 30/11/1917, p. 207. 14. Ibid. 15. Women’s Party pamphlet, 1917, Fawcett Library, 324.24102. 16. The Women's Party, The Women's Party - Victory, National Security and Progress. The Women's Programme for the War and After (London, 1918). For Martin Pugh, the WP’s campaign against industrial militancy, which earned it the support of the Captains of Industry, “combined with her well-established belief in the principle of leadership and discipline, suggests that by 1917 Christabel was on the high road that leads to fascism”. Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts: The History of One Radical Family (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 342. 17. Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: right-wing feminism, the Great War and the Ideology of Consumption”, in Julie V. Gottlieb (ed.), Feminism and Feminists after Suffrage (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 9. 18. Ibid., p. 16. 19. International Women’s Suffrage News, January 1919, p. 49. 20. “Should there be a Woman's Political Party?”, The Vote, 3/11/1922, p. 350. 21. Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: right-wing feminism, the Great War and the Ideology of Consumption”, in Julie V. Gottlieb (ed.), Feminism and Feminists after Suffrage (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 15. 22. Ibid. 23. Consultative Committee of Women's Organisations (CCWO), Preliminary agenda 13/4/21, p. 2. 24. “The Six Point Group”, Time and Tide, 2/3/1923, pp. 242-3. 25. “Earnings and hours worked”, British Labour Statistics: Historical Abstract 1886-1968, in David Butler, Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 1900-2000 (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 383-384. 26. Gender pay differences, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2015, November 2015, Office for National Statistics, http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/ earningsandworkinghours/ bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/ 2015provisionalresults#gender-pay-differences, consulted 10 June 2016. 27. For further information on interwar feminism, see Julie V. Gottlieb (ed.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945 (London, Palgrave, 2013) and Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement (London, Macmillan, 1993. 28. Ethel Snowden, The Real Women's Party (London, ILP, 1920), pp. 15-16. 29. Minnie Pallister, Socialism for Women, ILP, 1925, p. 1. 30. “Inside or Outside the Parties?”, Woman’s Leader, 15/6/1923, p. 156.
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31. Kate Millet, BBC broadcast, 1971, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/70sfeminism/, consulted 18 May 2016. 32. Saphora Smithnov, “New Women’s Political Party in Britain Demands Faster Equality”, The New York Times, 27 November 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/world/europe/new- womens-political-party-in-britain-demands-faster-equality.html, consulted 2 June 2016. 33. Whereas they tended to abstain from voting in larger numbers than men in the 1970s, the trend reversed at the end of the decade and, between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, the participation rate among women voters overtook that of men. Pippa Norris, Joni Lovenduski & Rosie Campbell, “Gender and political participation”, The Electoral Commission, April 2004, p. 1. 34. It had declined in the 1980s and totally disappeared on the occasion of the 1997 elections (Mary-Ann Stephenson, The Glass Trapdoor, Women, Politics and the Media during the 1997 General Election (Fawcett Society, 1998), p. 2). 35. Julia Clark, Roger Mortimore and Katherine Rake, Women’s Votes: Myth and Reality (London, Fawcett Society, 2007), p. 2. 36. Patricia Hewitt & Deborah Mattison, Women’s Vote: The Key to Winning (London, Fabian Society, 1989). 37. Fawcett Society, Make Your Mark, Use Your Vote. Every Woman’s Guide to the Election, April 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/womens-equality-party-leader-hits-back-on- sharia-law---and-brand/, consulted 7 March 2013 38. Claire Cohen, “Women’s Equality Party: ‘The Mayoral election was a dress rehearsal. We're not going anywhere’”, The Telegraph, 6 May 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/ womens-equality-party-leader-hits-back-on-sharia-law---and-brand/, consulted 6 May 2016. 39. Gaby Hinsliff, “The Women’s Equality party has a problem – no one hates it”, The Guardian, 22 October 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/22/womens-equality- party-problem-wep-ukip-eu-feminism, consulted 6 May 2016. 40. Kate Devlin, “Call for new Women's Equality Party to set out more radical policies”, Herald Scotland, 26 Oct. 2015, http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/ 13895228.Call_for_new_Women_s_Equality_Party_to_set_ out_more_radical_policies/, consulted 5 June 2016. 41. Sophie Walker: “How To Solve The Labour Party's Women Problem”, Newsweek, 29 July 2016, http://europe.newsweek.com/when-misogyny-becomes-mass-ogyny-485295?rm=eu, consulted 28 November 2016. 42. Labour Party Report, 1925, p. 295; Woman’s Leader, 2 October 1925, p. 281 43. Lucy Whitehouse, “Labour expelled me from the party - for supporting women's rights”, 20 September 2016, New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/09/ labour-expelled-me-party-supporting-womens-rights, consulted 28 November 2016. 44. Sophie Walker's leadership speech to conference 2016, 26 November 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j6uMTUKANc&feature=youtu.be, consulted 5 December 2016. 45. WE First Party Conference 25 – 27 November 2016, Conference resolutions, p. 2, 7, 8. https:// d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/womensequality/pages/1753/attachments/original/ 1481019661/WE_2016_Conference_resolutions.pdf?1481019661, consulted 2 December 2016. 46. Emily Revess, “Women’s equality advocates can’t afford to ignore political economy”, 23 October 2015, https://capx.co/womens-equality-advocates-cant-afford-to-ignore-political- economy/, consulted 2 December 2016. 47. 1 - Equal pay, 2 - Equal education and job opportunities, 3 - Free contraception and abortion on demand, 4 - Free 24-hour nurseries (NWL Conference, 1971); 5 - Financial and legal independence, 6 - An end to all discrimination against lesbians and a woman’s right to define her own sexuality (NWLC, 1975).
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48. “The Women's Equality Party needs you. But probably not as much as you need the Women's Equality Party”, 28 March 2015, https://www.facebook.com/events/362216697294937/, consulted 6 June 2016. 49. Directed by Sarah Gavron. 50. Sophie Walker's leadership speech to conference 2016, 26 November 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j6uMTUKANc&feature=youtu.be, consulted 5 December 2016. 51. The Suffragette Fellowship was established by Edith How-Martyn in 1926 to “perpetuate the memory of the pioneers and outstanding events connected with women's emancipation and especially with the militant suffrage campaign, 1905-14, and thus keep alive the suffragette spirit”. Laura Nym Mayhall, “Creating the 'Suffragette Spirit': British feminism and the historical imagination”, Women’s History Review, vol. 4, n. 3, 1995, p. 329. 52. Cowman, Krista, “‘Carrying on a long tradition’: second-wave presentations of first-wave feminism in Spare Rib c. 1972-80, European Journal of Women's Studies, 17 (3). 2010, p. 194. 53. Laura Nym Mayhall, “Creating the 'Suffragette Spirit': British feminism and the historical imagination”, Women’s History Review, vol. 4, n. 3, 1995, p. 333. 54. PM announces new measures to eradicate gender pay inequality, 25 Oct. 2015, https://www.gov.uk/ government/news/pm-announces-new-measures-to-eradicate-gender-pay-inequality, consulted 6 March, 2016.
ABSTRACTS
The May 2016 elections to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London mayor and assembly members saw the appearance of a newcomer on the British political scene. The Women’s Equality Party, co-founded the year before by Catherine Mayer and Sandi Toksvig to push “for equal representation in politics, business, industry and throughout working life,” is not the only one of its kind in Europe. More interesting, it is not the first one of its kind in the UK either. Both its name and the fact that it presents itself as based on a six point-programme are direct reminders of Christabel Pankhurst’s Women’s Party and Margaret Haig’s Six Point Group, both launched in the context of women’s enfranchisement in 1918 together with other attempts at creating a women’s party in Parliament and local government. Such similarities with events that are now one hundred years old cannot fail to raise a number of questions, not only as to the reasons that account for its emergence, but also as to what may still motivate women today to organize separately from mainstream political parties rather than contribute to change things from the inside –a question that was central to the interwar women’s movement. By placing WE in a wider historical perspective, this article will not only try to determine to what extent the party can be considered as innovative rather than a close replica of past initiatives, it will also provide some special insight into the changes and continuities in the strategies, motivations and recruitment of women-only British political associations or parties. In this respect, the choice made by its members to claim the inheritance of the suffragette movement rather than that of other groups it bears more resemblance to will also be looked into.
Les élections législatives de mai 2016 en Ecosse et au pays de Galles, ainsi que celles pour le maire et l’assemblée de Londres qui se sont tenues en même temps, ont vu l’émergence d’un nouveau parti sur la scène politique britannique. Fondé un peu plus d’un an auparavant par Catherine Mayer et Sandi Toksvig, le Women’s Equality Party, est entrée dans la course afin, selon les propos
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de ses dirigeantes, de promouvoir « une représentation égalitaire en politique, dans les affaires, dans l’industrie, et dans toute la vie active ». Le parti, qui a su à cette occasion s’attirer une importante couverture médiatique, n’est cependant pas le premier du genre en Europe ni-même au Royaume Uni. Son nom, ainsi que son programme, basé sur six points, évoquent très clairement le Women’s Party de Christabel Pankhurst et le Six Point Group de Margaret Haig, tous deux fondés au moment de l’obtention du droit de vote par les femmes en 1918 et accompagnés d’autres tentatives, tant au niveau parlementaire que local, de fonder un parti féminin. De telles similitudes avec des évènements qui ont maintenant près d’un siècle ne peuvent manquer de susciter un certain nombre d’interrogations, non seulement quant aux raisons qui expliquent son émergence mais également quant à la pertinence pour les femmes aujourd’hui de continuer à s’organiser distinctement des principaux partis politiques plutôt qu’essayer de faire changer les choses « de l’intérieur » –une question centrale au mouvement féministe de l’entre-deux-guerres. En replaçant le Women’s Equality Party dans une perspective historique plus large, cet article ne tentera pas uniquement de déterminer dans quelle mesure celui-ci peut être considéré comme novateur, il s’attachera également à souligner les changements et continuités observables dans les stratégies, motivations et recrutement des associations politiques exclusivement féminines en Grande-Bretagne. Le choix fait par les membres du WEP de se présenter comme les héritières du mouvement des suffragettes plutôt que d’autres mouvements dont elles seraient plus proches sera à cet égard également discuté.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Women’s Equality Party, parti féminin, élections, féminisme Keywords: Women’s Equality Party, women’s party, elections, feminism
AUTHOR
VÉRONIQUE MOLINARI
ILCEA4, Université Grenoble Alpes
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Review article: The Politics of Remembering the Suffragettes Politique de la mémoire : le cas des suffragettes
Laura Schwartz
1 The 2015 film Suffragette grossed 4.7 million at the box office, was screened in cinemas across the UK and was awarded “Best Movie about Women” by the Women Film Critics Circle Awards.1 Finally the subject of my own historical research had hit the mainstream, generating much debate not just among historians but also within activist circles and on social media. Yet not all the attention was positive, especially with regards to the race politics of both the film and the movement whose story it told. This posed some difficult questions for me as a historian and as a feminist committed to organising for radical social change. How should I best engage with the explicit politicisation of my academic research, and how could I use history to inspire present- day struggles without romanticising, demonising or oversimplifying the past?
2 Directed by Sarah Gavon and written by Abi Morgan, Suffragette sets out to tell the story of the “foot soldiers” of the militant suffrage movement, rejecting a focus on the famous Pankhurst family to look instead at the working-class women active in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). This was a refreshing take on a movement that is often represented, at least on screen and in the school room, as a story of posh and slightly unhinged ladies in impressive hats, to whom we all have to feel extremely grateful. The WSPU did indeed recruit among the wealthy, and was led mainly by middle-class women. Yet, as feminist historians have been arguing for decades, it also gained significant support from women workers – many of whom joined the fight, despite the difficulties of combining this with jobs in factories or domestic service and their responsibilities as wives and mothers.2
3 While Suffragette was widely congratulated for its attention to working-class militants, 3 the most substantive and widely discussed critique was of its race politics. Kirsten West Savali and Sarah Kwei criticised the film not only for failing to cast actors of colour and represent suffragettes of different ethnicities, but also for its publicity photoshoot in Time Out magazine that used a line from an Emmeline Pankhurst speech in which she
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declared “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave”. They argued that the filmmakers had failed to consider the slogan’s racist origins and contemporary resonances: the connotations of the term ‘rebel’ with the pro-slavery South in the US Civil War, and the opportunistic comparison that Emmeline Pankhurst made on a visit to the United States in 1913 when she called upon her audience to free women just as they had already freed “the Negro”, while ignoring the continued oppression of African Americans.4 Many discussions on feminist social media extended this critique not only to the film’s representation of this historical period, but to the suffrage movement itself, which was condemned by some as nothing more than white feminism for white feminists.5
4 The creators of Suffragette had taken great care to offer a historically accurate portrayal of the militant suffrage movement, consulting Professor June Purvis and appointing Professor Krista Cowman as the historical advisor. Sarah Gavron even published an article on the making of the film in the leading academic journal Women’s History Review.6 The importance of historical accuracy was also foregrounded in the response to criticisms of Suffragette’s race politics. Time Out’s official reply to complaints about its photoshoot insisted that Emmeline Pankhurst’s use of the term “rebel” had been taken out of context and had nothing to do with the US Civil War.7 When interviewed on BBC Radio, Sarah Gavron, reminded her critics that the British suffrage movement should not be confused with its counterpart in the United States. Whereas, she argued, North American suffrage had at times excluded Black women from its ranks, this did not occur in Britain. Gavron also maintained that it was anachronistic to demand that women of colour be represented in the film, since in 1912 there were very few Black people living in the UK. Researchers for the film had only found one woman of colour involved in the WSPU, the Indian Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who was not part of the working-class women’s movement that the film focused on.8
5 Historian Sumita Mukherjee wrote about the mis-use of a 1911 photograph of ‘Indian suffragettes’, widely circulated on social media by those who condemned their erasure from the film. Although she argued for the need to move away from Anglo-centric narratives of the suffrage movement, and to recognise the degree to which it was a global struggle fought for by women around the world, Mukherjee was nevertheless troubled by the uncritical deployment of the photograph. As she pointed out, the Indian women in the picture were not, in fact, fighting for votes for Indian women living under colonial rule, but were participating in a British suffrage procession that celebrated Empire. Mukherjee argued that by ignoring the specificity of these women’s backgrounds and politics (Sophia Duleep Singh was well connected within the British establishment and occupied a grace and favour apartment at the Royal Palace of Hampton Court), even the most well-intentioned moves to celebrate “diversity” within the British suffrage movement risked obscuring important political differences between these elite Indian women in Britain and the anti-imperialist women’s movement in India and Pakistan.9
6 In the case of Time Out and Gavron’s responses, however, I was concerned that invoking “facts” and historical “expertise” was a way to avoid a debate about a wider truth – namely the problematic relationship that much feminism past and present has had with race and racism. Emmeline Pankhurst may not, in her “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” speech, have been supporting the pro-slavery South, but she and her daughter Christabel did, during and after World War I, promote a right wing and anti-migrant form of patriotism, and were part of a feminist movement that often supported the
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British Empire.10 How could I, as an activist greatly inspired by the politically rich, diverse and often revolutionary movement that I research, convey this to a wider audience without ignoring its problems or its complexity? And how could I, as a (white) historian, listen to and learn political lessons from the concerns of many of today’s feminist activists (including many Black feminists) who felt alienated from the feminist history canon, without renouncing much that is valuable and important about that history?
7 One strategy was to delve more deeply into the history itself, in a piece I published on the website of the London-based activist collective Feminist Fightback that I helped to found 10 years ago.11 Here I attempted to respond to the North American emphasis within many of the criticisms of Suffragette by exploring questions of race and racism in the British context more specifically. I wrote of how the women’s suffrage movement in the United States made a conscious decision to renounce the struggle against slavery and the emancipation of African Americans (in their early years the two movements had been closely intertwined), in the hope that this would make their demands for rights for white women more palatable to the powers that be. The British suffrage movement, however, never experienced such an explicit moment of betrayal and rupture. In contrast to the United States, the primary site in which the racism of the British state and society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century played out was not the metropole, but its Empire. Britain was home to some people of colour in this period, but they were a small fraction of the metropolitan population and their history is not, therefore, directly comparable to that of people of colour in North America.12 Britain carried out exploitation, segregation, violence against and genocide of people of colour “somewhere else” – in the territories it colonised in the Indian subcontinent and parts of Africa. The only sizeable wave of colonial migration into Britain at this time was from Ireland, whose population was both “white” and highly racialized.13
8 This had significant implications for how the race politics of British feminism played out, meaning that the movement followed a somewhat different path from what occurred in the United States. Historians Antoinette Burton and Claire Midgley, among others, have written about the dominance of imperialist ideas in the British women’s movement. White women frequently argued for political rights for themselves, on the grounds that this would better enable them to play their part in Empire and/or “rescue” their “sisters” in the colonised territories from oppression at the hands of more “backward” societies.14 A destructive legacy that has weighed heavy on British feminism, and continues to shape the present-day political landscape. Yet there was also space in Britain for currents of anti-imperialist and anti-racist feminism to develop – exemplified by women such as Annie Besant, Harriet Law and Catherine Impey, who were also supporters of women’s suffrage.15 This alternative tradition of feminist politics was certainly a minority one, but it does complicate any attempts to dismiss the history of this movement as “white feminism” concerned solely with the rights of white women and excluding people of colour. The women’s suffrage movement in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century was exceptionally politically diverse, involving conservatives, liberals, socialists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Theosophists and atheists, as well as imperialists and anti-imperialists – who frequently disagreed with and debated each other over the best way to win the vote and what they would do with it once they had it. Even members of the Pankhurst family took politically divergent paths. Rejecting the increasing conservatism and patriotism of her mother and sister, Sylvia Pankhurst pursued a socialist feminist course, organising with
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working-class women in London’s East End, and was also an active and outspoken opponent of racism, imperialism and fascism throughout the whole of her life.16
9 None of this, of course, is news to historians. Yet the lack of historical context to many of the wider debates about the film suggests that we need to try harder at democratising our research. My intention in the Feminist Fightback blog was not to say that British feminism was any less racist than North American feminism, nor to try to absolve ourselves from the overriding legacies of a women’s movement that has frequently been dominated by the needs of white middle-class women. Rather, I aimed to show how, by looking more closely at the politics of feminism and race in a historically and geographically specific context – one structured primarily by Empire and a predominantly white metropole – we see how understanding the history of racism within the women’s movement solely in terms of “inclusion” vs “exclusion” is inadequate unless we also examine the political content of different strands of suffrage activism. Which, in turn, allowed me to pose some more directly political questions. Which traditions from the past might we want to draw from in feminism today, and which traditions should we reject? What were the possibilities at the turn of the twentieth century for developing an anti-racist feminism within the shadow of Empire and among a predominantly white British population? To what degree did overarching imperialist and racist discourses limit the thinking even of those white feminists who professed solidarity with their colonised “sisters”? And how do these discourses continue to structure feminist thinking today?
10 These discussions continued when I spoke on a panel following a packed out screening of Suffragette at the Genesis cinema in East London. The cinema’s location on the Mile End Road, a stone’s throw away from many of the key sites of suffrage militancy portrayed in the film, brought the past and the present together in a particularly intimate way. The audience proved perfectly capable of enthusiastically engaging with the film’s powerful representations of women in struggle (heckling the police and loudly cheering the heroines), while also contributing to a thoughtful and sophisticated discussion of some of Suffragette’s flaws. The risk of a film like Suffragette is not that it might “get things wrong”, either historically or politically, since, at least in my experience, collective discussion of its strengths and weaknesses proved that it was possible to be both inspired by the successes of the suffrage movement and learn from its failures. Rather the most dangerous thing that we can do when we represent radical history is turn it into a museum piece, to relegate struggles for social justice to the past and imply that either there is nothing left to fight for or that social change is no longer possible. Sisters Uncut had resisted this narrative when they staged a protest against the Conservative government’s cuts to domestic violence services at Suffragette’s London premiere; while Feminist Fightback, who organised the Genesis screening, used the proceeds to pay for coaches to ongoing demonstrations outside Yarls Wood detention centre where, in 2018, the British state still imprisons (in this case migrant) women and where those women still use the hunger strike as a tool of resistance. I continue to hope, therefore, that knowing our history can and must help us make better use of it in the present.
11 Laura Schwartz is Associate Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on the history of British feminism and is currently completing her third monograph Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class Conflict and Domestic Labour in the British Women's Suffrage Movement.
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Purvis June, 'Suffragette: A Reply to Its Critics' 11 November 2015 http:// www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/suffragette-reply-critics/ [accessed 26 July 2017].
Purvis, June, 'The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain', Women's History Review, 4/1 (1995), pp. 103-33.
Ramdin, Ron, The Making of the Black Working-Class in Britain (Aldershot, Gower Publishing Co., 1987).
Romero, Patricia W., E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1987).
Sanghani, Radhika, 'The Uncomfortable Truth about Racism and the Suffragettes’ http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11914757/Racism-and-the-suffragettes-the- uncomfortable-truth.html [accessed 19 May 2017].
Schwartz, Laura, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women's Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013).
Schwartz, Laura, 'Knowing Our History Helps Us to Make Better Use of It in the Present', Feminist Fightback, 13 October 2015 http://www.feministfightback.org.uk/some-thoughts-on-kirsten- west-savalis-article-sister-suffragette/.
Schwartz, Laura, 'Film Review: Suffragette Explores the Lives of Working-Class Women' History Today 8 October 2015 http://www.historytoday.com/laura-schwartz/film-review-suffragette
Time Out, http://www.timeout.com/london/film/statement-response-t-shirt-complaints [accessed June 2016].
Visram, Rozina, ' Duleep Singh, Princess Sophia Alexandra (1876-1948)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, online edn.) [accessed 15 May 2017].
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Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, Pluto Press, 2002).
Visram, Rozina, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London, Pluto Press, 1986).
West Savali, Kirsten, 'Sister Suffragette: "Slave" T-Shirts Highlight White Feminism's Race Problem', The Root 7 October 2015 http://www.theroot.com/sister-suffragette-slave-t-shirts- highlight-white-fe-1790861323 [accessed 19 May 2017].
Winslow, Barbara, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (London, UCL Press, 1996).
NOTES
1. IMDB.com/title/tt3077214 [accessed 15 May 2017]. 2. For the involvement of working-class women in the suffrage movement, see Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement (London, Virago, 1984); Angela V. John, “Radical Reflections? Elizabeth Robins: The Making of Suffragette History and the Representation of Working-Class Women”, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts (eds.), The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (London, Mansell Publishing Ltd, 1995a), pp. 191-211; June Purvis, “The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain”, Women's History Review, 4/1 (1995), pp. 103-33; Sandra Stanley Holton, “Silk Dresses and Lavender Kid Gloves: The Wayward Career of Jessie Craigen, Working Suffragist”, Women's History Review, 5/1 (1996), pp. 129-50; Michelle Myall, “‘No Surrender!’: The Militancy of Mary Leigh, a Working-Class Suffragette", in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds.), The Women's Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998); Krista Cowman, “‘Incipient Toryism’ the Women's Social and Political Union and the Independent Labour Party, 1903-1914”, History Workshop Journal, /53 (Spring 2002), pp. 128-48; Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women's Social and Political Union, 1904-1918 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007). 3. See, for example, Sarah Jackson, 'The Suffragettes Weren’t Just White Middle-Class Women Throwing Stones' Guardian 12 October 2015 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/ oct/12/suffragettes-white-middle-class-women-pankhursts [accessed 26 July 2017]. Interestingly, it was the class, rather than the race, politics of the film that provoked most debate between historians, Laura Schwartz, “Film Review: Suffragette Explores the Lives of Working-Class Women” History Today 8 October 2015 http://www.historytoday.com/laura-schwartz/film- review-suffragette, “Suffragette Busts Some Myths But Has Major Holes in Its History” The Conversation 9 October 2015 https://theconversation.com/suffragette-busts-some-myths-but-has- major-holes-in-its-history-47325 [accessed 26 July 2017]; Helen McCarthy, 'Suffragette' 15 October 2015 Past Notes http://pastnotes.blogspot.co.uk/[accessed 26 July 2017]; Lucy Delap and Julie Gottlieb, “Suffragette: the Forrest Gump of Feminism” History Matters 3 November 2015 http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/suffragette-forrest-gump-feminism/[accessed 26 July 2017]; Diane Atkinson & Krista Cowman, “Suffragette: 100 Years on Women's Rights Still Prompt Shrill Hysteria”, The Telegraph 30 October 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/ womens-politics/11965153/Suffragette-100-years-on-womens-rights-still-prompt-shrill- hysteria.html [accessed 26 July 2017]; June Purvis “Suffragette: A Reply to Its Critics” 11 November 2015 http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/suffragette-reply-critics/ [accessed 26 July 2017]. 4. Kirsten West Savali, “Sister Suffragette: ‘Slave’ T-Shirts Highlight White Feminism's Race Problem”, The Root 7 October 2015 http://www.theroot.com/sister-suffragette-slave-t-shirts- highlight-white-fe-1790861323 [accessed 19 May 2017]; Sarah Kwei, “Why I Protested with Sisters
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Uncut at the Suffragette Premier”, Independent 8 October 2015 http://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/why-i-protested-with-sisters-uncut-at-the-premiere-of-suffragette-a6685686.html [accessed 19 May 2017] 5. For social media, see Radhika Sanghani, 'The Uncomfortable Truth about Racism and the Suffragettes’ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11914757/Racism-and-the- suffragettes-the-uncomfortable-truth.html [accessed 19 May 2017]. 6. Sarah Gavron, “The Making of the Feature Film Suffragette”, Women's History Review 24:6 (2015), 985-995. 7. http://www. timeout.com/london/film/statement-response-t-shirt-complaints [accessed June 2016]. 8. Sarah Gavron interviewed by Francine Stock for BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme, broadcast 11 February 2016 [accessed 15 May 2017 BBC radio player]. 9. Sumita Mukherjee, “That Indian Suffragettes Photo”, http://sumitamukherjee.wordpress.com/ 2017/02/20/that-indian-suffragettes-photo/[accessed 15 May 2017]. For Sophia Duleep Singh, see Rozina Visram, ' Duleep Singh, Princess Sophia Alexandra (1876-1948)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, online edn.) [accessed 15 May 2017]; Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, Pluto Press, 2002); Anita Anand, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary (London, Bloomsbury, 2015); Sumita Mukherjee, Indian Suffragettes: Networks, Trans-Nationalism and International Feminism (forthcoming). 10. For Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst's patriotism see, for example, Nicoletta Gullace, “Christabel Pankhurst and the Smethwick Election: Right Wing Feminism, the Great War and the Ideology of Consumption”, Women's History Review 23:3 (2014), pp. 313-346. There is a large historiography on “imperial feminism”, for seminal work see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History. British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 1994); Claire Midgley, Feminism and Empire. Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865 (London & New York, Routledge, 2007). 11. Laura Schwartz, 'Knowing Our History Helps Us to Make Better Use of It in the Present', Feminist Fightback, 13 October 2015 http://www.feministfightback.org.uk/some-thoughts-on- kirsten-west-savalis-article-sister-suffragette/. 12. For the history of people of colour in Britain prior to large-scale migration following the Second World War, see, for example, Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London, Pluto Press, 1986); Visram, Asians in Britain; Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working-Class in Britain (Aldershot, Gower Publishing Co., 1987); Rehana Ahmed & Sumita Mukherjee (eds.), South Asian Resistances in Britain 1858-1947 (London, Continuum, 2012); Caroline Bressey, “Looking for Work: The Black Presence in Britain 1860-1920”, Immigrants and Minorities 2 & 3 (2010), pp. 164-182; Caroline Bressey “Racism, Anti-Racism and the Place of Blackness in the Making and Remaking of the English Working Class”, Historical Reflections 41:1 (2015), pp. 70-82. 13. Jewish people from Eastern Europe constituted another racialised yet “white” migrant population from the late nineteenth century onwards. 14. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History; Claire Midgley, Feminism and Empire. 15. For Law and Besant, see Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women's Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013); for Impey, see Caroline Bressey, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 16. Patricia W. Romero, E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1987); Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (London, UCL Press, 1996); Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics (London, Pluto Press, 1999); Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire (London, Verso, 2013).
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ABSTRACTS
This review article examines the debates and controversy surrounding the 2015 film Suffragette. It considers how historians might best engage with the politicisation of their research, and the role of the activist radical historian.
Cet article étudie les débats et controverses autour du film Suffragette, sorti en 2015. Il s’interroge sur le place de l’historien.ne dans le débat public : comment réagir lorsque son objet de recherche se retrouve au cœur du débat public ? L’historien.ne engagée a-t-elle un rôle particulier à jouer ?
INDEX
Mots-clés: le film Suffragette, féminisme, féminisme impérial, histoire britannique, histoire publique, histoire radicale Keywords: Suffragette film, feminism, imperial feminism, British history, public history, radical history
AUTHOR
LAURA SCHWARTZ
History Department, University of Warwick
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Book Reviews Comptes-rendus
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Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage L’Europe des femmes, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle de Julie Le Gac et Fabrice Virgili,
Michel Prum
RÉFÉRENCE
Julie Le Gac et Fabrice Virgili (dir.), L’Europe des femmes, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle, Paris, Perrin, 2017, 351 p.
1 Il est toujours utile de revenir aux textes, en particulier aux grands textes fondateurs, et, si possible, de les lire ou les relire en langue originelle ou, du moins ‒ si on ne maîtrise pas cette langue ‒ en version bilingue, avec possibilité de vérifier tel ou tel passage de la traduction. C’est pourquoi l’anthologie dirigée par Julie Le Gac et Fabrice Virgili, sous le nom de L’Europe des femmes, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle, Recueil pour une histoire du genre en VO, est tout à fait bienvenue. Ce petit volume nous donne près de 80 extraits, en français, anglais, allemand, espagnol, portugais, italien, russe, mais aussi en albanais, grec, latin, néerlandais, polonais, roumain, serbo-croate, suédois, turc et yiddish. Un tel florilège plurilinguistique n’existait pas et il faut bien sûr saluer cette précieuse contribution à l’histoire des femmes et du genre en Europe à l’époque contemporaine. L’ouvrage est accompagné de nombreuses illustrations dont un quatre- pages central en couleurs. En fait, plus que des « illustrations », ce sont de véritables contributions, commentées au même titre que les textes. Les textes sont, pour certains, des extraits d’ouvrages majeurs qui ont « fait » l’histoire des femmes et du genre, comme A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) de Mary Wollstonecraft ou Le Deuxième sexe (1949) de Simone de Beauvoir. Mais on trouve aussi des documents qui ne sont pas des textes d’auteure, comme l’annonce, sur churchofengland.org, de la nomination en 2014 de la première femme évêque de l’Église d’Angleterre, Libby Lane, Bishop of Stockport. On peut lire aussi des déclarations antiféministes, à l’instar de l’extrait de Sexe et caractère (1903) de l’Autrichien Otto Weininger, thuriféraire de la domination
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masculine et de l’antisémitisme, ou de l’encyclique papale Humanae vitae de Paul VI (1968) dénonçant la contraception orale (c’est le texte en latin). Le livre est une anthologie de l’histoire du genre, non de l’histoire du féminisme. L’ensemble des documents sont accompagnés d’une présentation et d’un éclairage permettant de les replacer dans leur contexte et d’en faciliter la compréhension. L’agencement des documents n’est pas chronologique, mais s’articule autour d’onze chapitres, comme la science, l’art, la religion ou la guerre. Outre le fait de mettre à disposition en bilingue des documents parfois difficiles d’accès, le recueil permet à la lectrice ou au lecteur qui parcourt ces pages en continu d’obtenir une vision d’ensemble, par effet cumulatif, et de comparer, de faire dialoguer ces textes ou ces iconographies, et parfois d’en saisir les filiations.
2 Parmi les documents britanniques ou irlandais (notre collègue du CRECIB Myriam Boussahba-Bravard fait partie du noyau dur qui a « pensé, coordonné et réalisé » cet ouvrage), on notera les noms de Mary Wollstonecraft (déjà citée), William Thompson, Florence Nightingale, Marie Stopes, Jane Stuart Wortley, Virginia Woolf et Hertha Marks Ayrton (cette dernière figurant ici non comme auteure : l’extrait donné est un texte rédigé à la mémoire de cette illustre scientifique). Citons encore les interventions des représentantes britanniques au quatrième congrès de l’Alliance internationale pour le suffrage féminin à Amsterdam (1908). Enfin deux auteurs hâtivement classés « Royaume-Uni » sont en fait l’une sud-africaine (Olive Schreiner) et l’autre américain (Benjamin Spock).
3 On regrettera la brièveté des extraits ‒ mais pouvait-il en être autrement pour un ouvrage de grande diffusion, de 350 pages, dont on ne peut attendre l’exhaustivité d’un épais ouvrage universitaire ? En revanche, une présentation plus substantielle que les trois pages de l’« introduction générale » aurait permis de mieux lier la multitude des documents très divers proposés ici et aurait donné à l’ensemble une plus grande cohérence et une meilleure intelligibilité, d’autant plus que les introductions de chapitre sont, elles aussi, particulièrement courtes (une petite page).
4 Il n’en demeure pas moins que ce recueil, issu de la collaboration de l’association Mnémosyne et du groupe « Genre et Europe » du laboratoire « Écrire une nouvelle histoire de l’Europe », est une contribution hautement appréciable pour qui s’intéresse aux relations sociales de sexe sur notre continent. Pour finir, notons l’excellente iconographie de couverture, empruntée aux archives culturelles prussiennes : Une femme reporter photographiant Berlin en 1910. Cette anthologie multilingue peut être vue elle-même comme une photographie de l’histoire des Européennes, riche d’enseignements pour notre XXIe siècle et ses combats futurs.
AUTEURS
MICHEL PRUM
Université Paris Diderot
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Review of Rewriting Academia, The Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe by Renate Haas (ed),
Shirley Doulière
REFERENCES
Renate Haas (ed), Rewriting Academia, The Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2016, 442 pages
1 The book under scrutiny is a global survey of Gender Studies in Continental Europe. It presents the work of -mostly female- researchers aiming at developing Women’s and Gender Studies as an academic topic, as well as assessing its current situation. The book is divided in four geographical areas: Southern Europe, Western and Central Europe, Northern Europe, Southeastern and Eastern Europe.
Southern Europe
2 The overview begins with the situation in Portugal. Macedo and Esteves Pereira remind us that teaching feminism or gender studies remains challenging in most places in the world and Portugal is one of these places. When stating the difficulty of fitting classes in the curricula and having to argue one’s choice for graduate courses, their experience echoes that in the other countries in Southern Europe. The first Portuguese MA degree course in Women’s Studies was created in 1995, then a PhD course was opened in 2002 at Universidad Aberta-the Open university in Lisbon as part of Women’s and Cultural Studies.
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3 Similarly, English Studies and Women’s Studies are fairly recent arrivals in Spain following the death of dictator Franco in 1975. It has had to navigate rigid higher education structures. Gender Studies slowly developed but encountered a setback in 2008 because of the recession. Another happened in 2011 with the election of a Conservative party which did not choose to allocate funds for Women and Gender Studies. However, the discipline has grown steadily ever since.
4 In Italy, Professor Vita Fortunati highlights a complex situation when it comes to the institutionalisation of these type of studies. On the one hand, some faculty members consider that the inclusion of Women and Gender studies is key to the recognition of its “formative and educational strength (p. 87)”. On the other hand, some fear it would deprive them of its “subversive potential” (Ibid.).
Western and Central Europe
5 In Western and Central Europe, Women’s and Gender Studies is usually either transdisciplinary, or part of the English Studies Department. Universities are generally funded by the Ministry of Education and Research, which gives them a strong orientation towards research. Florence Binard dates Women and Gender Studies in most Western countries back to the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s. In France, it is also related to the social movement of May 1968 which brought about a deep transformation of Higher Education and an increased emphasis on non-traditional topics such as Gender studies.
6 She highlights the fact that scholars were able to organize non-official research groups, and/or women-only meetings mostly based on the participants’ feminist commitment and their teaching in left-leaning universities. This did not prevent dissensions, with some opposed to feminist studies in academia and others fearing a “dilution of feminism in a male-dominated environment” (p 87).
7 Ultimately, she underlines the influence of individuals in the creation of courses: in 2004 the President of the Conseil Régional d’île de France (Paris Area Regional Council) appointed a Vice President in Charge of Education who was open to feminist concerns. He gave Eliane Viennot, professor of Literature the task of developing research on women, sex and gender. In 2009, the first Senior Lecturer position of Women Studies, Sex and Gender in English studies was created at Lille 3. Belgium saw a similar development under the impulse of young scholars in the 1990’s. Marisa Demoor calls attention to the fact that, in Belgium there was a little hostility to Women Studies and Feminism. Some people have an ambivalent position, as some younger researchers deem women studies “unnecessary and patronising to women” (p.107).
8 In contrast with the situation in other Western countries, in Germany Renate Haas dates feminist efforts to study these domains back to the 19th Century. Intertwined with women’s literature, lesbian literature, and motherhood leagues, they went through obvious setbacks due to the Third Reich’s policy of ousting women from office. Women who might have been leading intellectuals remained excluded from the higher ranks of academia after 1945 until the early 1980’s. Haas credits the revival of women’s studies to Anglicist studies and individual lecturers’ efforts though she warns that “pioneers were frequently ridiculed and viciously attacked” (p.154). Haas also points out that since its establishment in 1980, the prize for the best Habilitation thesis has never been
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awarded to a woman, and the only habilitation with a clear Gender Studies orientation to win such a prize was written by a man studying masculinities.
9 In Austria, Women’s and Gender Studies were modeled on the second wave feminism in the 1960s in American universities. Austria was late in admitting female students, later than most European countries, and equally suffered from the exclusion of female researchers due to Nazism. In 2007/8 the University of Graz introduced an MA in Gender Studies but in other universities courses are integrated as part of “topics in Cultural and Media studies” and are thus less visible. Overall Anglicist and Americanist Women and Gender Studies emerged from feminist interventions in Austria and are largely shaped by English and American syllabi, only officially included as a field of study and research in 2002.
10 In the Czech Republic, the authors concede that Women’s and Gender Studies is used as an umbrella term although some department have Gender Studies only (without Women’s Studies) but are part of sociology departments. Women’s and Gender Studies tend to be integrated in the English departments. This distinction is due to the post- communist period in the early 90’s, when a more “user-friendly” word was chosen, “less ideologically charged than Women’s Studies or Feminism” (p. 195).
11 During the communist years, women’s emancipation was seen as part of the communist doctrine, if one had different ideas one was accused of being bourgeois and capitalist. After the change in political regime in 1989, Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies were created but remained ostracized for a while. Their work consisted mostly of translation of western feminist works. After 2000, Women’s and Gender studies became more institutionalized but as part of Sociology more than of English studies. In 2004 the Czech Republic joined the EU which has driven even more progressive steps toward gender equality, but the authors warn that the situation is far from stabilized.
12 A similar situation is found in Croatia where, according to the author, Women Studies is “paradigmatic of the development of women’s studies in post-communist, transitional societies” (p. 219). Feminism was also part of communist values that the middle class did not identify with. However, Women Studies were created as early as the 1950’s in line with the party’s agenda, as part for example of the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement.
Northern Europe
13 Sweden, Finland and Lithuania are slightly ahead of the others, with Women’s Studies courses held as early as the 70’s within the humanities and social sciences. However, the authors warn against the myth of the all egalitarian “women friendly” welfare state in Finnish society. Though they have plenty of MA and PhD programs in Women’s studies, some universities do not have gender-related research. Currently the main development is the shift from Women Studies to Gender Studies. Another warning to curb one’s enthusiasm is that among EU countries, Lithuania is the leading country for male to female researcher ratio, but female researchers hold mostly the less prestigious positions.
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South-Eastern and Eastern Europe
14 In Romania, Schneider and Selejan explain that the general feeling is that “there is not a strong feminist movement nor any need for one” (p. 327) or that it is an “alien importation, largely of Anglo-American extraction” (Ibid.). These four countries saw a rise of interest in feminism after the fall of Communism in the 90’s, and share the same suspicions against bourgeois notions. The influence of the European union is felt, as the prospect of getting in the European Union pushed universities to add more English studies courses to the curricula. Romania however, has the particularity of not having had an industrial revolution in the 19th century and no second wave feminist movement in the 60’s.
Conclusion
15 The aim of the publication is to give a greater visibility to the various Anglicist scholars in Europe developing the field of Women’s and Gender Studies which suffers from lack of communication and recognition. Why Anglicists? Because English studies is a predominantly feminine field influenced by Anglo-American Feminism it should come as no surprise that it is where Gender Studies got their impulse. The different articles show the ambivalence or unease in using the word feminist, preferring Women’s and/ or Gender Studies and remind young researchers of the long way fought and the way ahead. They point out that even today, a valued researcher can be denied a position because of his/her field of research being mostly in women’s studies and ultimately raises the issue that a lot of work is done by individuals and once these researchers are gone so are the projects they started.
16 Overall this collection of articles fulfils its goal of unveiling the work of scholars to promote an undervalued field of studies. It is unfortunate though that it does not cover countries outside of Europe since it is still too commonly held to be true that feminism exists only in Europe. It could be the object of an entire new study and would be very valuable. It is nevertheless a great inspiration for Women and Gender Studies scholars but also for researchers of other topics with a similar problem such as Post Colonial Studies.
17 Shirley Doulière is a PhD student at the university Bordeaux Montaigne and ATER at the University of Besançon. Her doctoral thesis is entitled: The Tightrope Walkers of Identity: Victorian Female Explorers map out a New Atlas of Femininity.
AUTHORS
SHIRLEY DOULIÈRE
Université de Besançon
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Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage Inclusion through Access to Higher Education – Exploring the Dynamics between Access to Higher Education, Immigration and Languages de Marie-Agnès Détourbe (Ed.),
Marie-Annick Mattioli
RÉFÉRENCE
Marie-Agnès Détourbe (Ed.), Inclusion through Access to Higher Education – Exploring the Dynamics between Access to Higher Education, Immigration and Languages, Rotterdam, Sense Publishers, 2017, xxv + 164 p.
1 Comme le rappelle dans sa préface Vincent Latour, spécialiste des études migratoires européennes, l’immigration a longtemps été étudiée sous le prisme de l’inclusion ou non sur le marché du travail ou dans les sociétés d’accueil en général. Elle est maintenant très largement appréhendée à travers le biais des questions d’accès à l’enseignement supérieur et à l’apprentissage des langues des pays d’accueil.
2 Depuis le début du XXIe siècle, la maîtrise de la langue devient un élément décisif pour l’obtention du statut de réfugié dans bon nombre de pays et les chercheurs s’emparent tout naturellement de cette question. Les huit chapitres de l’ouvrage coordonné par Marie-Agnès Détourbe traitent ainsi d’une question d’actualité brûlante, l’inclusion des publics issus de l’immigration dans l’enseignement supérieur et du rôle joué par les langues.
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3 Le livre est composé de trois parties : la première s’intéresse au lien entre les politiques de l’enseignement supérieur et les règles migratoires mises en place à divers niveaux (supranational, national et régional) ; la deuxième partie se penche sur les différents rôles joués par les langues dans l’accès à l’enseignement supérieur pour les personnes en situation de migration ; la troisième et dernière partie explore les relations entre inclusion dans la société civile et accès à l’enseignement supérieur en s’arrêtant sur des cas d’inclusion sociale favorisés par l’accès à l’enseignement supérieur et vice versa.
4 Le premier chapitre du livre, proposé par Rashed Al-Haque, expose la question du lien entre l’accès à l’enseignement supérieur au Canada et les changements récents qui ont eu lieu dans les lois sur l’immigration. S’il est toujours rappelé par les autorités fédérales et régionales que la mission des universités canadiennes est de développer l’intégration des étudiants internationaux pour, d’une part, atteindre de meilleurs classements dans les échelles de classements internationaux, et d’autre part viser la réussite économique du Canada dans son ensemble, un tournant a été franchi par les lois introduites en 2014 et 2015 sur l’immigration. Des glissements de compétences entre les différents niveaux de gouvernance (notamment du local (l’université) ou régional vers le fédéral) sont mis en évidence ; plus la sphère de compétence est éloignée du sujet principal (l’étudiant international, l’université) moins les chances de certains profils atypiques d’être retenus seront grandes.
5 Le second chapitre de la première partie, rédigé par Gaële Goastellec, porte sur une autre aire géographique, l’Europe, notamment la France, l’Allemagne et la Suisse. Les chiffres montrent que les taux d’entrée des réfugiés dans le monde de l’éducation supérieur (1%) est extrêmement faible comparé à celui des jeunes en âge d’étudier globalement (32 %). Le terme « réfugié » comprend les différentes catégories administratives par lesquels les États classent les personnes demandant l’asile. Si dans les trois pays concernés, on trouve des textes et des déclarations émanant des autorités de l’enseignement supérieure rappelant que les publics de migrants doivent être intégrés dans les universités depuis 2015, l’accès à l’enseignement supérieure pour ces catégories d’étudiants varie selon les pays d’accueil. En France, le relai des associations et bénévoles est fortement encouragé en parallèle de l’action publique et des programmes s’adressant aux réfugiés en particulier. En Suisse, des reconnaissances de diplômes sont faites, mais peu d’universités élaborent des programmes spécifiques pour les migrants. En Allemagne, la gestion de cette question se fait au niveau national : Quatre universités allemandes sur cinq accueillent des réfugiés. Le nombre de places dans les universités suisses, allemandes et françaises influe aussi sur l’accueil (2,8 millions de places en Allemagne, contre 2,3 en France et seulement 280 000 en Suisse) ou l’internationalisation des universités (les universités suisses sont bien dotées avec 16 % de leur cohorte venant de l’étranger, contre 12 % pour la France et 11,5 % pour l’Allemagne). En revanche, ni les niveaux économiques de richesse ni les taux de chômage peuvent expliquer la variation des traitements de l’accueil des réfugiés dans l’Enseignement supérieur, car la Suisse devrait, sinon, se placer en très bonne position d’accueil. C’est plutôt la démographie et les besoins de l’économie qui sont très fortement corrélés à l’inclusion ou non des réfugiés dans les trois pays concernés.
6 Dans la deuxième partie de l’ouvrage, le troisième article porte sur les expériences de mobilité des enseignants de langues en France et au Royaume-Uni. Norah Leroy rappelle tout d’abord le contexte de la mobilité européenne : le processus de Bologne, avec la déclaration de Bologne, mettant en place l’espace européen de l’enseignement
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supérieur (the European Higher Education Area, EHEA), signée en 1999 par 30 pays (47 appartiennent aujourd’hui à l’EHEA). La mobilité a pour objectif de développer la coopération entre les peuples européens ainsi que les compétences en langues, et notamment, après l’anglais qui est toujours la langue la plus prisée, une deuxième langue étrangère vivante. Quel que soit l’accès aux professions de l’enseignement des langues - qui emprunte des chemins différents en France et au Royaume-Uni-, les parcours de quatre enseignantes de langues vivantes en France et en Grande-Bretagne (2 de part et d’autres de la Manche) montrent que l’intérêt premier pour les langues y est déterminant et qu’ensuite une expérience à l’étranger, dans le pays de la langue enseignée, permet très souvent de renforcer les compétences linguistiques et culturelles de l’enseignant. Un besoin de construire des programmes de mobilité du type Erasmus pour les enseignants de langues avant qu’ils n’intègrent le supérieur est une demande que les enseignants de langues interrogés formulent.
7 Le quatrième article s’intéresse aux programmes élaborés au Canada, notamment les programmes linguistiques, vers l’intégration sociale des infirmier.ère.s issu.e.s de l’immigration. Ses auteures, Nadezda Kulikova et Yuliya Miakisheva, dressent tout d’abord un panorama des politiques migratoires du Canada et rappellent que le Canada a, dès les années 1970, décidé de redéfinir sa politique migratoire en introduisant une nouvelle catégorie de migrants, ne faisant pas référence aux origines ethniques, celle des migrants économiques. Aujourd’hui plus de la moitié des immigrants (environ 60 % en 2017) évoquent des raisons économiques pour s’installer au Canada. Les besoins en personnel de santé (des études montrent qu’il va falloir recruter 60 000 infirmier.ère.s au Canada d’ici à 2022) se font cruellement ressentir au Canada. Un ensemble de programmes de langues à visée professionnelle de santé a ainsi été bâti pour intégrer ces nouveaux immigrants visant un poste d’infirmier.ère.s. Des outils d’évaluation des compétences linguistiques des infirmier.ère.s a même été mis en place par le gouvernement fédéral. Des études montrent bien que plus les compétences langagières des infirmier.ère.s sont élevées, plus l’intégration sociale et professionnelle de ces catégories professionnelles est réussie. Les auteures concluent que ces éléments devraient être confirmés par des études empiriques qui, en la matière, sont encore trop peu nombreuses.
8 Les langues et leur rôle dans le recrutement des étudiants internationaux est le thème du chapitre 5 proposé par Cui Bian et Régis Malet. Depuis les années 1990, diverses lois avaient pour objectif d’augmenter les flux d’étudiants intégrant les universités françaises. Les processus de recrutement et d’accueil ont tous favorisé les étudiants maîtrisant la langue française. Ce n’est que tout dernièrement, à partir des années 2000, que l’anglais a aussi été intégré aux processus de recrutement, dans certains champs de recherche et d’enseignement supérieur (l’économie et la gestion, les sciences et la technologie notamment) et pour certains niveaux (master et doctorat). Une étude plus complète et intégrant d’autres paramètres – notamment les interactions entre les nations, les enjeux de concurrence entre les divers États dans les domaines de recherche, les départs de cerveaux- serait nécessaire, selon ses auteurs, pour compléter cette analyse du rôle des langues dans le recrutement des étudiants étrangers en France.
9 La troisième et dernière partie ouvre sur le chapitre 6 proposé par Julia Carnine ; elle s’intéresse au cas des étudiants chinois en France, un groupe d’étudiants internationaux dont l’intégration à long terme est réussie après une période d’études. Il
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s’agit, institutionnellement parlant, d’une population estudiantine en augmentation en France. Une étude quantitative et qualitative a été menée à Paris et à Toulouse ; elle a débuté en 2010 et s’est continué en 2015, sur 100 étudiants chinois, dont 45 répondants. Cette étude montre que la promotion de la langue française favorise l’accueil et le maintien sur le sol français des étudiants chinois. Si des lois émanant du gouvernement français ou des accords institutionnels ont permis de renforcer les coopérations sino- françaises, en facilitant notamment l’obtention de papiers ou en étendant les durées de validité de ces papiers, des dispositifs d’aide au logement ou des programmes d’inclusion culturels pourraient renforcer le maintien des jeunes Chinois en France.
10 L’article de Himabindu Timiri traite de l’intégration dans l’enseignement supérieur américain des femmes de travailleurs qualifiés du secteur des hautes technologies. Ces femmes qui arrivent aux États-Unis avec le regroupement familial n’ont pas le droit de travailler, mais peuvent entrer à l’université. Très souvent, on observe qu’elles sont victimes de déqualification ; elles doivent intégrer des cursus d’études en-deçà de ceux auxquels elles étaient arrivées dans leur pays d’origine. Cette contribution évoque le parcours de trois femmes qui doivent apprendre à jongler entre les lois américaines d’une part et les schémas de vie familiale, la perception de la place des femmes dans leur pays d’origine, ou la justification des coûts liés à l’enseignement d’autre part. Il montre aussi que si les États-Unis veulent satisfaire leurs besoins en main d’œuvre qualifiée dans les hautes technologies, un effort considérable devra être opéré dans l’accueil des femmes de ces salariés.
11 Le chapitre qui clôt cet ouvrage, de Michelle Henault Morrone, traite de la question de l’inclusion des élèves d’origine étrangère dans l’enseignement secondaire au Japon. Le Japon ayant une population vieillissante – les estimations gouvernementales prévoient que 40 % de la population aura plus de 65 ans pendant que moins de 10 % de celle-ci aura au-dessous de 15 ans au Japon -, le pays va être obligé de mettre en place une politique d’accueil des immigrants, qui passera par des programmes de langues. En s’appuyant sur quatre études de cas, de jeunes étrangers arrivés avec leur famille au Japon, l’article montre que la maîtrise de la langue est un point essentiel dans l’accès à l’éducation au Japon. D’autres paramètres, tels que l’histoire familiale ou encore la proximité culturelle à celle du peuple nippon et au confucianisme, rendent plus ou moins facile l’expérience scolaire et universitaire des étrangers.
12 L’ouvrage dirigé par Marie-Agnès Détourbe montre très clairement qu’il existe une diversité d’éléments qui poussent les gouvernements à mettre en place une politique d’accueil avec un apprentissage linguistique digne de ce nom. Y jouent un rôle les données démographiques (en Allemagne ou au Japon), ou économiques (au Canada avec les infirmier-ère-s) ainsi que la volonté de maintenir des populations immigrantes dans le pays d’accueil (les Chinois en France, ou les femmes des salariés du secteur des hautes technologies aux États-Unis). En multipliant les angles d’approche – avec des aires géographiques différentes, des publics divers, des politiques linguistiques spécifiques ou globales ˗, cet ouvrage très original et novateur est une mine de renseignements et de références que tout chercheur en histoire des migrations ou en sciences de l’éducation intéressé par l’accueil des migrants dans les sociétés modernes devrait lire.
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AUTEURS
MARIE-ANNICK MATTIOLI
Université Paris Descartes
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Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage Le Reggae en Angleterre 1967-1997 d’Éric Doumerc
John Mullen
RÉFÉRENCE
Éric Doumerc, Le Reggae en Angleterre 1967-1997, Rosières en Haye, Camion Blanc, 2016, 256 pages
1 Ce livre est publié par la maison d’édition Camion Blanc, spécialiste des ouvrages sur le rock, qui a déjà produit des monographies sur des artistes anglais tels que Judas Priest, les Sex Pistols, Joy Division, The Cure ou David Bowie.
2 Eric Doumerc a déjà écrit en 2014 un livre sur le reggae dont la majeure partie analyse les paroles d’une sélection de chansons, et il est l’auteur d’autres livres sur la musique et la poésie antillaise. Ce nouvel ouvrage présente à un public francophone un large panorama de l’évolution et de l’impact du reggae au Royaume-Uni. Il peut utilement être accompagné, pour ceux qui comprennent l’anglais, du documentaire de la BBC Reggae Britannia.1 M Doumerc montre une connaissance approfondie de ce courant musical, et a profité de nombreux séjours dans les « quartiers jamaïquains » d’Angleterre pour faire sa recherche.
3 L’ouvrage est divisé en 4 chapitres. Le premier traite de la présence des Jamaïquains en Angleterre, arrivés en nombre après la deuxième guerre mondiale, attirés par les emplois disponibles dans les grandes villes. Ensuite, trois chapitres présentent chacun une décennie (110 pages sur les années 1970, 70 pages sur les années 1980, et 16 pages sur « l’héritage de la musique jamaïquaine pendant les années 1990 »). Une discographie et bibliographie sont fournies en fin de volume. L’accès facile sur internet à l’essentiel des chansons évoquées dans le volume permet de rendre le récit encore plus vivant, surtout dans certaines pages où on évoque beaucoup de noms d’artistes.
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L’auteur fait le choix heureux de citer et d’analyser des extraits substantiels des paroles des chansons et de les traduire en français.
4 L’objectif de M Doumerc est de retracer le développement du reggae et de ses publics. Tout d’abord écouté uniquement par les Antillais, la musique reggae deviendra un des marqueurs clé de la subculture skinhead, dans la période avant l’identification d’une bonne partie de cette subculture avec des idéologies racistes. 2 Ensuite, le tournant de beaucoup d’artistes reggae vers l’idéologie rastafarienne basée sur un retour à l’Afrique et un rejet de l’Occident, va rendre temporairement plus difficile la diffusion grand public de cette musique.
5 Le plus long des chapitres, sur les années 1970, commence par un rappel des effets du racisme sur la génération d’Anglo-Antillais nés en Angleterre et peu encline à baisser la tête comme leurs parents s’étaient sentis obligés de le faire. La publication en 1971 de la brochure de Bernard Coard dénonçant le racisme institutionnel du système éducatif sert de marqueur emblématique.3 La violence raciste n’était pas rare, et, vingt ans avant le cas de Stephen Lawrence,4 les meurtres racistes des années 1970 ne donnaient pas lieu à de larges campagnes politiques.
6 Doumerc nous présente dans cette partie une série de pionniers du reggae en Angleterre, construisant un récit vivant qui ne devient jamais une liste ennuyeuse. Le reggae britannique se séparait lentement de ses ancêtres jamaïquains, et dans un contexte de chômage massif, le milieu reggae devenait un style de vie pour une partie de la jeunesse antillaise des grandes villes. Les chansons des groupes tels Aswad et Misty Roots protestaient contre la violence policière et la misère. L’auteur nous fournit une explication très pédagogique de la vision rastafarienne et les spécificités de sa version britannique, à l’aide de commentaires des paroles de quelques chansons influentes. L’histoire sociale des jeunesses issues de l’immigration et l’histoire technologique des modalités de production et de diffusion des musiques populaires ont évidemment beaucoup influencé l’évolution de ce genre musical, mais Doumerc montre qu’il ne faut pas négliger l’importance d’initiatives politiques et volontaristes. Face à la montée de l’extrême droite au milieu des années 1970, la campagne Rock against Racism fut établi, largement épaulée par les partis d’extrême gauche. Pendant quelques années, des centaines de concerts locaux et quelques évènements nationaux furent organisés. Le format était presque toujours le même : un groupe de punk (blanc) et un groupe de reggae (noir), le groupe de reggae en tête d’affiche. L’initiative a réussi, à un moment clé, à faire en sorte que le racisme ne soit plus ‘cool’ chez les jeunes, mais elle a également transformé la musique reggae. Les rencontres musicales des artistes noirs et blancs, précédemment séparés de facto (les publics punks étaient blancs, les publics reggae majoritairement noirs) ont mené directement au travail hybride de The Clash (une dizaine de morceaux sur l’album Sandinista en 1980 témoignent d’une forte influence reggae). Le style Two Tone suivra rapidement derrière.
7 Rock against racism ne constitue qu’un des aspects militants du reggae britannique. La popularité croissante du poète reggae Linton Kwesi Johnson, dont le premier album date de 1978, et qui deviendra en 2002 le premier poète noir édité par l’édition de poche Penguin Modern Classics, en témoigne. Les titres de ses recueils, de Inglan is a bitch (L’Angleterre est une salope) de 1980 à Mi Revalueshanary Fren (Mon ami révolutionnaire) donne une indication de ses priorités : une expression politique radicale, rédigée dans un dialecte jamaïquain dont l’utilisation même est contestataire.
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En une vingtaine de pages l’auteur nous présente le travail de Linton Kwesi Johnson, et la puissance émotionnelle et politique de ces poèmes dans le contexte de l’époque. Johnson ne sera pas le seul poète dub à connaître un grand succès. Quelques années plus tard, Benjamin Zephaniah suivra son exemple et deviendra connu nationalement avec des albums tels que Us and Dem en 1990 et Belly of de Beast en 1996, œuvres qui commenteront l’actualité avec un humour mordant.
8 L’arrivée des années 1980, avec d’un côté les gouvernements thatchériens néolibéraux et, de l’autre, l’avancée rapide des politiques multiculturelles mises en place par les municipalités des grandes villes, tenues par les travaillistes, changera le contexte de la musique. UB40 et Madness feront du reggae un produit extrêmement populaire. UB40 chantera beaucoup de chansons d’amour, mais aussi des morceaux anti-impérialistes (tel « Burden of Shame » - « Le Fardeau de la honte »).
9 Le reggae n’est pas toujours un genre contestataire, pourtant. Les années 1980 apporteront un nouveau style baptisé « lover’s rock » porté par des chanteuses telles que Sandra Cross et Louisa Mark, se concentrant sur des morceaux romantiques.
10 De rares erreurs sont à signaler dans le livre : le grand historien des Noirs britanniques est Peter Fryer (et pas Stephen) ; mais ces erreurs ne nuisent pas à la lecture.
11 Il s’agit d’un livre qui s’adresse à un public relativement large. On n’y trouvera pas de réflexions théoriques sur le reggae, sur sa rhétorique, ni sur les rôles qu’il permet de jouer et les raisons de son appropriation par un grand nombre de personnes non- antillaises. Ce travail prend un point de vue Cultural Studies en général, c’est-à-dire qu’il conçoit le reggae comme une activité de masse permettant à une population opprimée d’être présente dans l’espace public et dans le paysage symbolique d’une époque. Le livre n’est pas enraciné dans les Popular Music Studies et leurs théories sur les structures et la sémiotique des répertoires musicaux.5 Cependant l’auteur nous fait vivre un véritable festival de musique jamaïquaine en bouillonnement, et l’on ne regrette pas de l’avoir lu.
NOTES
1. On peut regarder ce documentaire (en anglais) en ligne ici : https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=xtQCYzhjoO0 2. Bien expliqué dans un autre documentaire de la BBC, The Story of Skinhead ici https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=reGXa3vgeF4 3. Bernard Coard, How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain, Londres, sans mention d’éditeur, 1971. 4. Stephen Lawrence, assassiné par une bande raciste en 1993. Le scandale du traitement raciste de l’enquête policière sur son meurtre a provoqué une mobilisation de masse et une série de changements législatifs. Voir Stuart Hall. « From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence. » History Workshop Journal, no. 48, 1999. 5. Dont les auteurs les plus influents sont Philip Tagg, Simon Frith, Richard Middleton, Andy Bennett, Roy Shuker.
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AUTEURS
JOHN MULLEN
Université de Rouen, Equipe ERIAC
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