'From Pioneers to Parity? 100 Years of Suffrage'
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Harriet Harman MP Alice Bacon Memorial Lecture ‘From pioneers to parity? 100 years of suffrage’ Leeds University 25th January 2018 Thank you very much, it’s really great to be here and I want to congratulate Alan and Leeds University for hosting this and say how important it is for reasons that I will develop a bit more in my lecture. And I hope that other universities will follow suit because, as it’s been said, it’s 100 years since women got the right to vote and the right to stand for Parliament. It’s more than 70 years after Alice Bacon entered Parliament, 35 years after I got into Parliament and seven years after Rachel [Reeves] came into Parliament, but women in politics are still pioneers. So I’m very grateful to you for inviting me to give this lecture tonight and it’s an honour for me to be joining you to celebrate the achievements of Alice Bacon; to talk to you about my journey and talk about the battles that lie ahead; and it’s a huge pleasure for me to be here with Rachel Reeves, who is one of the shining stars of the House of Commons. She has been elected by all her fellow MPs to be the Chair of the powerful Commons Committee on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. She is a beacon among the young women now in Parliament and a source of great pride to us in the Labour Party, as I’m sure she is to you here in Leeds. And I think what radiates out from Rachel is 3 things. Rachel’s very committed. I knew her when she was toiling around hopelessly in Conservative seats, knocking on doors with local campaigners all around the country – she’s Labour through and through. She’s clever – even the most arrogant Tories defer to her. And she’s tough. I’m afraid that it’s the case that you still need to be ultra- committed and ultra-tough to be a young woman striving for Labour and striving for women in Parliament today. So it’s a joy – and a relief – for me to see Rachel and dozens of young women in the Division Lobby in Parliament and see them surging forward with an agenda for change that is so important. It was the Women’s Movement that brought me into politics and I see Rachel and so many of her generation as daughters of the Women’s Movement. And it is in that spirit that Rachel has written her book on Alice Bacon. Now, I’m exactly halfway between Alice Bacon and Rachel, in that Alice was elected 70 years ago and I was elected 35 years ago, and Rachel is relatively new in. So I think that between Rachel’s brilliant investigation into the work of Alice, and me and Rachel being here together today, we’ve got a perspective on women and politics that stretches back 1 100 years – and forward for what I hope will be another 30 years; because, Rachel, you will need to stay in Parliament a long time in order to make change, as it does really take a long time. But I think we’ve got it covered! Alice Bacon was an amazing woman – a pioneer, a trailblazer – but I had never actually heard of her. Few people had heard of her. Few people would know about what she had done if Rachel hadn’t written her book. And I think for the most part women are, as Sheila Rowbottom said, “Hidden from history.” You know, unless we write about ourselves and unless we write about what other women have done, history will tell us what men did, but it will not tell us what women did. And we certainly, I am afraid even until this day, can’t rely on the men to include us women in their memoirs. And that’s why I, having always railed against the idea of politicians writing their memoirs, denouncing them as vanity projects and a distraction from the struggle against the Tories, had to do a U-turn. Because as my colleagues from government – Alistair, Alastair, Tony, John, David – all wrote their very interesting memoirs, I would pause in the bookshop and look at the photographs, the way you always do, and there would be no women unless they were married to them or working for them. I would then run my finger down the index and get to the H’s and see no reference to myself; and this was the tipping point, because the period they were writing about was a one of massive change in women’s lives – in family life, in women’s sense of what it is to be a woman, in work life, in public policy – and it was invisible, just as Alice was until Rachel wrote her book. And so, I wanted to write about the big changes there had been in women’s lives that the Women’s Movement and Labour politics contributed to. I would urge all of you to recognise that you have to write it down, or suffer from invisibility. To start at the outset and to remind you, that when I was growing up – and I was born in 1950 – the real aspiration for a girl was to get a husband. That was the most important thing. And once you had achieved that great aspiration, to be a good wife to that husband, many women – most women if they had worked before marriage – gave up work to get married. There were obviously many women who worked throughout their lives, but their work was undervalued, almost invisible and regarded as pin money. Men were considered the important ones in the world of work and women were regarded as being in the world of the home. Many women gave up work to get married. I met a woman in her eighties in Scotland who told me she had done her banking exams after leaving school and went to work in a bank. When she was 24 she gave it up to get married, because she wasn’t allowed to work in the bank if she was married. But then her husband died when she was 50, so she went back to work in the bank but retired at 55, compulsorily. So, women talked about giving up work to get married – if they were teachers, if they were in the civil service – and that was regarded as a marvellous thing. Work was not as important as getting married. 2 My mother was very unusual in that she went to university. Very few people went to university in those days – she was born in 1918 – but even fewer women went to university. She was one of three law students at Oxford at that time and the criminal law lecturer refused to teach the women in her class, so they had to bring somebody down from London to teach them. She qualified as a barrister, but when she got married to my father she had achieved her more important ambition, as it was seen. So, of course, she gave up work. And I look back and remember her wig and barrister’s gown in our dressing up box – and that’s just the way things were back then. But the Women’s Movement came along in the 1960s and 1970s, building on a lot of work undertaken by women in the Labour and Trade Union movements over the years – but the Women’s Movement had a new energy, which was, we were going to change everything. We weren’t going to define ourselves by who we married. Until that point the most important definition was the husband. In fact, my mother regularly received letters addressed to Mr. John Harman, which to me was very odd – but that’s the way it was. But we were not going to serve the husband. Why should the husband need to be served by the wife? We expected the husband to be an equal partner in marriage. We weren’t going to perform vows to obey. The marriage service routinely required women to promise to obey your husband. He was the head of the household – and that was not said lightly. His word stood. I remember one time, when the Women’s Movement was at its height, challenging this ideology after returning from university. By this time my mother had gone back to college to study as a solicitor, since we had all grown up. My dad had retired by this time – he had been a doctor – and he was reading the paper at the table while my mother was cooking him breakfast; kippers, so there was a terrible smell emanating! But also, because she was going to be at the College of Law, I remember her law book propped up on the back of the stove, because she had to cook his supper as well – and that was curry, so there was another awful smell emanating! So, I looked at him, sitting, reading the paper, waiting for his breakfast, while my mother was studying her law book, cooking his breakfast and supper, and I thought, “That is not going to be for me.” And that was the spirit of the Women’s Movement. We loved and admired our mothers, but we weren’t going to lead their lives. We were going to lead completely different lives. We weren’t going to accept the notion that there were things you couldn’t do because you were a woman, nor that men were there to make all the decisions and that women were there to abide by them.