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GENDER RELATIONS AND SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY TRANSFORMATION: THE CASE OF WOMEN IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Abigail Lee Halcli, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1996

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor J. Craig Jenkins

Professor Verta Taylor iser Professor Patricia Craig of Sociology UMI Number: 9710573

UMI Microform 9710573 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeh Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Abigail Lee Halcli 1996 ABSTRACT

The resurgence of women’s activism in the British Labour Party since the late

I970’s has increased pressure on the party leadership to address issues of female representation and to place greater emphasis on a variety of "women’s issues." The increased focus on gender issues has been facilitated by changing environmental conditions that created pressures for the Labour leadership to reevaluate party organization and programmatic appeals. In this research I examine the relationship between women’s mobilization in parties and social democratic party transformation through interviews with Labour Party elites and activists and officials from key women’s movement organizations, and supplemented with documentary materials and other published accounts of the activities of the Labour Party and women’s movement organizations. The objectives of this research are twofold. First, this research contributes to the study of gender and politics. Through an analysis of women politicians and activists in the Labour Party, I show how women’s participation in political parties is linked to the opportunity structures afforded by parties. Specifically,

I show how organizational and strategic changes in the Labour Party created spaces for women to mobilize and demand reforms. In addition, I discuss how political parties and other political institutions, including the British Parliament, operate as gendered

11 organizations, and how this shapes the opportunities and experiences of women in the

Labour Party.

Second, I add to the research on political parties by analyzing social democratic party transformation through the case of the British Labour Party. I consider explanations that highlight the influences of environmental changes on social democratic party transformation, including the proportionate decline in the size of the working class and the rise of postmaterialist values and new political challengers in the form of social movements and political parties. While recognizing the significance of changing environmental conditions in setting the context for party transformation, I emphasize the necessity of analyzing the internal life of political parties, including organizational structure, intraparty coalitions, and links with other organizations, to understand how parties respond to environmental changes.

Ill To my parents, Marie and Albert

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express great appreciation to Craig Jenkins for his insights and encouragement throughout all stages of this research. He has been an enthusiastic and supportive adviser. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Verta

Taylor and Patricia Craig, for their helpful suggestions and comments. Jo Reger has been instrumental in helping me to develop the ideas for this research, and her influence is especially apparent in Chapter Six which draws from our co-authored publication comparing women politicians in Britain and the United States. Kim Dill, Jacqueline

Keil, Murray Low, Gail McGuire, Jan Solari, and Marieke Van Willigen also deserve special thanks for reading sections of the dissertation, suggesting useful ideas and directions, or offering their editing services. I am also grateful to Dick Haller and Joan

Amfield in the Department of Sociology Computer Lab for all the help they have given me over the years on a variety of data issues.

I am deeply grateful to the women and men in Britain who I interviewed for this research. They were extremely generous with both their time and their insight, and this research would not have been possible without their cooperation. The staff at the

Fawcett Library and the Feminist Library and Information Centre in London, England, and the Equal Opportunities Commission Library in Manchester, England offered their cheerful help in tracking down documents and sources. Becky Ice and Andy Wood extended me their warm hospitality while I was doing research in Sheffield and

Manchester.

I wish to thank Kim Dill, Jacqueline Keil, and Marieke Van Willigen for constantly reminding me to relax and have some fun. Finally, I thank Murray Low for his intellectual and emotional support throughout all stages of this research project.

Hours of trans-Atlantic phone conversations with Murray have helped me to develop the ideas for this research. I deeply appreciate his cheerfulness and patience as 1 have worked toward completion of this dissertation, and I look forward to our reunion.

VI VITA

April 22,1967 ...... Bora - Escanaba, Michigan

1989...... B.A., Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, Illinois

1989 - 1996...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University

1991...... M.A., The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

1. Halcli, Abigail and Jo Reger. 1996. "Strangers in a Strange Land: The Gendered Experiences of Women Politicians in Britain and the United States. Pp. 457- 471 in Feminist Frontiers, 4th edition. Edited by Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, and Nancy Whittier. New York: McGraw-Hill.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Fields: Sociology Studies in: Political Sociology, Gender

V ll TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

V ita...... vii

List of Tables...... x

Chapters;

I. Introduction ...... 1

The Development and Transformation of Social Democratic Parties...... 4 Gender and Political Parties...... 9 Women in the Labour Party...... 13 Chapter Outline ...... 17

II. Data and Methods ...... 19 The D ata ...... 20 Data Analysis...... 26 Summary and Limitations...... 28

III. Social Democratic Party Transformation: The Case of the British Labour Party...... 30 The Changing British Party System and Labour’s Electoral C risis...... 31 Environmental Conditions ...... 38 Changes in Class Structure and Class Voting ...... 38 Postmaterialism, New Politics, and New Challengers ...... 46 The Internal Life of Political Parties ...... 52

IV. Labour Women and the Autonomous Women’s Movement ...... 59 Women’s Organizations in the Labour Party...... 60 Separatists and Integrationists ...... 66

V lll Labour Women, Feminism, and the Autonomous Women’s Movement ...... 68 Second Wave Feminism and Women’s Liberation...... 75 The Rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement ...... 79 Division and Diversity in the Women’s Movement ...... 81 Conclusion ...... 86

V. Gender and Labour Party Restructuring...... 88 The Decline of Revisionist Social Democracy ...... 89 Labour’s "Civil War," 1979-1983...... 93 Feminism in the Labour Party...... 98 Labour Party Constituency Women’s Sections...... 102 Women in Local Government and Municipal Feminism ...... 105 Labour Women’s Action Committee...... 108 The Labour Party in Transition, 1983 to 1987...... 110 Labour’s Policy Review Process, 1987 to 1991...... 113 Women as Labour Party Voters and Supporters...... 119 Conclusion ...... 129

VI. Women Politicians in the Labour Party and in Parliament...... 131 Gendered Politics...... 132 Candidate Selection...... 134 Gendered Barriers...... 136 Being a "Woman" Politician ...... 137 Encountering Gendered Politics ...... 142 Gendered Responses ...... 145 Bypassing the Barriers ...... 145 Challenging Gendered Politics ...... 158 Conclusion ...... 164

VII. Conclusion: Comparative Implications ...... 171 Gender and Party Politics...... 173 The Rise of "New Labour"...... 177 The Future of Women in the Labour Party ...... 180

List of References...... 183

IX LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

3.1 Shares of the Vote in Britain, 1945-1992 ...... 56

3.2 Labour Party Membership, selected years...... 57

3.3 Trends in Party Identification, 1964-1992 ...... 58

6.1 Women Elected in British General Elections, 1945-1992 ...... 167

6.2 Women Candidates in British General Elections, 1945-1992 ...... 168

6.3 Women’s Share of Parliamentary Candidacies and Seats ...... 169

6.4 Level of Women’s Quotas in Other Socialist Parties ...... 170 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In recent years gender issues have assumed an increasingly high profile within the British Labour Party. With the resurgence of women’s activism in the Labour Party since the late 1970’s, a number of Labour women activists and politicians have challenged "politics as usual" by addressing how the Labour Party and other political institutions operate as gendered organizations in that they reflect and reinforce societal gender arrangements and systems of inequality. Women’s mobilization within the

Labour Party has increased pressure on the party leadership to address issues of female representation and to place greater emphasis on a variety of "women’s issues."

Efforts to increase the role of women in the Labour Party have been met with considerable opposition from the party leadership and grassroots. The Labour Party, like social democratic parties in other western nations, was founded to provide political representation for the industrial working class.' Throughout its history Labour’s leadership and membership have been predominantly male and its programmatic appeals have been expressed in terms of the class interests of its working class constituency,

‘ Throughout this research the term "social democratic party" will be used as a generic label to refer to a broad group of western European political parties that define themselves as labor, socialist, or social democratic parties. including an emphasis on issues such as material redistribution and increasing the rights of trade unions. However, the interests of women have not been absent from Labour

Party ideology, particularly in relation to the formation and operation of the British welfare state. As the architects of the welfare state in the postwar period. Labour leaders were concerned with the status of women in British society, though they conceptualized women’s needs in terms of their roles as wives and mothers rather than the needs of women as individuals (Lewis 1992). Backed by matemalistic ideologies that exalted women’s roles in the domestic sphere, women in the Labour Party and in autonomous women’s movements groups also had an important role in designing state policies to address the needs of women and families (Koven and Michel 1990, Thane

1991, Pederson 1993). However, when Labour women raised issues of gender equality that fundamentally challenged existing gender relations or the rules and organization of the Labour Party itself, they often met with opposition from Labour leaders and activists who argued that women’s issues served as a detraction from the struggles of the working class as a whole.

More recently, an increased focus on gender issues has been facilitated by important changes within the party organization. Like social democratic parties throughout western Europe, the Labour Party has confronted new developments over the last few decades that are altering the stability of dominant social cleavages, party systems, and individual voting behavior. In the 1980’s the Labour Party experienced serious internal fighting and suffered an electoral catastrophe that created pressures for the leadership to reevaluate party organization and policies in order to make Labour more "electable" (Seyd and Whiteley 1992a, Gamer and Kelly 1993, Shaw 1994a).

Internal party change brought on by changing social, economic, and political conditions created a more conducive environment for women’s mobilization within the Party and increased receptiveness to their efforts to promote greater gender equality (Perrigo

1995). These developments have culminated in a number of important policies including

Labour’s well publicized efforts to promote women within the Party and increase its appeal to female voters.

The objectives of this study are twofold. First, this research contributes to the study of gender and politics. Through an analysis of women politicians and activists in the Labour Party and the activities of the autonomous women’s movement, I show how women’s participation in political parties is linked to the opportunity structures afforded by parties. Specifically, I show how organizational and strategic changes in the Labour Party created spaces for women to mobilize and demand reforms in terms of party policy. In addition, I discuss how political parties and other political institutions operate as gendered organizations in that they assume a male participant.

As a result, their rules, practices, and organizational structure create obstacles for women seeking political careers and greater recognition of gender issues.

Second, I add to the research on political parties by analyzing social democratic party transformation through the case of the Labour Party. I consider explanations that highlight the influences of environmental changes on social democratic party transformation, and evaluate these explanations in light of specific changes in Britain and the experiences of the Labour Party. While recognizing the importance of changing environmental conditions in setting the context for party transformation, I will emphasize the necessity of analyzing the internal life of political parties, including organizational structure, intraparty coalitions, and links with other organizations, to understand how parties respond to environmental changes. I argue that organizational and programmatic changes in the Labour Party in the 1980’s, in conjunction with the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in Britain and the diffusion of feminist ideas, created the conditions for women to mobilize within the party and challenge existing gender relations.

THE DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTIES

The study of social democratic parties has been central to political research in western societies throughout the 20th century. There are a number of classic studies that frame our understanding of the development and internal structures of these parties.

Maurice Duverger (1954) explored the evolution of party organizational forms brought on by the rise of mass political parties. European political parties were originally organized as small groupings of political elites whose main goal was to secure the election of their candidates. However, with the extension of voting rights and the emergence of mass class parties, cadre parties were compelled to modify their organizational structures and recruitment procedures in order to compete with socialist, social democratic, and labor parties. Unlike cadre parties, mass parties attempt to recruit as many members and supporters as possible so as to provide the income and campaign workers necessary to win elections. Mass parties utilize class-based appeals to mobilize their "natural constituency." Theoretically, the membership of mass parties

has a certain degree of influence over party policy and candidate selection through their

participation in membership branches or cells.

Social change in the postwar period led political researchers to reconsider

assumptions about the dominance of mass class parties in western democracies. Otto

Kirchheimer (1966) claimed that the rise of the affluent consumer society and the

decline in the size of the working class had diluted the salience of class-based appeals.

This created pressures for mass class parties to adopt policies that are appealing to a

broad base of voters - thus the rise of the "catch-all" party. Catch-all parties try to

mobilize a more heterogenous membership than mass parties and do not attempt to

"encapsulate" their members. Similarly, Leon Epstein (1967) noted that in the age of

mass media and opinion polling mass memberships are no longer necessary and may

in fact constrain the autonomy of party leaders. What modem parties need is the

support of donors and interest groups to mobilize the money and other resources necessary to run contemporary political campaigns.

As far as social democratic parties go, the British Labour Party has always been

considered somewhat exceptional in terms of its organizational structure and programmatic appeals. Given Britain’s electoral system, which combines a two-party

system with plurality electoral laws, one might predict that the logic of electoral

competition would create pressures for the Labour Party to move quickly toward the

"catch-all" model of a political party. As Giovanni Sartori (1976) explained in his

study of party systems, two-party systems create pressures for centripetal competition that lead parties to adopt a more moderate and consensus-oriented stance. However, in the case of the Labour Party a number of organizational and ideological factors have deterred the party from moving in this direction at the same pace as other western

European social democratic parties.

To a large extent. Labour Party "exceptionalism" must be understood in terms of it unique linkages with the British trade unions. The Labour Party was established at the turn of the century to serve as the political arm of the trade unions and a number of small socialist groups, and in no other social democratic party do the trade unions have such a powerful institutional role (Taylor 1993). The trade unions are formally linked to the Labour Party through the Trade Unions Congress (TUG). Through their bloc vote at the annual conference and their financial sponsorship of the party, the trade unions have secured a highly influential role in the executive and policy-making structures of the party. In other western European countries, the structural linkages between social democratic parties and trade unions are more indirect. For example, the

Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) exerts a considerable influence over party policy due to its ability to mobilize working class voters. However, trade union influence is limited by the fact that LO lacks an institutionalized power source, such as a bloc vote at party conferences, and policy making is centralized within the leadership structure of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) (Pierre and Widfeldt 1994).

In terms of its programmatic appeals, the Labour Party is notable for sticking to its socialist roots and class-based appeals, if only at the symbolic level. Other social democratic parties went through programmatic renewal in the 1950’s in their attempts to broaden their appeal to voters (Paterson 1993). For example, in 1959 the German

SPD officially abandoned Marxism at Bad Godesburg and embraced liberal pluralism and the market economy. In the same year Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell made a similar attempt at revisionism by calling for the abolishment of Clause IV of Labour’s

1918 constitution, which committed the party to nationalization. Gaitskell’s attempt failed due to the fierce opposition by trade unionists and left-wing party members who felt a moral commitment to their socialist principles, despite the fact that the Labour

Party had no plans for extensive public ownership. The internal conflict over this issue limited the debate over programmatic renewal within the party for years to come

(Hodge 1993).

In the last few decades social democratic parties have continued to adapt organizationally and programmatically in order to remain vital in the face of social political, and economic change. Changing socio-economic conditions have altered the class structures of western nations, leading to a proportionate decline in the size of the industrial working class. The shrinking size of the so-called "natural constituency" of social democratic parties has created various electoral dilemmas for these parties historically dedicated to the promotion and protection of working class interests.

In addition, political scholars have argued that the structural conditions of advanced industrial societies have generated an erosion in traditional class-based political cleavages and the emergence of "postmaterialist" values among a significant proportion of the electorate (Inglehart and Rabier 1986). Value change is associated with the emergence of the "new politics" cleavage in western politics, which emphasizes postmaterialist concerns such as the limits to economic growth, environmental protection, peace, and the rights of consumers, women, and minority groups. The new politics impulse has found expression in a number of new social movements, and in some nations, in the establishment of new political parties. The rise of new values and new political challengers has created pressures for party change, and most social democratic parties have moved from strict adherence to traditional socialist concerns, including incomes policies and extension of the welfare state, and broadened their appeals to include a number of new politics issues.

The electoral fortunes of social democratic parties have varied throughout the

1980’s. Some social democratic parties, particularly those in France, Spain, Greece and

Italy have experienced electoral successes in the 1980’s. Other social democratic parties in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Austria, however, found the 1980’s to be a difficult decade. But the British Labour Party experienced the sharpest downturn in electoral support of all social democratic parties. Labour’s electoral crisis has spawned a great deal of analysis as to why Labour has failed to win the last four general elections, as well as speculation on its prospects for the future. (Crewe 1992,

Smith and Spear 1992, Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1994, Shaw 1994a).

But political parties are not static entities. More recently the Labour leadership and many activists and supporters have embraced a process of "modernization," intended to bring about organizational and programmatic adjustments to make the party

"electable." Some observers interpret this as evidence that Labour is becoming a social democratic party along the lines of its continental counterparts (Smith 1992a). Part of

8 Labour’s modernization process includes changing its linkages with the trade unions and constituency parties. As I will show. Labour’s restructuring process has also created new opportunities for women’s mobilization within the party.

Party change cannot be explained simply through examining the impact of external social, economic, and political factors. Social democratic parties are not merely determined by these changes, but actively respond to environmental changes. In order to explain recent changes in the Labour Party I utilize an organizational perspective, highlighting how the internal structure of the party and the actions of party leaders and activists shapes party change (Panebianco 1988, Koelble 1992, Kitschelt 1994, Katz and

Mair 1994). An organizational approach to the study of political parties leads us to focus on how party choices and objectives, intraparty coalitions, internal constraints and opportunities for strategic adjustment shape party responses to changing environmental conditions. These types of explanations help us to understand variations in party organizational and strategic responses in a comparative perspective. In addition, an analysis of internal party change in the Labour Party is essential to an understanding of how spaces have been created for women to mobilize in the party and work toward important policy changes in terms of female representation and women’s issues.

GENDER AND POLITICAL PARTIES

Over the last twenty years the political activities of women have received the increasing attention of social scientists. A research tradition has developed that documents sex-specific differences in political socialization, electoral behavior, and policy preferences. For example, a number of British and American researchers have identified a "gender gap" in voting behavior in their countries, showing that American women prefer the Democratic Party and British women prefer the Conservative Party

(Mueller 1991, Norris 1993a). The gender gap is also apparent in sex differences in attitudes (Shapiro and Mahajan 1986, Conover 1988, Welch and Thomas 1988). Public opinion data indicate that both British and American women have more favorable attitudes toward social spending and peace and environmental issues, and exhibit less support for military spending.

A number of researchers have turned more specifically to a study of women in political parties and as politicians (Freeman 1986, Ferree 1987, Costain and Costain

1987, Gelb 1989, Jennings 1990, Lovenduski and Norris 1993). For example, comparative studies of candidate recruitment document how structural properties of political systems, such as electoral arrangements, may create barriers to the representation of women in elective office (Gugin 1987, Rule 1987, Clark 1991, Norris

1993b, Darcy, Welch and Clark 1994). In general, women candidates do not fare as well under electoral arrangements in countries like the United States and Britain with single-member districts and winner-take-all systems. Women politicians have been more successful in western European countries with multi-member districts and proportional representation.

By identifying sex-specific differences in political behavior and the influence of political systems on women’s representation, research in this area helps us to recognize the significance of sex in shaping how men and women operate as citizens, voters, and

10 participants in political institutions. However, most research in this area has not conceptualized gender in terms of party systems and party organizations. Therefore, less is known about how gender relations structure the operation of political parties and political institutions. For example, though it is now clear that the rhetoric of social democratic parties has been "gendered" in its assumption of a white working class male voter, we’re just beginning to recognize the significance of gender in relation to empirical political analysis.

Researchers are increasingly aware that gender is a part of all social relations, including the family, work, education, law, and religion (Connell 1987, Lorber 1994).

Gender relations refers to "the set of mutually constitutive structures and practices which produce gender differentiation, gender inequalities, and gender hierarchy in a given society," and gender relations are "embodied in the sexual division of labor, compulsory heterosexuality, discourses and ideology of citizenship, motherhood, masculinity and femininity, and the like" (Orloff 1996). A number of recent studies have analyzed how gender relations shape and are shaped by social institutions.

Scholars have looked at the role of gender relations in the formation of welfare states as well as the gendered effects of welfare state provision (Wilson 1977, Lewis 1992,

Skocpol 1992, Orloff 1993). Others have studied how gender relations structure the organization and operation of workplaces and the rewards and opportunities available to male and female workers (Kanter 1977, Acker 1990, Cockbum 1991).

A focus on gender relations can also contribute to an understanding of social democratic party transformation. Standard explanations of the formation and

II development of social democratic parties look at how these parties organized around the major social cleavages in western nations. In these analyses, the significance of the working class and trade unions in shaping the organization, ideology, and programmatic appeals of these parties was emphasized. Gender, however, has not been considered a central social cleavage as it cuts across class, region, religion, and race. As a result, the role of women and gender relations in social democratic parties has been underestimated.

In this research I argue that political institutions are gendered in that they reflect and maintain a system of inequality between men and women. Women in politics are often marginalized because political institutions are organized with the presumption that politicians are male. This means they operate under rules, practices, and organizational structures that sustain male privilege and limit women’s access to political careers. In particular, I demonstrate the gendered nature of the Labour Party and the British

Parliament through the experiences of female Labour politicians.

At the same time, an analysis of gender relations is important to an understanding of Labour Party restructuring. The resurgence of women’s activism in

Britain (and around the world) in the 1960’s and increased efforts to institutionalize women’s economic, political, and social rights within political systems have created unique pressures for Labour and other social democratic parties as they attempt to address increasingly salient gender issues and appeal to women as voters. The fact that the Labour Party is paying more attention to women voters and even promoting itself as "the party for women" raises interesting questions about gender and politics: What

12 do party policy makers think women’s interests are? How do gender divisions become a salient issue in party politics? How do gender concerns get integrated into party policy? What role have women played in shaping this process? These are the questions that will be addressed in this research.

WOMEN IN THE LABOUR PARTY

The degree and forms of female participation in the Labour Party have fluctuated considerably throughout the 20th century. Women’s interests in party activism and opportunities for involvement have been structured by socio-historical factors such as world wars, economic slumps and booms, demographic fluctuations, governmental policies, and cultural shifts in perceptions of women’s societal roles. These factors interacted with and shaped the ideology, strategies, and culture of the Labour Party and had a profound influence on the efforts of women to mobilize for change within the

Party.

However, the activities of women are largely absent from the large body of research on the British Labour Party. Political researchers have examined a wide variety of issues essential to an understanding of the organization and activities of the Labour

Party, including its linkages with trade unions (Minkin 1992) and its constituency parties (Seyd and Whiteley 1992). The extent and diversity of women’s participation in the Labour Party has until recently received little attention. Traditional analyses focus on the largely social and supportive role of women in the Party and tend to define women in terms of their activities as tea-servers and fundraisers (Cole 1977). Many

13 British feminists, from the time of the suffragists to the rise of the contemporary women’s liberation movement, have also devalued the work of Labour women because it is done in the context of a male dominated political organization that is largely devoted to representing working class men rather than women as an oppressed social category.

Histories of women in the party do indicate that many if not most Labour women gave their primary allegiance to the Labour Party and its socialist goals, and that many women defined themselves not as feminists but as working class women fulfilling their traditional and supportive roles as wives and mothers (Thane 1990,

Graves 1994). However, it is also important to explore the ways in which Labour women have acted to promote the interests of women in the party and in society at large. In her study of women in the Labour Party from 1906-1945, Pat Thane (1990) claims the majority of Labour women during this period could reasonably be defined as feminist, and yet "the female membership of the British Labour Party has been given little credit for making a positive contribution to feminist thinking or to extending the limits of women’s public role" (p. 124). In this research, 1 document the ways in which Labour women have mobilized to promote women’s interests, examine their definitions of "women’s interests," and analyze the various organizational and cultural constraints on women’s participation within the party.

An analysis of women’s involvement in the Labour Party must also take into account the variations in women’s movement activism throughout the period. Feminist and Labour women are overlapping yet distinct groups separated by class, ideology, and

14 goals, yet they are intertwined by their sex and concern for women’s advancement.

During some periods groups of feminists and Labour women worked jointly to pursue shared goals, while at other times they found little common ground to unite them. And sometimes, despite their mutual goals, issues of class, party loyalty, and strategy divided feminists and Labour women and created barriers to cooperation. Feminism and the autonomous women’s movement therefore provide a context in which to explore fluctuations in women’s roles in the Labour Party, as the ways in which Labour women organized, the issues they pursued, and the responses they encountered within the party and society at large have been shaped by trends in women’s activism.

A discussion of the British women’s movement and feminism requires some clarification. The lines and boundaries of the British women’s movement need to be addressed as it is a highly diffuse movement in terms of organizational structure, ideology, and strategies. In popular discourse the women’s movement is often used synonymously with the women’s liberation movement, but important historical, ideological and organizational differences make a distinction between the two movements necessary. Specifically, the women’s liberation movement emerged in the late 1960’s along with numerous other liberation movements throughout western nations. Women’s liberation regenerated and radicalized feminist activity in Britain.

The women’s movement, however, is a much broader movement that includes traditional British women’s organizations such as the Women’s Institute, Townswomen

Guilds, churchwomen’s organizations, the Soroptomists, the National Council of

Women, and sectors of the trade union movement that pre-date the emergence of the

15 women’s liberation. The more traditional women’s movement groups have been affected by feminist activism and some of these groups are now engaged in various campaigns to promote sex equality in British law, workplaces, and changing social attitudes toward gender relations. These groups are at times referred to as the "liberal" or "equal rights" branch of the women’s movement. In this research I define the women’s movement as being comprised of "all those individuals, networks, organizations, ideas, and practices that espouse feminist values and goals" (Lovenduski and Randall 1993, p.3).

Trying to define feminism also raises a number of contentious issue. Some

British women involved with activities promoting women’s equality refuse the label of

"feminist" for a variety of reasons. For working class women, feminism is sometimes rejected as a bourgeois movement focused on improving the lives of middle-class women and having little to offer working-class women and their families. At some points during the 20th century, feminism has been synonymous with anti-Labourism.

For this reason, some Labour women have and continue to reject participation in feminist movements based on the principle that the Labour Party is the appropriate arena in which to realize the goals of socialism and the needs of the working class.

More recently some Afro-Caribbean and Asian women have also rejected feminism as a label because it is associated with the promotion of the interests of white women, and because of the existence of racism within the feminist movement. I adopt a broad definition of feminism which defines it as "all ideologies, activities, and policies whose

16 goal it is to remove discrimination against women and to break down the male domination of society" (Dahlerup 1986, p.6).

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Following this introduction. Chapter Two discusses the research methods used in this study. The third chapter reviews the literature on the transformation of social democratic parties in western Europe that has occurred over the last few decades. 1 look at a number of explanations that emphasize the impact of environmental conditions on party transformation, and evaluate this research in light of its relevance to the organizational and strategic changes that are occurring in the Labour Party. Chapter

Three concludes with a theoretical discussion of the significance of party organization and internal policy in shaping responses to changing conditions.

In Chapter Four I provide a description of the changing activities and ideologies of Labour women and their interactions with the autonomous women’s movement from the early part of the twentieth century to the late 1970’s. This includes a discussion of the rise of second-wave feminism and women’s liberation in Britain. Chapter Five documents more recent developments in women’s mobilization in the party in light of the impact of the women’s liberation movement and the Labour Party’s electoral crisis of the 1980’s. I show how organizational and programmatic changes in the Labour

Party created opportunities for women to mobilize in the party. I also show how gender is important to an understanding of Labour’s restructuring processes as it attempts to modernize the party and make Labour more electable. In the sixth chapter I analyze

17 how the Labour Party and other political institutions such as the British Parliament operate as gendered organizations through an analysis of the experiences of female

Labour members of Parliament (MPs). I describe the barriers to women’s political participation as well as the ways in which Labour women have organized to overcome obstacles within the party and Parliament. In the final chapter I discuss the comparative implications of this research for an understanding of gender relations in other social democratic parties.

18 CHAPTER H

DATA AND METHODS

This research addresses questions about social democratic party transformation, the impact of women’s mobilization on political parties, and the gendered nature of political organizations through a case study of women in the British Labour Party.

Through a qualitative analysis using interviews, documentary sources, and other published materials, I provide an in-depth look at recent changes in the Labour Party with a particular emphasis on how these changes have been brought about and affected women in the party. Three main data sources are used in this research: 1) intensive interviews with female Labour members of Parliament (MPs) and Labour Party officials and activists, 2) interviews with key informants from two newly formed political organizations of Labour women and numerous national and local autonomous women’s organization, and 3) documents firom the Labour Party, Labour women’s organizations, and autonomous women’s organizations, as well as newspaper and magazine articles and other published accounts of the activities of the Labour Party and the British women’s movement. These data sources provide information on the activities and experiences of women in the Labour Party and in British women’s organizations, and the activities and political decision-making of party elites.

19 A study of the role of women in Labour Party politics is useful for several reasons. First, there is a large body of research that has examined organizational and strategic changes in the Labour Party in recent years. However, the research in this area has not conceptualized gender in terms of political party change. Therefore, far less is known about the activities of Labour women and the ways in which women have organized within the Party to promote their own interests. Second, a number of significant events have occurred in recent years that have affected the Labour Party’s policies in regard to women, including the implementation of a quota system for women parliamentary candidates and the emergence of new Labour women’s organizations.

These developments need to be documented and examined in terms of theoretical issues about parties and social democratic party change, as well as more broadly in terms of gender theory and how gender relations are manifested within social institutions.

Finally, a case study of women in the British Labour Party contributes to the comparative understanding of gender relations in political parties by identifying how party structures and practices create barriers for women’s political participation. An understanding of how party organization shapes the opportunities and experiences of women both as activists and politicians may indicate ways in which these structures can be altered so to increase women’s political representation.

THE DATA

The data for this research are drawn primarily from forty-nine interviews with

Labour party politicians, officials and activists, and representatives of key women’s

2 0 movement organizations. Most of the people interviewed for this study represent more than one of these groups. The interviews were semi-structmed and open-ended.

Interviews lasted between thirty minutes and two hours, with most lasting approximately one how. These data are supplemented with official publications and internal documents of the Labow Party, documents from Labow women’s groups and autonomous women’s movement organizations, and other published accoimts of the activities of the Labow Party and women’s movement organizations.

The data collection was conducted during two research trips to Britain. During a five-month period in 1994 I conducted the majority of the interviews and document collection. A one-month research trip in December 1995 provided the opportunity to conduct second interviews with several key informants and collect current party documents pertaining to its stance on women’s representation in Parliament and on party committees and its policies in regard to British women.

The data address two sets of questions. First, I examine how the Labow Party and other political institutions operate as gendered organizations through an analysis of interviews with Labow MPs, party officials and activists, and representatives of Labow women’s groups and other women’s movement organizations. Second, I analyze and document recent organizational and programmatic changes in the Labow Party, particularly in regard to women in the Party, through the interview data, Labow Party dociunents, and other published accounts of changes in the party.

All of the interviews with female Labow MPs (and one male Labow MP) were conducted dwing the 1994 research trip. Thirteen of the thirty-six female MPs (36%)

2 1 who held office at this time were interviewed for this study. ' All thirty-six female MPs were contacted through an initial letter and a follow-up telephone call. Interviews were conducted in the MPs offices, in conference rooms and hallways of the Houses of

Parliament, and in restaurants and cafes.

Published biographical guides of parliamentary members, including Dod's

Parliamentary Companion and The Times Guide to the House o f Commons, provide evidence that the thirty-six MPs included in this study are broadly representative of female Labour MPs in general in terms of region, age, race, education, and occupational background. The women interviewed represent constituencies in Scotland, northern

England, and southern England, and their tenure in the House of Commons ranges from two to twenty-eight years. They range in age firom thirty-three to sixty-three years. All thirteen of the women are white, and all but two have university degrees. They come to Parliament fi-om a variety of careers including teaching, nursing, law, local government work, and various positions within trade unions and the Labour Party.

These women also represent the variety of ideological alignments in the Labour

Party. Some of the MPs interviewed are aligned with the dwindling hard-left of the party as illustrated by their self-placement on the Labour Party’s ideological continuum and their membership in leftist party groups such as the Campaign Group. Others are associated with the Party’s traditional trade union right-wing, the Fabian socialists, or

' Thirty-seven Labour women were elected to Parliament in the last general election in 1992. However, because one of the female MPs died in February 1994 only thirty- six Labour women held parliamentary seats at the time of this study. In addition, four more Labour women have been elected to Parliament in a number of by-elections held since 1994, bringing the current total number of female Labour MPs to thirty-nine.

2 2 with the moderate soft left wing of the Party. Still others are associated with the newly emerging "modernizing" wing in the center/right of the Labour Party. With the election of new Labour Party leader Tony Blair in 1994, the modernizers are now in firm control of the party machinery and dominate the parliamentary party.

The interviewees provided information about their own experiences as female politicians. They also served as informants about the party at-large and the autonomous women’s movement, drawing from their experiences in the House of Commons as well as past experiences as constituency-level activists, local government office-holders, and party and trade-union officials.

The interviews with representatives of the newly formed Labour women’s organizations. Labour Women’s Network (LWN) and Emily’s List U.K., largely overlap with the women MPs, which is to be expected given that both of these organizations were formed by Labour women activists and parliamentarians. All but one of the MPs

I interviewed was a member of both organizations, though they exhibit varying degrees of involvement in and commitment to these organizations. Two unpaid coordinators of Emily’s List U.K., neither of whom holds a political office, were also interviewed for this research, one during the 1994 research trip and the other in 1995.

In addition, interviews were conducted with Labour Party officials past and present, a researcher for a Labour MP, a former senior Labour officer and current member of the House of Lords, and a number of Labour Party activists who held positions as trade union officials, local councillors and local government workers.

23 The interview schedules were tailored to the targeted sample. For example, the interviews with Labour MPs addressed questions about women’s experiences as candidates, their political careers, and the operation and practices of the House of

Commons. The interviews with Labour Party officials were particularly useful in gathering information about party policies and the political decision-making behind these policies. Interviews with Labour Party activists focused on the individual’s experiences within constituency parties, trade unions, local government, and their histories of political involvement. Taken together, these interviewees offer a broad view of the Labour Party in Parliament, in the central office, and at the grassroots level.

Labour Party documents were an important source of information on party policy and activities. Some of these sources were public documents such as election platforms, party newspapers, and party press releases. Other sources were internal party documents given to me by party officials and activists, including memos, policy statements, and fact sheets. Newspaper and magazine articles provided reports on the activities of Labour Party officials and members at the national and local level. In particular, I relied on major British publications including The London Times, The

Guardian, The Independent, and The New Statesmen and Society. Finally, a number of published studies of the Labour Party were used to supplement these sources and provide additional information on the history of the party and its more recent transformations.

A second focus of this research is to analyze the autonomous women’s movement in Britain and its interactions with the Labour Party at the national and local

24 levels. Interviews were conducted with officials and activists representing eighteen women’s organizations. These organizations represent the full spectrum of the British women’s movement, from moderate women’s organizations such as the National

Council of Women and Women Into Public Life, to radical feminist groups such as

Wages for Housework, to local feminist organizations in a number of British cities.

The names of women’s organizations around the country were attained from the

Everywoman Directory, 1993-1994. In addition, snowball sampling techniques were utilized to identify additional organizations and individuals to be interviewed. This method was usefiil for a study of the British women’s movement as it is a highly decentralized and diffuse movement, and as an "outsider" it can be difficult to become aware of some women’s organizations. The interviews with officials and participants in autonomous women’s organizations addressed questions concerning the history and activities of the organizations they represent, their involvement with and perception of the Labour Party, and individual histories of political activism.

The analysis of the autonomous women’s movement focuses primarily on the activities of national level women’s organizations and those located in London. Given its size and the large amount of feminist activity that occurs there, it is easy to base one’s analysis of the British women’s movement on the city of London. However, I’ve tried to overcome this tendency by speaking with women activists in other British cities.

Therefore, this research also includes interviews with women’s organizations and feminists in the large northern cities of Manchester and Sheffield and in the medium­ sized southern city of Reading.

25 The information on the autonomous women’s movement is supplemented with published primary materials including books detailing the history and activities of the movement and narratives written by participants in the movement. In addition, a number of feminist journals and magazines provided information on women’s movement organizations across the country. These sources included Feminist Review,

Signs, Spare Rib, and Everywomen, as well as a large number of documents given to me by representatives of women’s organizations.

DATA ANALYSIS

This study utilizes qualitative methodologies in order to address the research questions. Both inductive and deductive methodologies were employed throughout the research process. Initially, my analysis was guided by the theoretical frameworks supplied by studies of social democracy, party organizations, social movements

(particularly women’s movements) and gender. The analysis proceeded inductively to allow new information and theoretical categories to emerge from the data.

The majority of interviews were conducted in person, though a few were held over the telephone. A few of the informants did not allow me to tape record our interviews. Therefore, the analysis of telephone interviews and non-recorded interviews is based on my notes taken during and after the interview. All the rest of the interviews were tape recorded and transcribed. The interview transcriptions were coded in terms of categories that are relevant to the theoretical questions addressed in this research, including the gendered nature of political institutions and the impact of internal party

26 change on women’s opportunities and experiences within the party. For example, the interviews with MPs were coded in terms of topics such as "pathways to Labour Party involvement" "barriers to political careers," and "challenging gender relations in the party and Parliament." I then sorted through the coded transcripts to identify common themes and draw conclusions about the topics or theoretical category.

The fact that many of the interviewees are public officials raises important questions about anonymity and confidentiality. The vast majority of people I interviewed did not request that their interviews remain anonymous or confidential. At times, an interviewee would speak "off the record" and some requested that I turn off my tape recorder during segments of the interview. But in general, the people I interviewed tended to see themselves as representatives of particular organizations, such as the Labour Party or a women’s movement group, and therefore did not feel it was necessary to have their identities protected.

However, 1 have chosen to preserve the anonymity of each interviewee. The main reason for this decision is that 1 believe that some of the interviewees actually may be unhappy, or perhaps the feelings of others would be hurt, if certain comments made during an interview were attached to them in print. As a result, some of the richness of the data may be lost by not providing information that is both relevant and interesting to this analysis. For example, I have avoided identifying informants in terms of the constituency which they represent, the trade union by which they are employed, the office held in a women’s organizations, or other information that might make them recognizable. At times, readers who are familiar with British politics may be able to

27 recognize an interviewee through their descriptions, though I have tried to minimize these cases as much as possible.

SUMMARY AND LIMITATIONS

This research explores questions pertaining to recent transformations in the

Labour Party, the ways in which women have worked to bring about and are affected by these changes, and how political institutions operate as gendered organizations. The use of intensive interviews with Labour party elites and activists and women’s movement participants, and supplemented with party documents and other published accounts, allows for an in-depth analysis of gender relations in a political party within a specific country.

This research is however limited in a number of ways. In particular, the analysis of the autonomous women’s movement is limited by the small number of women interviewed. As 1 will show, the British women’s movement is a highly decentralized and diverse movement. While the tendency is to focus on the more high profile activities of national level organizations and feminist organizations based in London, important varieties of women’s mobilization are occurring in cities across the country.

A fuller picture of the autonomous women’s movement, in terms of the various forms of mobilization and issues pursued, and the interactions between feminists and the

Labour Party would require a more in-depth analysis of the regional and local variations in women’s movement activism than is provided by this research.

28 In addition, I offer only a rudimentary analysis of the activities of another significant group within the Labour Party and the British women’s movement - women in trade unions. Because of the unique linkages between the trade unions and the

Labour Party, an imderstanding of women in the trade unions has much to contribute to a study of gender relations in the Labour Party. In addition, trade union women have been important actors in a number of campaigns to advance the social and economic position of British women throughout the 20th century. A number of the women who

I interviewed are presently or in the past have been trade union officials and/or activists, but this research does not attempt to offer a complete analysis of the impact of women’s trade union activities on the Labour Party and on the women’s movement.

Future research needs to more fully explore gender relations within British trade unions and the ways in which trade union women have organized to promote gender interests in the union movement and in the Labour Party.

29 CHAPTER m

SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY TRANSFORMATION; THE CASE OF THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

Over the last few decades social democratic parties throughout western Europe have encountered shifting social, economic, and political conditions that have created unique pressures for parties historically dedicated to the promotion of working-class interests. The changing size and composition of social classes, the rise of "new politics" issues, and the emergence of new political challengers in the form of social movements and political parties have forced parties to re-examine social democratic orthodoxy and conventional means of organizing voters. Social democratic parties have responded to changing conditions with a variety of organizational transformations and new programmatic appeals.

Of course, social democratic party transformations have not occurred in a uniform fashion. Country and party specific variations have shaped the rate and the content of party change. So while comparative generalizations of social democratic parties provide insight into the conditions that generate change and the patterns of responses, a more focused analysis of a particular country is useful in conveying the richness and variety of social democratic party transformation within a more specified context.

30 This chapter examines social democratic party transformation through the case of the British Labour Party. I begin by providing a brief outline of the British party system in the postwar period, and then examine how recent changes in British politics have created serious electoral challenges for the Labour Party. Next I review explanations that emphasize the impact of environmental conditions on party transformation, and evaluate these explanations in terms of the case of the Labour Party.

While recognizing the significance of these external conditions in shaping party transformation, this research focuses on how the internal structure of the Labour Party, including its organizational structure, party alignments, and methods of decision­ making, produce constraints and opportunities that affect its options for fashioning responses to new environmental conditions and new challengers. This discussion provides the context for the remainder of this dissertation in which I examine the relationship between party change and increasing women’s mobilization within the

Labour Party, and how the internal life of the Party has shaped and been shaped by women’s demands for policy changes in the party and the leadership’s responses to these demands.

THE CHANGING BRITISH PARTY SYSTEM AND LABOUR’S ELECTORAL CRISIS Pulzer’s often-cited observation that "class is the basis of British party politics; all else is mere embellishment and detail" (1967, p.96) has until recently been considered the most suitable interpretation of the British political system. Pulzer’s focus on the class-based nature of British politics was derived from an analysis of

31 prevailing 20th century social cleavages within the British context. Unlike other

European nations, Britain has been viewed by most scholars as uniquely homogenous in terms of religion and ethnicity, thus making class the central cleavage in the British party system.

It has been argued that the lack of cross-cutting cleavages, along with a majoritarian electoral system, allowed Britain to develop into what was considered the model of the stable two-party system where class and ideological alliances were neatly channeled into the Conservative and Labour parties (Almond and Verba 1963, Beer

1969). British voting trends in the postwar period reveal that the occupational class of voters served as a strong predictor of party preference and voting, with working class voters supporting the Labour Party and middle-class voters supporting the Conservative

Party. Despite the continuing existence of the centrist Liberal Party, the Conservative and Labour parties dominated British politics in terms of both votes and parliamentary seats.

In the 1960’s the Party Identification model became the dominant explanation for British voting behavior (Butler and Stokes 1969, 1974). Drawing upon the work of American political scientists (Belknap and Campbell 1952, Campbell et al. 1960,

Converse 1964), the framers of the Party Identification model emphasized the central influences of political socialization and class identification in forging enduring partisan commitment among voters. Socialization processes, beginning with the influences of parents and family social environment and continuing through adult workplace and social experiences, have a strong impact on class identification. As Britain is a highly

32 class-structured society, socialization tends to reinforce Labour voting amongst the working class and Conservative voting amongst the middle class. As Butler and Stokes

explained, "the individual, identifying with a particular class, forms a positive bond to the party which looks after the interest of the class" (1974, p.88). Though other social cleavages in British society, particularly religion and national identity, resulted in sometimes contentious social and political divisions, these factors did not appear to influence voting as strongly as social class.

However, a series of significant changes in class structure and voting behavior since the 1970’s have forced scholars to re-examine their assumptions about British political behavior. Like other western European nations, Britain has experienced long­ term changes in its economy and occupational structure, along with the rise of new political challengers. These changes have created pressures throughout western party systems. While other social democratic parties also experienced a decrease in their traditional voter support during this period, including the German SPD and the Austrian

SPÔ, the Labour Party is unique in that it suffered a far more precipitous and long lasting electoral decline than any of its continental counterparts.

Though Britain’s economic woes are part of a long term process of economic transformations in western nations, the Conservative Party’s movement in the 1980’s toward returning the economy to the "discipline of the market" accelerated the processes of de-industrialization and the re-organization of production in Britain. These processes had significant effects on the occupational structure, leading to mass unemployment and a growing peripheral workforce of part-time and temporary workers. At the same time.

33 the expansion of the service sector led to an increase in the "salariat" of managers, administrators, and professional workers.

Very significantly for the Labour Party, the economic transformations contributed to a contraction in the size of the unionized manual labor force - - the so- called "natural constituency" of the Labour Party - - and an accompanying increase in the size of the Conservative’s voting constituency. When measuring the working class as rank and file employees in industry and agriculture, the working class constituted

51% of the electorate in 1964. By 1992 the working class had shrunk to 35% of the population (Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1994). At the same time, there emerged a growing sector of skilled manual workers employed in the multinational private sector who have well-paying and relatively secure jobs. The Conservative Party has been quite successful in appealing to this constituency of skilled workers, who often find their interests or perceived interests at odds with the manual working class (Crewe 1992,

Dunleavy and Husbands 1985).

These changes in the composition and size of the British working class have been accompanied by a decline in the Labour Party’s electoral performance, membership, and partisanship. As Table 3.1 shows, the Labour Party’s share of the vote has been declining since the late 1970’s. In 1979 Labour received 37.8% of the vote, its lowest level of support since the 1930’s. The following general election in

1983 saw Labour’s electoral performance plummet even further, attaining just 28.3% of the vote compared to 43.5% won by the Conservative Party. The most surprising event of this election was the electoral performance of the newly formed Alliance Party,

34 which joined the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party which had splintered from the Labour Party in 1981. The Alliance came only 2.3 percentage points behind the Labour Party in terms of popular vote, thus threatening Labour’s legitimacy as the official opposition party in Parliament. Though the Labour Party increased its share of the vote in the 1987 and 1992 elections, it still did not match its electoral performance of the pre-1970 period.

Along with a decline in its electoral performance the Labour Party has also lost significant numbers of members over the last several decades (see Table 3.2).

Individuals can join the Labour Party in one of two ways - either as an individual member or more indirectly through their membership in an affiliated trade union or socialist society such as the Fabian Society or the Cooperative movement. Individuals who pay a political levy to their trade union or socialist society are counted in the ranks of Labour’s affiliated membership. The Labour Party’s affiliated membership accounts for about 94% of total party membership. Since 1960 affiliated membership has dropped 16%, which largely reflects an overall decline in trade union membership.

However, judging party membership by the size of the affiliated membership is an inadequate measure as it tends to inflate the level of support for the Labour Party. This is because it is believed that many people who pay the political levy to their organization may do so more out of apathy than commitment to the Labour Party. For example, trade union members are automatically charged a political levy unless they make the effort to "contract out" and request not to pay the levy and therefore not be counted as part of Labour’s affiliated membership (Webb 1994). Therefore, individual

35 membership provides a better measure of Labour Party support, and it too has declined in both absolute and relative terms over the years. In 1960 individual membership accounted for 12.5% of Labour’s total membership but had declined to 5.7% in 1992.

Voter disenchantment with the Labour Party is also reflected in the data on partisan identification. As Table 3.3 shows, the Labour Party appears to have lost the emotional loyalty of a significant portion of its traditional supporters. The percentage of voters who identify with the Labour Party has declined from 42% in 1964 to 34% in 1992, while the percentage of Conservative identifiers has remained steady at around

40%.

Part of the explanation for Labour’s declining electoral fortunes must be sought in the overall process of partisan dealignment in British voting which threatens the dominance of the two major parties (Sarlvik and Crewe 1983, Alt 1984). The proportion of the British electorate voting for the Conservative and Labour parties has declined markedly in the post-war period, from 97 % in 1951 to 78 % in the 1992 election

(Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1994). Partisan dealignment is also reflected in the progress of minor political parties. In particular, after a period of electoral decline the Liberal

Party resurfaced in the 1970’s and began putting forward a larger number of candidates in British elections. In 1988 the Liberal Party merged with the Social Democratic Party to form the Liberal Democratic Party, and it continues to present a challenge to both

Labour and the Conservatives in local and national elections. In addition, the rise of the

Scottish Nationalist Party and the Welsh Plaid Cymru has intensified national divisions in Britain and attracted a limited number of votes away from the two main parties.

36 Labour’s dwindling electoral support and its failure to win the last four general elections indicate that its leaders and activists have not been particularly successful at adapting to significant socio-economic and political change. The extent of Labour Party decline, as well as its much publicized internal struggles throughout the 1980’s, led many observers during this decade to question whether or not Labour could pull itself out of the "electoral wilderness" and regain the confidence and support of the British electorate. Despite Labour’s improved performance in the 1992 general election, some political analysts wonder whether Labour can recover enough lost ground to become the majority party again (Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1994).

I do not attempt any definitive pronouncements on Labour’s future prospects.

Rather, I show that there is plenty of evidence from recent years that Labour’s leadership has launched a serious response to its long-term electoral decay, resulting in important changes in party organization and strategy, and including greater responsiveness to the demands of women in the Party. I analyze how the internal life of the Party provides opportunities and constraints that have shaped its responses to shifting environmental conditions and the efforts of challengers inside and outside the

Party, including female activists, to influence party strategy, rules, and organization.

In the following sections I review explanations for the decline of the Labour

Party that place special emphasis on the impact of environmental conditions on party transformation, such as changes in the composition and sociological condition of the working class and the rise of postmaterialist values among a significant proportion of the electorate. While recognizing the influence of broad social changes in bringing

37 about party change, I emphasize the importance of focusing on the internal life of the

Party to explain the form and timing of party transformation.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS

Changes in Class Structure and Class Voting

In the 1980’s British scholars began questioning conventional assumptions about the dominance of class-based cleavages in British politics. The combined processes of class decomposition and partisan dealignment forced scholars to rethink the adequacy of the Party Identification model as an explanation for political behavior in Britain. A debate arose over whether Britain has experienced a genuine decline in class voting.

The British experience has contributed to an international discussion about the state of class voting in capitalist democracies in general (Clark, Lipset, and Rempel 1993;

Manza, Hout and Brooks 1995; Weakliem 1995). The central point of contention in the

British debate is as follows: Has Britain experienced a process of "class dealignment" in which the ability of class to explain voting has decreased? Or, does social class continue to influence voting trends in much the same way it has throughout the postwar period?

Supporters of the class dealignment thesis are unified by their belief that the salience of social class as a determinant of voting has clearly declined in the British electorate, though they emphasize different aspects of this overall process (Crewe 1983,

1986, 1992; Dunleavy and Husbands 1985; Franklin 1985, 1992; Rose and McAllister

1986). These scholars recognize that the contraction in the size of the working class

38 has contributed to Labour’s dwindling electoral support, but they contend that class structure alone cannot fully explain voting behavior or Labour’s electoral failures.

Rather, proponents of the class dealignment thesis focus on a number of social and political factors that have altered the determinants of voting in the British context and led to the decreasing willingness of the working class to cast votes for the Labour

Party.

Class dealignment proponents point to a variety of environmental changes that have fundamentally altered the nature of voting in Britain. According to Rose and

McAllister (1986), changes in party competition due to the rise of third parties and the growing influence of factors other than social class on voting behavior have transformed

Britain from a closed-class to an open electorate. In an open electorate, "voters float because they are ’weightless,’ lacking strong commitments to parties or to socio­ economic interests" (Rose and McAllister 1986, p. 13). Because social class no longer anchors individuals to their "natural class party," voting behavior cannot be explained simply with reference to occupational class and the assumed patterns of political socialization accompanying class position.

How then do we explain voting choices among a non-committed electorate?

Some scholars have turned to the rise of "issue voting" as an explanation for electoral behavior. This approach emphasizes the dependence of voting on individual policy preferences. Franklin (1985) describes the rise of issue voting as follows:

. . . the British electorate has moved to a more sophisticated basis for voting choice. No longer constrained to the same extent by characteristics largely established during childhood, British voters are now more open to rational argument than they were in the past. A party which ignores these developments

39 and relies on past loyalties to bring supporters to the polls is unlikely to be as successful as a party which bases its appeal on careful assessment of the needs and wishes of the voting population, and skillfully presents its policies in terms of issues that are meaningful and salient to them (1985, p. 152).

Research has shown that attitudes are better predictors of voting than in the past. For example, Franklin (1992) finds that while occupational class explains a reduced proportion of variance in recent elections, the influence of opinions on issues such as private education and tax cuts on voting has increased. Overall, according to proponents of this view, the Conservative and Liberal Democrats have offered a more appealing response to the rise of issue voting while the Labour Party has failed to provide policies that have broad appeal to voters.

Other political analysts do not completely agree with the model of voting forwarded by supporters of the issue voting approach. While agreeing that voter preferences are no longer simply determined by class position, Dunleavy and Husbands

(1985) maintain that individual voting choices are more complicated than indicated by researchers such as Franklin (1985, 1992). The main flaw in the issue voting model is that it underestimates the influence of external stimuli on explaining how individuals perceive the political parties and why they support certain issues.

In what they term the "Radical Model" of voting behavior, Dunleavy and

Husbands (1985) emphasize the role of dominant ideological influences in shaping electoral behavior. According to this approach, parties do not win elections simply by noting voter preferences and providing appealing policies. Political researchers must also examine the role of dominant groups in shaping voter preferences and defining the

40 political agenda through the structure of public institutions and control of the mass media. In the British case, the Conservative Party’s long tenure as the majority party has allowed it to exert a great deal of influence over the national political agenda and public perceptions of policy issues. The media, as the major source of political information for most citizens, also have an essential role in shaping public perceptions and political consciousness. As much of the British media (particularly the tabloid press) are clearly biased in favor of the Conservative Party, they have been quite successful in portraying Labour as incompetent and its policies as infeasible. The

Radical Model, therefore, alerts us to the influence of dominant ideological influences on shaping individual issue preferences and voting choices.

Other supporters of the class dealignment thesis focus more specifically on how changes in the composition of the working class have decreased its ideological and social distinctiveness and contributed to changes in working class voting patterns

(Crewe 1984, 1986, 1992). The decline in union membership and influence throughout the 1980’s has decreased the pool of traditional Labour voters and deprived the Labour

Party of an important agent of class and partisan socialization. However, the reduced size of the trade union sector itself is only part of the explanation for Labour’s electoral crisis. More disturbing for the Labour Party is the fact that a growing number of blue- collar union members withheld their support for Labour and began casting votes for the

Conservative Party in the 1980’s. The decrease in Labour Party support among trade unionists occurred despite the fact that throughout the 1980’s the Conservative

41 government acted to limit their rights in terms of collective bargaining and strike activity.

The growing willingness of certain workers to support the Conservatives can be explained by identifying significant divisions within the working class itself. The working class is now split between workers in public sector and declining industries, and workers in competitive, private industries. Workers in different industries and regions are therefore divided by a number of "consumption cleavages," particularly in relation to housing and transportation (Crewe 1992, Dunleavy and Husbands 1985). For example, the expansion of working class home ownership in the 1980’s through the

Conservatives’ policy of selling council housing and the increasing availability of inexpensive cars has mainly benefitted workers in the more prosperous and competitive industries in the south of England, while workers in declining industries, concentrated in the north, are more likely to rent housing from local councils and depend on public transportation. At the same time, the Labour opposition continued to oppose the sale of council housing, thereby alienating working class supporters. These changes in housing and transportation have important electoral consequences as research has shown that more prosperous workers have been inclined to vote for the Conservative Party. In addition, because these issues have become highly politicized in recent years divisions along these consumption cleavages are displacing occupational class as a determinant of political behavior.

42 The voters who now can be relied upon to consistently cast votes for the Labour

Party are a smaller and somewhat different group than Labour’s traditional base of support. Crewe (1992) describes. Labour’s new "natural constituency" as follows;

The Labour Party has largely retained the loyalty of the economically marginal and dispossessed - the unskilled, the council tenants, the unemployed, the welfare dependents - as well as the more secure working class living in areas of economic decline in the industrial north and Scotland. But it has lost those sections of the secure and relatively prosperous working class who live in areas of economic growth (p. 36).

As the economically marginal and workers in declining industries constitute a minority of the electorate. Labour cannot depend on these groups to provide them with the percentage of votes necessary to form a majority government. Political analysts such as Crewe have concluded that Labour’s traditional strategy of utilizing working class appeals will not bring electoral victory and party leaders must win votes in "the affluent center ground" of working class and middle class voters.

Proponents of the class dealignment thesis have been challenged by another group of scholars who question the entire notion of the declining significance of class in British politics. Heath, Jowell, and Curtice (1985, 1987, 1991, 1994) argue that the extent of class dealignment in British voting has been exaggerated. While it is true that changes in working class composition in terms of variables such as housing tenure and consumption patterns has occurred in recent decades, this does not necessarily imply a change in the social psychology of the working class. In fact. Heath et al. maintain that claims of class dealignment rely on an ". . . image of a unified, cohesive and solidary working class [that] was an inaccurate representation even in the 1960’s"

43 (1990, p.64). Rather, class continues to influence voting in much the same way as it has over the last few decades, and therefore the potential for collective class action has remained the same.

Much of the debate over the impact of class on voting centers on the use of absolute or relative measures of class voting and the accompanying statistical procedures. Absolute class voting, which is the measure preferred by Crewe, is defined as the proportion of middle class voters who vote Conservative and the proportion of working class voters who vote Labour. This measure is based on the assumption that voters have a natural party that corresponds to their class (Manza et al. 1995).

According to this definition, if the proportion of voters casting ballots for their natural class party declines, than the level of class voting is said to have declined. There is plenty of evidence that levels of absolute class voting have decreased over the last few decades. In 1964, 64% of the British electorate voted according to their occupational class while in 1987 this decreased to 52%. However, in the 1992 general elections the percentage of the electorate voting according to occupational class rose to 56 % (Heath et al. 1994, p. 283)

Heath et al. (1985) introduced the concept of relative class voting as a more appropriate statistical measure of class voting. Relative class voting is measured as the log odds ratio of the votes won by the Conservatives and Labour among members of the salariat and the working class respectively. This measure captures the relationship between class and party after controlling for any across-the-board movements between the parties. Using this measure. Heath and his colleagues maintain there was a decline

44 in relative class voting between 1964 and 1970, but there has not been a clear trend since that time period. They assert that Crewe and others have confused the decline of the Labour Party with the decline of class voting. Indeed, when Labour’s electoral fortunes began to decline in the I970’s it lost votes in all social classes. At the same time, when Labour improved its performance in the 1992 election it increased its proportion of the vote in all classes (Heath et al. 1994). Given their measures of class voting. Heath et al. claim that a "trendless fluctuation" is a more suitable way to characterize British voting patterns than "class dealignment." To explain variations in electoral outcomes Heath et al. turn to short-term political factors that have changed the context in which the parties operate, noting that voters take account of factors such as the state of the economy and their perceptions of party leaders. The Labour Party lost its appeal to a significant proportion of the electorate due to the failures of its tenure in government in the I970’s as well as the well-publicized splits in the party and unpopular policy positions in the 1980’s. In principle the Labour Party should be able to overcome these obstacles in public perception of it capabilities and performance.

Therefore, it is not necessary for the Labour Party "to temper its pursuit of working class interests or to change its overall ideology" (Heath et al. 1987, p.258), which is the strategic solution implied by the class dealignment thesis.

As shown, these approaches vary in terms of their explanations of Labour Party decline and the significance of class voting, but all of them alert us to the importance of shifting socioeconomic and political conditions in creating pressures for social democratic parties to re-evaluate their programmatic appeals and conventional means

45 of organizing voters in order to remain electorally vital. However, these perspectives do not help us to understand how internal party structures shape the ways in which parties respond to changing environmental conditions. Before moving to a more focused analysis of the internal life of political parties, I review another area of scholarship that emphasizes the impact of environmental factors on political parties.

Postmaterialism, New Politics, and New Challengers

An important area of political research to emerge since the 1970’s addresses the impact of broad changes in social values in western societies. Most closely associated with the work of Ronald Inglehart and his colleagues (1977, 1986, 1990), research in this area examines the political and electoral consequences of the shift from materialist to "postmaterialist" values among a significant proportion of the population. Though postmaterialism arguments are in some ways compatible with the class dealignment thesis discussed above, they differ in important ways which I will outline below.

Inglehart argues that the structural conditions of advanced industrial societies have fundamentally altered the value orientations of citizens. In the postwar period, economic expansion and the redistributive policies of the welfare state have secured a level o f prosperity capable of satisfying basic human needs for most citizens, and as a result "the quest for economic gains has less urgency and in the long run may give way to an emphasis on other types of goals" (Inglehart and Rabier 1986, p. 461-462).

Living in a period of relative affluence, people bora in the postwar period are less concerned with the materialist issues that were of central importance to earlier

46 generations, such as economic and military security. Rather, postwar cohorts exhibit postmaterialist values placing greater importance on quality of life issues such as environmental protection, increased citizen participation, and individual freedom and self-expression. Generational replacement means that the proportion of postmaterialists in the population has steadily increased over the last few decades and therefore their impact on politics has grown.

Intergenerational value change in advanced western democracies has had important consequences for party systems. Modem party systems are stmctured by an enduring set of social cleavages, including class, religion, and region, that emerged from the historical conditions of national and socioeconomic development in western societies during the advent of mass democracy (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). These cleavages defined partisan alignments in European party systems along the left/right axis.

Postmaterialist issues, however, do not clearly correspond to traditional cleavages along these lines. For example, such traditional political opponents as trade unions and business interests may join forces in order to oppose environmental protection legislation that both groups find detrimental to their interests.

An important development in western societies is the emergence of a new cleavage between supporters of "old politics" and "new politics," also described as a switch from social-group cleavages to issue-group cleavages (Habermas 1981, Offe

1985, Dalton 1988). The old paradigm of politics emphasizes materialist issues such as economic growth, distribution and security. The working class is thought to cling to old politics and traditional social and religious values. New politics are an expression of

47 postmaterialist concerns, such as the limits to economic growth, environmental

protection, peace, and the rights of consumers, women, and minority groups. Support for new politics issues is concentrated among the "new middle class" who tend to be

highly educated and employed in teaching and welfare professions (Inglehart 1990).

As party systems are transformed from social-group cleavages to issue-group

cleavages, the stability of partisan alignments and voter behavior is being altered.

Dalton (1988) describes the effects of the rise of new politics on electoral behavior as

follows:

Political coalitions and voting patterns will lack the permanence of past class and religious cleavages. Without clear social cues, voting decisions will become a more demanding task for voters, and voting decisions will become more dependent on the individual beliefs and values of each citizen." (p. 175).

Though explanations for the rise of new politics and the class dealignment thesis

rely on similar assumptions about socio-economic changes, these scholars explain the

impact of these changes in somewhat different ways. For example, while the notion of

an "open electorate" central to some class dealignment approaches implies an uncommitted and homogenous electorate, the new politics view states that the electorate

is divided along new cleavage lines. Social divisions are not described in terms of opposing interests or consumption cleavages, but in terms of opposing values, with political systems polarized between voters with postmaterialist values and those with traditional values emphasized by materialists.

The new politics impulse has found expression in western democracies in a number of new social movements (NSMs) including the feminist, peace, environmental.

48 gay and lesbian, and student movements. These movements are defined as "new" in that they differ in a number of important ways from the social movement model provided by labor movements (Offe 1985, Klandermans and Tarrow 1988). NSM theorists link the rise of new movements to the structural conditions of advanced capitalism. Drawing from Inglehart's work, some emphasize that economic growth, security, and the redistributive policies of the welfare state have secured the satisfaction of material needs, leading to mobilization around postmaterialist values such as self- actualization and quality of life issues. Other NSM scholars contend that new protest movements are a reaction to modernization. The continual push for economic expansion and the intrusion of the state into economic, social, and family life has led to the "colonization of the life world" in that more areas of life are subject to state regulation (Habermas 1981, Melucci 1989). NSM participants recognize that further state intervention will not alleviate the problems of modem societies because the state has a "structural incapacity" to control the vast power and resources it has created (Offe

1985). Participants seek autonomy, direct democracy, self-expression, and the creation of "liberated areas" where they can pursue their alternative goals free from state regulation. Though NSMs represent new values they are also characterized by a self- limiting radicalism (Cohen 1985, Offe 1985). NSMs lack a revolutionary rhetoric typical of older leftist movements. Rather, new movements want to change and reform existing institutions so that they operate more democratically.

NSMs tend to draw the majority of their participants from the new middle class of educated professionals, often employed in the public sector, who exhibit high levels

49 of support for new politics issues. Participants often join on the basis of characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual orientation which places the construction and politicization of identities at center stage for new movements (Melucci 1980, 1989).

New movements are noted for using new methods of political action and unconventional protest tactics in addition to engaging in more conventional political activities.

In addition to new social movements, some European nations have encountered the formation of new political parties. A number of left-wing, regional, tax-revolt, and ecology or Green parties have emerged over the last few decades to represent interests not addressed by the established parties and to challenge these parties within the realm of conventional politics. Some of these new parties have experienced limited electoral success, most notably the Green parties that now exist on the national level in twelve

European nations (Miiller-Rommel 1989).

The rise of new values and new political challengers in the form of movements and parties has altered the political field in which social democratic parties operate and created pressures for party change. Social democratic parties are presented with the challenge of developing political and electoral strategies that appeal to supporters of new politics issues without alienating their traditional base of support among working class voters. Throughout the 1980’s most social democratic parties endeavored to integrate new issues into party programs (Paterson 1993). However, until recently the

Labour Party has been notably resistant to new politics issues and has carried on with its traditional working-class appeals (Shaw 1993). In part. Labour’s reluctance to

50 embrace new politics is due to the fact that these issues are less salient in the British political context. Inglehart (1971) found Britain to have lower levels of postmaterialism and smaller inter-generational differences than most other European countries in the early 1970’s. Though in his latest survey Britain does not lag that far behind other

European nations in exhibiting postmaterialist values, intergenerational differences do stand - young people in Britain are much less postmaterialist than their counterparts in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark (Inglehart 1990).

In comparison to other nations, Britain also has been characterized as uniquely resistant to the rise of new social movements and movement parties (Eyerman and

Jamison 1991). Britain lacks independent new social movements such as the peace, environmental, and anti-nuclear movements found in other European countries (Rootes

1992), and the British Greens have not had much electoral success compared to their continental counterparts. "British exceptionalism" in terms of new politics must be examined in terms of the British electoral system and the party system it sustains. The combination of single-member constituencies and the first-past-the-post system is inhospitable to new parties, making support for minority parties a "wasted vote." New politics parties have done better in countries with proportional representation like

Germany and Belgium. Also, the institutional arrangements of the British political system constrain potential protest movements toward integration within the party system rather than opposition through the formation of independent social movements (Rootes

1992).

51 Despite Britain’s exceptionalism, the Labour Party has made some important changes recently in the area of new politics issues, giving a higher profile to women’s rights, the environment, and constitutional reform (Smith 1992a). These programmatic changes are part of the overall "modernization" process that the Labour leadership initiated in the late 1980’s (to be discussed more fully in Chapter Five) in its efforts to overcome its electoral failures and attract new voters. Part of Labour’s modernization process entails restructuring its relations with some of its traditional constituencies, including the trade unions and welfare recipients, and embracing middle class voters who are more likely to value new politics issues.

Thus far I have reviewed a variety of explanations for social democratic party transformation that focus on the impact of social, political, and economic conditions on parties and party systems. Changing environmental conditions such as the decline in the size of the working class and the rise of new values and political challengers provide the context for examining how variations in party responses are structured by internal party dynamics, intraparty coalitions, and internal constraints and opportunities for strategic adjustment. In the following section I turn to this topic with a review of theoretical approaches to the study of political parties as organizations.

THE INTERNAL LIFE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

An interest in the study of party organizations dates back to the classic work on political parties by Ostrogorski (1902), Michels (1911), and Duverger (1954), who were concerned with the organizational structure and internal dynamics of political parties

52 and the relations between party leaders and members. There are three broad approaches to the study of parties as organizations (Ware 1996). First, the electoral competition model associated with the work of Maurice Duverger (1954) and Leon Epstein (1967) focuses attention on the impact of the logic of competitive politics on creating pressures for parties to adopt particular organizational forms. Both scholars have definite ideas about the type of party organization that would come to predominate in western societies, though they disagree on what constitutes the optimal party structure. For

Duverger, the branch party with a mass membership is preferable to the caucus party, consisting only of political elites, because it is better at accumulating political resources.

For Epstein, American-style political parties, which depend not on a mass membership but on the donations of individuals and interest groups, are more suitable for conducting elections in the age of mass media.

Second, institutional models emphasize the history of party formation and intraparty dynamics as determinants of organizational forms. In a recent analysis of party organizations, Panebianco (1988) develops a sophisticated typology of parties based on; 1) how a party came to be formed, for example whether a party was formed through territorial penetration or territorial diffusion, the existence of external sponsors

(such as trade unions), and the involvement of a charismatic leader in its founding, and

2) a party’s level of institutionalization, including its degree of autonomy in relation to its environment, including external organizations and supporters. Panebianco then explains variations in the internal life of parties based on these characteristics. For example, he notes that the Labour Party is a weakly institutionalized party because its

53 history of external sponsorship through affiliated trade unions constrains leadership autonomy.

Finally, sociological models examine how party organization is linked to the resources available to parties to mobilize supporters and activists and conduct election campaigns (Ware 1996). For example, the Labour Party has largely depended upon its linkages with affiliated trade unions to provide funds and campaign workers, and this has meant that Labour has done little work to recruit individual members. This organizational form has had important consequences for Labour’s intraparty dynamics and electoral success. The lack of an active membership allowed a radical socialist minority to "take over" a number of constituency parties in the early 1980’s. In addition, the sponsorship role of the trade unions threatens Labour’s legitimacy in the eyes of many voters who perceive that its policies and leadership are dominated by the trade unions.

Recently a number of scholars have focused renewed attention upon the internal life of political parties (Panebianco 1988, Koelble 1992, Kitschelt 1994, Katz and Mair

1994). Though these approaches differ in terms of the emphasis placed on various aspects of party organization, they share a concern with the empirical analysis of individual parties as a means to a comparative understanding of how parties develop and change. Scholars working in this tradition maintain that party transformation cannot be explained simply through examining the impact of external social and economic factors. While recognizing that environmental factors create pressures for party adaption and change, they focus on how internal structure affects a party’s

54 "procedural capacity for strategic innovation" (Kitschelt 1994, p.212). In other words,

party responses are shaped by their institutional linkages with various groups, degree of leadership autonomy, intraparty coalitions, methods of decision making, and other aspects of a party’s organizational life.

I adopt an organizational approach to study recent transformations in the Labour

Party and their relationship to women’s mobilization inside the party. While the environmental factors discussed in this chapter create the context in which party change occurs, I examine how Labour has shaped its own outcomes and affected the political scene through its strategic choices and intraorganzational policies. In this view I emphasize the role of party leaders and activists as central actors who can bring about party change by working to alter organizational structure, candidate selection procedures, and polices of the party. These changes will then affect opportunities and constraints for the formation of intraparty coalitions and the mobilization of actors inside and outside the party. These types of explanations help us to understand the variety of organizational and strategic responses of parties in a comparative perspective.

In addition, as I will show in the following chapters, only by looking at the internal life of a party as well as environmental conditions can we understand how spaces are created for women’s agency, and thus assess the impact of women’s organizations on changes in the party.

55 Year Conservative Labour Liberal Other Total 1945 39.3 48.8 9.2 2.6 99.9 1950 43.0 46.8 9.3 0.9 100.0 1951 47.8 49.4 2.6 0.3 100.1 1955 49.3 47.3 2.8 0.6 100.0 1959 48.8 44.6 6.0 0.6 100.0 1964 42.9 44.8 11.4 0.9 100.0 1966 41.4 48.9 8.6 1.1 100.0 1970 46.2 43.9 7.6 2.3 100.0 1974 (Feb) 38.8 38.0 19.8 3.4 100.0 1974 (Oct.) 36.7 40.2 18.8 4.3 100.0 1979 44.9 37.8 14.1 3.2 100.0 1983 43.5 28.3 26.0 2.2 100.0 1987 43.3 31.5 23.1 2.1 100.0 1992 42.8 35.2 18.3 3.8 100.1

Table 3.1. Shares of the Vote in Britain, 1945-1992

Source; Heath, Jowell and Curtice (1994) Note: Liberal represents Liberal 1945-1979, Liberal, SDP or Alliance 1983-1987, Liberal Democrat 1992.

56 Year Individual Corporate Total 1960 790,192 5,538,138 6,328,330 1974 691,889 5,826,568 6,518,457 1983 295,344 6,160,393 6,455,737 1987 288,829 5,619,320 5,908,149 1992 279,530 4,644,000 4,923,530

Table 3.2. Labour Party Membership, selected years.

Source: Webb (1994)

57 Year Conservative Labour Liberal None %% % % 1964 41 42 12 5 1966 39 45 10 5 1970 42 42 8 7 1974 (Feb.) 38 39 14 6 1974 (Oct.) 36 39 15 7 1979 39 38 12 9 1983 37 31 19 11 1987 39 32 17 11 1992 42 34 13 8

Table 3. 3. Trends in Party Identification, 1964-1992

Source: Heath, Jowell and Curtice (1994) Note: Liberal represents Liberal 1964-1979, Liberal, SDP or Alliance 1983-1987, Liberal Democrat 1992.

58 CHAPTER IV

LABOUR WOMEN AND THE AUTONOMOUS WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Despite the sizable literature that has been written about the British Labour Party since its founding at the turn of the century, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which women have organized within the party to promote their own interests, and how their positions and experiences have been shaped by the organization, policies, and culture of the party. In this chapter I turn to an analysis of women in the

Labour Party. I begin with a brief discussion of the 20th century history of women in the Labour Party including an analysis of the structure and activities of the women’s organizations established by the party following female suffrage. I show how these structures formally integrated women into the Labour Party and British political institutions but in ways that limited their political power and affirmed their subordinate status. I also trace the mobilization of the autonomous women’s movement during this period and the interactions between women’s movement activists and Labour women activists. Feminism and the autonomous women’s movement provide a context in which to explore fluctuations in women’s roles in the Labour Party, as the ways in which

Labour women have organized, the issues they have pursued, and the responses they

59 have encountered within the party and society at large have been shaped by larger

trends in women’s activism.

I then move to a more familiar and well documented period of British women’s

history - the rise of second wave feminism in the 1960’s. I discuss the structural and

cultural roots of the emergence of women’s liberation within the British context. I then

examine the variety of organizational types, ideologies, and strategies exhibited in this

highly diffuse movement. The resurgence of feminism provided women with activist

experiences and the tools to critique women’s oppression within social institutions,

including political parties. For some, activism within the women’s liberation movement served as a bridge to Labour party activism.

WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS IN THE LABOUR PARTY

Women have been involved in the Labour Party since its origins at the turn of the century. The first official women’s organization was the Women’s Labour League

(WLL) which was founded in London in 1906 by the initiative of the National Union of Railwaywomen’s Guilds. Though the WLL affiliated to the Labour Party in 1908

it maintained its standing as a semi-autonomous organization within the party structure and was free to elect its own representatives to Labour’s armual conference and submit resolutions to the conference on matters of concern to its female membership, rather than having to work through the traditional channels of trade unions and constituency parties. WLL members also elected their own officers and published a newspaper. By

60 the start of the First World War the WLL had attracted about 5,000 members (Thane

1990).

Though WLL's semi-autonomous position provided women with a certain degree of latitude to act within the Party, its position must be interpreted within the context of the limited political significance accorded to Labour women by the party leadership.

As a non-voting population, the influence of Labour women over policy-making processes and candidate selection was restricted and their contributions to the mobilization of supporters and maintenance of the party were often devalued. As a consequence of women’s limited political roles, the WLL was allocated few resources by the Labour Party to organize members or engage in political activities. In addition,

WLL met with a certain degree of hostility on the party of Labour men who opposed women’s political organizations on principle, and in some localities the WLL was just barely tolerated by male working class constituency members (Pugh 1992).

Despite the limits placed on women’s political rights, Labour women managed to have an impact on governmental policy through the organized campaigns of the

WLL. Studies of the WLL indicate that its members concentrated on issues related to women’s traditional spheres of influence in the home and family, such as securing maternity and child care services (Thane 1990, Graves 1994). As political elites had shown limited concern for these types of social reforms, WLL succeeded in focusing attention on a number of welfare issues directly affecting large numbers of British women. WLL was also able to make an impact through its affiliation with the Standing

Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organizations (SJC, and later the Joint

61 Committee on Working Women’s Organizations), which it founded in 1916 in partnership with the National Federation of Women Workers and the Women’s

Cooperative Guild. SJC was the most influential women’s body in the labor movement at large and it provided a point of contact between women involved mainly in their local constituency parties and women trade unionists. Finally, the First World War also served as a catalyst for Labour women to organize around a number of issues directly affecting working class women as well as the population at large. Labour women involved themselves in the war effort through their participation in the War Emergency

Workers National Committee, through which they had an input in governmental policies concerning rationing, food prices, and allowances for soldiers’ families.

In the early part of the 20th century Labour women also found that cooperation with autonomous women’s organizations was to their benefit in working toward several politically contentious issues such as suffrage and divorce reform (Banks 1993, Graves

1994). In these efforts Labour women were allied with middle class women’s organizations such as the Women’s Liberal Federation and the National Union of

Women’s Suffrage Societies (later the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship

(NUSEC)). Their commitment to women’s issues such as suffrage and divorce reform often put Labour women at odds with the party leadership and its predominately male supporters who argued that such issues detracted from the struggles of the working class as a whole. However, their involvement with these campaigns indicates the willingness of many Labour women to act independently of their party to work toward the advancement of women’s political, economic, and social rights.

62 The role of women in the party and their relations with the autonomous women’s movement changed following the First World War. The Labour Party disbanded the WLL in 1918 when the Representation of the People Bill granted suffrage to women over the age of 30.* Voting rights transformed women into an electorally valuable constituency and party leaders were faced with the need to integrate women as full citizens and as Labour Party voters. To achieve these ends, the party’s

1918 constitution. Labour and the New Social Order, granted women the right to join the party as individual members and established a new structure of party sponsored women’s organizations.

The Labour Party’s amended constitution made provisions for the formation of women’s sections at the constituency level, and Party leaders urged women to join these party sponsored sections rather than the organizations of the autonomous women’s movement. In 1918 party leader Arthur Henderson warned women that "separate sex organizations are fundamentally undemocratic and wholly reactionary" (quoted in Pugh

1992, p. 134), thus instructing Labour women that their primary allegiance should be to the working class and to the Labour Party. The battles over suffrage and divorce reform reminded party leaders of the potential for "sex antagonism" and internal party division represented by women organizing around women’s issues, so they set out to ensure that women’s issues were firmly subordinated to the larger Labour Party agenda.

The principle that women should not involve themselves in non-party organizations was given further weight in 1923 when the party conference ruled that any women holding

'British women over the age of 21 were granted the right to vote in 1928.

63 a membership in NUSEC, the major organization of the autonomous women’s

movement, was not eligible to be a delegate to the annual conference (Pugh 1992).

Women’s suffrage and the formation of women’s sections in constituency parties

led to a dramatic increase in female participation in the Labour Party. By 1922,

100,000 women were involved in 800 women’s sections in constituency parties across

the country. This amount increased to 200,000 women in 1,450 sections by 1925.

Female membership in the Labour Party peaked in 1928 with 250,000-300,000 women

involved in 1,845 women’s sections (Pugh 1992).

Though they facilitated the involvement of large numbers of women in the

Labour Party, the party sponsored women’s structures operated to limit the influence

of the female membership, particularly at the national level. Party leaders established

a yearly (later biennial) National Conference of Labour Women which provided the opportunity for Labour women from all over Britain to meet and discuss issues of

importance to the female membership. The Women’s conference, however, was granted no policy-making power by the party constitution. While Women’s conference delegates were allowed to send resolutions to the annual party conference they had the status merely of "recommendations." This lack of statutory power meant that resolutions that had been debated and voted upon at the Women’s conference did not necessarily have any impact on Labour Party policy. For example, throughout the

1920’s the party leadership refused to allow a discussion of birth control reforms at the annual party conference despite the continued demands put forward by Women’s conference delegates (Graves 1994). In this debate the Labour Party’s Chief Women’s

64 Officer Marion Philips did not support the efforts of the Women’s conference and played an instrumental role in keeping their birth control resolution off the conference agenda (Pederson 1989). Women’s delegates had no recourse in this situation because ultimately the Chief Women’s Officer was accountable to the party leadership and not to the Women’s conference.

The 1918 constitution also guaranteed women four reserved seats on the party’s

23-person National Executive Committee (NEC). Though this act institutionalized the principle of female representation within the party, it was decided that these seats were to be elected by the annual conference delegates rather than the Women’s conference.

This mechanism assured that the trade unions, through the use of their bloc vote, would dominate the selection of female NEC members. Female representatives would therefore have to be acceptable to the most powerful and conservative section of the

Labour Party. As a result female NEC members were unlikely to fall outside of the party mainstream or actively pursue a women’s agenda.

Many Labour women recognized the limitations placed upon them by the party’s women’s structure and throughout the 1920’s some women actively pursued changes in the party’s constitution to increase women’s institutional power. Their efforts brought them in conflict not only with the party leadership but also with other Labour women who defined women’s political roles differently. In the following section 1 examine some of the struggles over gender equality that occurred in the 1920’s and the divergent views of the two main factions of Labour women, the separatists and the integrationists, on the role of women in the Labour Party.

65 SEPARATISTS AND INTEGRATIONISTS

In the interwar period Labour women were divided by their views on the position of women and the women’s sections within the party. A majority of Labour women were committed to the idea of "separate but equal" women’s organizations within the party, and they seemed to believe that most other women preferred to organize in separate women’s organizations as well (Graves 1994). In fact, some Labour women feared that the Labour Party would lose potential female members to non­ partisan middle class women’s group such as NUSEC if it failed to provide for a separate structure of women’s sections within its 1918 constitution. Indeed, female membership was much higher in localities with women’s sections than in those without them (Graves 1994). In her interviews with Labour women active in constituency parties during the interwar period, Pamela Graves (1994) found that women of this generation preferred separate women’s groups and did not see them as a barrier to gender equality at the local level. Many women found it more difficult and less enjoyable to attend local constituency party meetings where the agenda and debates were dominated by the men. To these women, separate sections provided an opportunity for women to learn political skills and determine for themselves how meetings would be run and the issues that would be discussed.

The preference of many Labour women for organizing in separate organizations need not be interpreted as evidence that women were satisfied with assuming a secondary status within the Labour Party. On the contrary, some Labour women hoped that eventually the women’s sections would be able to assume an institutional role

66 within the Party similar to that of the trade unions (Graves 1994). The trade unions used their considerable institutional power within the Labour Party to pursue the interests of industrial workers, and did so without being accused of separatism.

Likewise, women hoped to use the women’s section to promote the interests of working class women and children and to have their concerns given equal attention to those of the male trade union membership. Throughout the 1920’s Labour women launched several campaigns to increase the statutory power and influence of their organizations.

For example, in 1921 they tried to increase the power of the Women’s conference by guaranteeing that its resolutions would be submitted to and voted upon by the annual party conference. Also, they campaigned to have the four reserved seats on the NEC elected by the women’s sections rather than the annual conference at large. However,

Labour women were not successful in these efforts and the party leadership continued to object to the principle of granting women a greater institutional role within the internal structure of the party.

Not only did the separatists run into opposition from their male comrades, but they were also opposed by other Labour women who believed that women should strive toward full integration within the party. The "integrationists" tended to be women in leadership positions within the party who believed women should compete equally with men for party offices. In their view, separate women’s sections and reserved seats for women on the NEC accorded women "special privileges" that ultimately served to marginalize women and institutionalize gender inequality (Graves 1994). Therefore, the

67 integrationists within the party opposed any proposals that served to divide party members along the lines of sex.

As shown by the divisions between the separatists and integrationists. Labour women did not during this period (nor during any period) constitute an ideologically unified group. There were a range of views not only on the proper institutional role for women in party, but also on political issues related to advancing the rights and welfare of British women. While some Labour women were primarily committed to promoting the advancement of working class women, others saw the focus on women’s rights as unnecessary and potentially divisive. These debates occurred within the context of male dominated political party that was structured to give precedence and power to working class men and their concerns. Still, this analysis shows that gender relations have been of central importance to ideological and policy debates within the party since its founding.

In the following section I turn to a discussion of British feminism in the interwar years and the relationship between the autonomous women’s movement and Labour women activists.

LABOUR WOMEN, FEMINISM, AND THE AUTONOMOUS WOMEN’S MOVEMENT An analysis of women’s involvement in the Labour Party must also take into account the variations in women’s movement activism throughout this period. Feminists and Labour women are overlapping yet distinct groups. They often pursued similar agendas including female suffrage, birth control reform, and family allowances.

68 However, they were separated by class, party loyalty, and different conceptions of feminism and women’s advancement.

Two strands of feminism existed in Britain in the interwar period - equal rights feminism and what came to be known as "new feminism." Supporters of equal rights feminism tended to be middle class and many had been activists in the campaign for women’s suffrage. The main issues on the agenda of the equal rights feminists were equal pay for women workers in the professions and civil service and the rights of women to work and retain their citizenship after marriage. In their efforts to promote greater workplace equality, equal rights feminists often found support from Labour women, particularly those active in the trade union women (Banks 1993). However, other Labour women found little common ground to unite them with the equal rights feminists. They were dismissed by some Labour women as bourgeois feminists whose political agenda had little to contribute to the advancement of working class families.

The second strand of British feminism was "new feminism," also known as welfare feminism. Eleanor Rathbone, who was a leading figure in NUSEC, became the foremost proponent of new feminism in the 1920’s. Rathbone created controversy within the British women’s movement with her assertion that equal rights feminism offered a dated approach to promoting women’s rights. Central to new feminism was the recognition that the lives of most women revolved around their roles as wives and mothers (Koven and Michel 1990, Thane 1991). Therefore, the goal of the women’s movement should be to promote social policies to improve the domestic lives of women and the social valuation of their work within the home. This approach to women’s

69 rights is referred to as matemalism, and a number of recent studies have traced the role of the ideology of matemalism and the activities of its supporters in the formation of welfare states (Bock and Thane 1991, Koven and Michel 1993). Matemalism had its roots in 19th century social reform movements that promoted women’s "difference" and moral purity resulting from their motherly capacities for nurturing and compassion, and it linked women’s motherly social tasks to political activism. By the mid-1920’s the agendas of the new feminists and Labour women had largely converged around the ideas of matemalism. Throughout this period new feminists and Labour women launched a number of campaigns to provide welfare and protection for women in the home, including family allowances, child care, health care, housing, and leisure facilities for women.

The ideological differences between equal rights feminists and new feminists came to a head in the late 1920’s over the issue of protective legislation for female workers. Consistent with their views on gender and social equality, equal rights feminists claimed that protective legislation played on the notion of women’s "special vulnerabilities" and served to limit opportunities for women and institutionalize inequality between the sexes. They viewed this type of legislation as an attempt by male politicians and trade unionists to impose further control over the conditions of female employment by restricting the number of hours worked by women or the type of occupations in which they could be employed. Therefore, equal rights feminists opposed any protective legislation that was based on the sex of the workers rather than the nature of the job (Smith 1990). On the other hand, new feminists. Labour women, and

70 the SJC were strongly in favor of protective legislation. They believed this legislation actually benefitted women by shielding them from further exploitation in the workplace.

Supporters of sex-based protective legislation could not agree with equal rights feminists that these policies should be seen as objectionable to women.

The disagreement over protective legislation was instrumental in cementing hostile relations between Labour women and the autonomous women’s movement for many years. It was at this point that feminism became synonymous with being anti­ labour among many Labour Party supporters and activists (Graves 1994). Even when

Labour women and feminists shared the same goals the divisions between them prevented them from working together to achieve these goals. For example. Labour’s

Chief Women’s Officer refused to cooperate with autonomous women’s groups on campaigns for the Equal Suffrage bill of 1928 even though both Labour women and feminists were highly committed to the passage of this legislation.

The social and political context for feminism began to change in the I930’s, and both the autonomous women’s movement and Labour women groups experienced a decline in mobilization. For the feminist movement, demobilization was in part a response to some of the policy achievements of the 1920’s which improved conditions and secured new rights for British women.. These included the Sex Disqualification

(Removal) Act of 1919 which barred restrictions on women, married or single, on holding public, civil, or judicial office; the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 which reformed divorce law; the Widow’s Pension Act of 1925; and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 which granted suffrage to women over the age of 21. Following these

71 successes feminists activists found it difficult to sustain the momentum for further campaigns. Also, hostility toward feminism and women’s activism grew throughout the

1930’s both within the Labour Party and society at large. Within the context of economic decline and the rise of fascism in Europe, a focus on women’s domestic issues had less urgency and feminist organizations found it difficult to recruit new members. The radical cohort of the women’s movement, which included those who had been involved in the suffrage struggle and equal rights debates, began to shrink in numbers. Lacking a new supply of feminist activists, women’s organizations experienced a significant loss in membership, resources, and parliamentary influence.

Women’s mobilization in the Labour Party also began to decline during this period and there was a clear retreat from activities and rhetoric that could be interpreted as "feminist" (Graves 1994). Labour women abandoned their campaigns for Labour

Party constitutional change and the family allowance as more pressing economic and international issues drew their attention. The number of women’s sections began to decrease in number after 1928, attendance at the Women’s conference declined, and women nearly disappeared from national Labour politics. This does not necessarily imply that fewer women were involved in the Labour Party but that they were more likely to get involved in the constituency party itself, rather than just in the women’s section (Graves 1994). However, women made important gains at the local level in the

1930’s and increased their representation as local councillors and in public appointments

(Graves 1994).

72 The decline in feminist mobilization must also be interpreted in terms of the growing "cult of domesticity" in the 1930’s (Pugh 1992). During this period, political, social, and commercial pressures encouraged women to devote themselves with renewed energy to their roles as mothers and wives and to their domestic duties within the home.

The ideology of domesticity was accompanied by the growth of a number of non­ partisan and largely non-political women’s organizations throughout the 1930’s, including the Women’s Institutes (WI), the National Union of Townswomen’s Guilds, and the Women’s Cooperative Guild. Though leading feminists were involved in the formation of these groups, local chapters were primarily social groups rather than women’s rights organizations. For example, NUSEC founded the National Union of

Townswomen’s Guilds to educate women about their citizenship roles and address issues of women’s inequality, but at the local level the Guilds quickly became dominated with gardening and other domestic concerns. These organizations were quite popular among British women, and by 1939 the Townswomen’s Guilds had 54,000 members, and by 1945 it had approximately 250,000 members. The WI’s were even more successful, with a membership of 238,000 in 1937 and nearly half a million by the 1950’s (Pugh 1992).

The general retreat of British feminism continued in the postwar period and well into the 1960’s. A number of once active feminist organizations were in abeyance during this period including the Abortion Law Reform Association and the Family

Planning Association. As in the 1930’s, feminist demobilization was in part due to the passage of key pieces of women’s legislation by the first majority Labour government.

73 For example, in 1946 the marriage bar on women in the civil service was lifted, and in

1948 the British Nationality Act allowed women to keep their citizenship on marriage.

Also, the campaign for family endowment ground to a halt when the Labour government introduced family allowances, even though this legislation fell short of the hopes of some feminist groups for providing payments directly to mothers with children

(Banks 1992).

Feminist demobilization was also due in part to the widespread belief among

British women and men that the postwar "new society" had ended women’s oppression

(Wilson 1980). Throughout the 1950’s a number of feminists also seemed to accept the view that equality between the sexes had been achieved, and therefore movements for women’s rights were no longer necessary (Banks 1992). Feminists believed that in postwar Britain women should not have to choose between marriage or a career, but should be able to have both. This "dual role" ideology was used to encourage women to seek employment outside of home, but since it was firmly believed that women’s main fulfillment was to come through their home and children, they were encouraged to find jobs that were not too demanding and did not interfere with their primary responsibilities for family life and domestic chores. The dual role ideology, therefore, served to reinforce traditional assumptions about the gender division of labor and did little to improve the conditions of women in paid employment (Lewis 1990).

Even during this period of conservatism and feminist demobilization, there is evidence of growing discontent among women as they encountered a number of contradictions within their families, at work, and in terms of societal gender

74 expectations. For instance, trade union women were growing increasingly frustrated as their campaigns for equal pay were met with resistance by the Labour Party and the trade union movement. By the late 1960’s a number of equal rights feminist organizations were reactivated as women started to mobilize around a number of issues including family law and women’s employment. At the same time, a new feminist ideology and type of women’s mobilizing was emerging in Britain, particularly among younger, middle-class women involved in the new left and a number of student movements. In the following section I turn to an examination of the rise of second- wave feminism and women’s liberation in Britain.

SECOND WAVE FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION

The resurgence of feminist activism in Britain in the late 1960’s is a well documented phenomenon (Wandor 1978, 1990; Jenson 1982; Bouchier 1983; Coote and

Campbell 1987; Sebestyen 1988). Like women throughout the world, British women began to mobilize in increasing numbers to promote their political, economic, and social rights. These women’s movements varied widely in terms of their organizational forms, ideologies, strategies and tactics, and relations with mainstream political institutions. "

Variations between women’s movements highlight the importance of examining the national context in which these movements arise and the country-specific political opportunity structures that condition their emergence, goals and strategies, successes and

^ See edited volumes by Katzenstein and Mueller (1987) and Nelson and Chowdhury (1994) for comparative analyses of women’s movements and political mobilization.

75 failures, and relations with political parties and the state (Jenson 1982, Gelb 1989). In this section I discuss the conditions that gave rise to second wave feminism within

Britain, and how the women's liberation movement in this country was shaped by

Britain’s political system and political parties.

Social and economic transformations in the postwar period had profound effects on the lives of British women in terms of education, employment, family patterns, and gender relations. In the postwar period labor shortages led the government and employers to encourage large numbers of women to seek employment outside the home.

As the economy and the market for consumer goods and services expanded, women were given incentives to enter the labor market not necessarily to pursue a career but to increase their family’s consumer power (Pugh 1992). Particularly striking was the increase in employment of married women. In 1951, 26% of married women were employed; this increased to 35% in 1961 and 49% in 1971, with most of these women working part-time (Lewis 1992). However, women’s employment conditions continued to reflect patterns of gender inequality in the home and society at large, as female workers were concentrated in low-paid, unskilled occupations with no career structure.

Employed women also found themselves with a double burden of work. Despite their participation in the paid labor force women were still expected to shoulder the responsibilities of housework and caring for husbands and children.

British women also attained higher levels of education in the postwar period.

By 1970 women accounted for about 30% of all British undergraduates. This did not represent a dramatic increase in the proportion of university degrees going to women.

76 but the absolute number of women in higher education continued to grow with the expansion of higher education in the 1960’s (Randall 1987, p. 223).

It was within universities that many young women gained their first exposure to leftist politics. In all western nations the new left served as an important launching ground for feminist movements (Jenson 1982). British women, particularly women students, were politicized in the 1950’s and 1960’s through their involvement in a number of protest movements including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the

Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and various leftist student groups (Randall 1987).

Participation in new left movements provided women with the opportunity to develop political skills, experience, and confidence in their abilities. At the same time, their exposure to radical political ideologies offered them the theoretical tools to explain sources of women’s oppression. British women also began to find out about the activities of women’s movements in the United States, France, and Germany through a number of journals and through their contacts with American women working in the anti-Vietnam War campaigns (Bouchier 1983).

While involvement in the new left politicized a number of women and provided them with activist experiences and political skills, it also proved to be an unsatisfying arena for women who were becoming increasingly committed to the idea of mobilizing for their own liberation. Women on the left found that their male comrades had little interest in pursuing questions of patriarchy and women’s oppression, claiming that

"women’s issues" were a distraction from a traditional leftist focus on workers and economic struggles. Women also developed critiques of the masculinist nature of

77 leftist organizational structures, strategies, and culture. As feminist ideas diffused throughout leftist movements in Britain, many women involved came to the conclusion that in order to mobilize for women’s liberation they would have to form women-only organizations.

Another catalyst for the women’s liberation movement was the increasing militancy among working-class women active in trade unionism (Rowbotham 1978).

Strikes by fishermen’s wives in Hull, bus condustresses in London, and sewing machine operators at the Ford plant in Dagenham received a large amount of media attention.

These strikes were followed by an increase in the number of women organizing and participating in workplace struggles, a situation which served to shake up the trade union establishment. In 1969 the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal

Rights (NJACWER) was founded. It was a moderate group composed largely of trade union and Labour Party women who were committed to working for women’s equality in the workplace. One of the main goals of the NJACWER was working toward the passage of equal pay legislation, and in 1969 they organized a large demonstration in

London around this issue. In 1970 the Labour government finally passed the Equal Pay

Act, which was to be implement in 1975. The NJACWER experienced a great deal of internal conflict due to the ideological and strategic divisions between the more moderate trade union membership and activists from marxist groups who became involved in the organization after its founding, and it quickly disbanded. However, it stood as a symbol of the political power of working class women and influenced women’s activism in the years to come.

78 The Rise o f Women's Liberation Movement

The women’s liberation movement took shape organizationally and in terms of public and activist perception following the first National Women’s Liberation

Conference in 1970 at Ruskin College, Oxford. This conference was attended by nearly

600 women and serves as a milestone for the women’s liberation movement. The conference participants established a loose coordinating body which was given no official powers, but was charged with providing a means of communication and coordination for the wide variety of women’s liberation groups that had cropped up throughout Britain. The following year, however, this coordinating body was abolished due to in-fighting among leftist sects who vied for control of it.

At the first conference, which was dominated by the socialist-feminist branch of the women’s liberation movement, the participants sponsored the following four demands: 1) equal pay, 2) equal education and job opportunities, 3) free 24-hour nursery care, and 4) free contraception and abortion on demand. At the 1974 National

Women’s Liberation Conference in Edinburgh two additional demands were added: 5) financial and legal independence for women, and 6) an end to all discrimination against lesbians and a woman’s right to choose her own sexuality (Bouchier 1983).

Following the 1970 conference, the women’s liberation movement grew steadily throughout the decade. Women’s support groups, largely concentrated in London, were the main voice of the women’s liberation movement during this period. In 1969 four such groups formed a loose collective called the London Women’s Liberation

Workshop, which came to epitomize the women’s liberation movement in popular

79 perception. The London Workshop expanded quite quickly, and at its peak in 1971 it had over seventy small groups (Bouchier 1983). The London Workshop also published an influential feminist newsletter called Shrew which was edited in turn by each group making up the collective.

The women’s liberation movement in Britain was highly decentralized, consisting predominately of small and locally organized women’s groups. Participants focused on politicizing "personal" issues such as sexuality and gender relations and promoting value and life style changes. Women’s liberation groups remained largely disconnected from leftist political organizations and from more mainstream political institutions and parties. Instead, they focused on constructing alternative institutions, often separatist, and free of masculine forms of organization and decision-making

(Rowbotham 1978, Wandor 1978, Gelb 1989, Lovenduski and Norris 1993). The organizational, strategic, and ideological forms taken by the women’s liberation movement in Britain distinguished it from the women’s movement in other countries such as the United States. In the United States, women’s mobilization tended to be more professionalized, and with a far greater emphasis on lobbying, networking, and promoting legal changes. A number of large national-level organizations, including the

National Organization for Women (NOW) provided focal points for women’s activism, enabling them to have a greater influence on national level politics.

To a large extent, the lack of connections between the women’s liberation movement and institutionalized politics was based on a feminist critique of party politics (Barrett 1988). For many activists in this movement, parties were considered

80 part of the problem and not the solution to feminist social change goals. At the same time, its also necessary to consider how the political opportunity structures afforded by the British state and political parties shaped the movement’s access to political elites and institutions. In her comparative study of women’s movements in Britain, the

United States, and Sweden, Joyce Gelb (1989) underscores how Britain’s highly centralized political and legal systems have precluded women’s movement participation in mainstream politics and political parties, thus contributing to the anti-institutional character of this movement. This particular configuration of opportunity structures also helps explain why the women’s liberation movement in Britain developed differently than the movement in the United States, where feminists often had greater access to governmental agencies and political elites.

Division m d Diversity in the Women's Liberation Movement

In the 1970’s a number of ideological and strategic differences between feminists intensified and led to divisions within the women’s liberation movement. The main split was between radical feminists and socialist feminists. Radical feminists utilized a sex-class analysis to explain women’s oppression, asserting that gender is the principle division in society. Radical feminists also displayed a deep mistrust of mainstream political institutions, such as the Labour Party, and leftist political organizations, portraying them as patriarchal institutions (Wandor 1978). On the other hand, socialist feminists had in common with leftist political groups a shared belief that class relations are the fundamental source of oppression in society, and that patriarchy represents a

81 particular form of capitalist class relations. At the same time, many socialist feminists recognized that mainstream political institutions can be important arenas in which to mobilize for women’s liberation.

The debates between these two factions erupted at the National Women’s

Liberation Conference in 1978. At this conference, radical feminists, a number of whom had begun referring to themselves as revolutionary feminists, clashed with socialist feminists over the issues of lesbianism and separatism within the movement.

A number of radical feminists were promoting political lesbianism as the strategy for women’s liberation, and implicated heterosexuality as the source of male domination.

Radical feminists demanded that the original six demands issued by the Conference be replaced with a single demand for "freedom from intimidation by threat or use of violence or sexual coercion, regardless of martial status; an end to all laws, assumptions, and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and men’s aggression towards women" (Lovenduski and Randall 1993). The controversy over this issue split the conference, and a national women’s liberation conference has not been held in

Britain since this time. Radical feminists gained control of the women’s liberation movement agenda, and a number of socialist feminists transferred their activism to the

Labour Party. The influx of socialist feminists into the Labour Party will be discussed more completely in Chapter Five.

Throughout the 1980’s the women’s liberation movement experienced a process of deradicalization for a variety of reasons. The arguments of radical feminists lost support over the years, and the number of women’s liberation groups declined

82 throughout the country. As feminist theory and practice were broadened, there was a growing tendency for the ideas of radical and socialist feminists to merge, in that sex and class oppression are now seen as interwoven and inseparable (Bouchier 1983,

Lovenduski and Randall 1993). In addition, the increasing involvement of feminists in political parties and the growth in municipal feminism, which will be detailed in

Chapter Five, signalled the willingness of many women to work for social change within the mainstream institutions of the state.

The feminist movement has also diversified as British women have organized around a variety of issues and created organizations along the lines of sexuality and race. Sexual difference and lesbianism continued to be debated among socialist and radical feminists. A number of lesbians became active in the Labour Party throughout the 1980’s, though many still feel that the party has done little to promote the rights of lesbians and gay men. Lesbians have also organized with gay men around a number of issues, including Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, which prohibited the

"promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities.

Afro-Caribbean and Asian women have sought autonomy from white women’s organizations by creating a number of influential groups including Brixton Black

Women’s Group, Southall Black Sisters, and Camden Black Sisters. In 1978 the

Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (GWAAD) was launched and served as a coordinating body for a number of black women’s groups. The black women’s movement has been instrumental in focusing attention on the issues of race in Britain and within the women’s movement. It too, however, has experienced some

83 divisions. In particular, a number of Asian women have reacted to the use of the term

"black" to refer to all women of African and Asian descent because it does not capture their experiences as Asian women. Participants in black women’s organizations are also divided over what should be the predominant focus of their activism. Some women want to focus on issues of Third World women while others want to emphasize the problems of black women in Britain.^

A number of feminists have also promoted a critique of the welfare state and governmental policies concerning women. The Labour Party was responsible for introducing several key components of the welfare state during its first majority government from 1945 to 1951. Labour leaders showed concern for the well-being of working class women in the formulation of welfare policies, but within a framework that served to reinforce assumptions about gender roles and the gender division of labor in families and societies (Koven and Michel 1990, Thane 1991). For example, feminists have argued that Labour’s housing and family allowance policies were intended to strengthen working class families, rather than taking into account the needs of individual women. Such policies also reinforced "the illegitimacy of the separation of the woman from the family, either in theory or reality" (Jenson 1982). Because welfare state policies are seen by some feminists as contributing to the maintenance of women’s subordination, they have focused attention on exposing "the underside of family life" by focusing on issues of domestic violence and poverty (Lewis 1992).

^ See Bryan et al., eds. (1985) and Coote and Pattullo (1990) for accounts of the rise of the black women’s movement in Britain.

84 As the major consumers of the welfare state, women also have recognized a number of contradictions in terms of welfare provision and services. Kathryn Harriss makes this point in her discussion of women and the welfare state:

While acknowledging that such provision fulfilled real needs and represented to some extent rights which had been won, feminists stressed that [welfare benefits are] delivered in ways which controlled women as much as it benefitted them (1989, p.34).

In order to address the inadequacies of welfare policies, women have organized tenant’s associations, community nurseries, and various campaigns in their attempts to have a greater influence over welfare provision.

Also throughout the 1980’s, major feminist campaigns were organized around issues such as abortion, pornography, rape, and domestic violence.^ Women have continued to organize for change within trade unions, and have made some notable successes in securing greater representation for women in the leadership structure, as well as focusing more attention on women workers (Boston 1987, Cockbum 1991). A significant mobilization of working class women has occurred in response to the closures of coal mines across the country and the resulting devastation to their communities. In 1984, 10,000 women showed up for a Women Against Pit Closures rally in Barasely, the largest march in Britain since the time of suffrage (Weir and

Wilson 1984). Women have also been active in the peace and anti-nuclear movements in Britain. Most notably, women, many of whom were feminists activists, played a

See Lovenduski and Norris (1993) for a more complete account of feminist mobilization around these issues.

85 central role in organizing the peace camp at Greenham Common starting in 1982 (Cook

and Kirk 1983, Liddington 1989). The catalyst for this mobilization was the decision

of the British government to allow United States missiles to be installed in Britain. The

Greenham Common mobilization generated tremendous media attention, and it also

brought together large numbers of women from around the country and led to the

creation of a national structure of support groups. Some feminists, however, saw the

Greenham Common mobilization as a distraction from feminist mobilization (Finch

1986).

And finally, liberal feminism, also known as "equal right feminism" has grown

considerably in recent years, though it has never been the most prominent branch of the

women’s movement as it has in the United States. Women in the professions, trade

unions, the Labour Party, and in mainstream women’s organizations such as the

National Council of Women have launched a number of efforts to seek the removal of

legal and institutional barriers to women’s advancement in the. workplace and in

politics. In general, liberal feminists believe that a change in sex roles and gender

relations will follow once discriminatory practices and structures are abolished.

CONCLUSION

As I have detailed in this chapter, women in the Labour Party and autonomous

women’s organizations have a history of both cooperation and conflict. Because

Labour women and feminists share many goals, they sometimes found themselves joining forces to work toward removing institutional and legal barriers to women’s

86 advancement in British society. At other times, important divisions resulting from class,

party loyalty, and ideological differences led to hostile relations between feminists and

Labour women. This chapter also has shown that "Labour women" and "feminists" are

not internally homogenous categories of women. In fact, the divisions within these

groups are as salient as the divisions between them, and these differences have had a

significant impact on how British women have mobilized to advance women’s interests

and challenge the structures and culture of British society.

In Chapter Five I turn to examination of women’s mobilization in the Labour party since the late 1970’s. The reasons for the increasing activism of Labour women and their attempts to alter gender relations in the party must be imderstood in light of the impact of second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement on the goals and ideology of women in the party. In addition, I will show how the internal life of the Labour party also has shaped the opportunities for women’s political participation. Specifically, I document recent organizational and programmatic changes in the Labour Party in terms of theoretical issues of social democratic party transformation, and in terms of gender relations in political parties and institutions. I highlight how gender relations are central to an understanding of how social democratic parties operate and how they change.

87 CHAPTER V

GENDER AND LABOUR PARTY RESTRUCTURING

The emergence of the women’s liberation movement in Britain and the diffusion of feminist ideas in the late 1960’s led to marked changes in women’s involvement in the Labour Party and conventional politics. Though participants in the women’s liberation movement in its early years had remained largely uninvolved in party politics, a number of feminist activists, particularly from the socialist-feminist wing of the movement, began actively participating in the Labour Party in the late 1970’s for a variety of reasons. At the same time, many female Labour activists and trade union officials were politicized by their exposure to feminism and/or their participation in the women’s liberation movement. Existing Labour women’s groups in constituency parties across the country were revitalized by the influx of feminist activists. Labour women also formed new organizations within the party, some of them modelled after women’s liberation groups, to promote increased participation and representation of women in the Labour Party. Labour women also developed feminist critiques of the party’s culture of masculinity and the internal barriers to gender inequality.

In this chapter I examine the relationship between the growth in women’s activism within the Labour Party and the party’s organizational and programmatic

88 transformations. I discuss a number of key events occurring since the late 1970’s that challenged the ideological alignments within the Party and changed the linkages between the party leadership, activists, and trade unions. I show how the party’s

"modernization" process created more conducive conditions for women’s mobilization within the Labour Party. At same time, I show how the organized efforts of the women in the party shaped and were shaped by these internal party changes. Finally, I highlight how an analysis of gender relations is central to an understanding of Labour

Party restructuring.

THE DECLINE OF REVISIONIST SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

Like all political parties the Labour Party has experienced its share of ideological differences and intraparty division since its founding at the turn of the century. In the postwar period, however, most observers agree that the Labour Party was ideologically unified by a consensus on revisionist social democracy (Miliband 1961, Coates 1975,

Shaw 1994a). Labour economist Anthony Crosland laid out the principles of revisionist social democracy in his work The Future of Socialism (1956). Revisionist social democracy differed from the ideological views of more left-wing party members who held a socialist vision of extensive public ownership as the means to overcome the economic instability inherent in capitalist systems and social inequality resulting from disparities in income and wealth. Crosland’s revisionist social democracy promoted the idea that the state should pursue Keynesian economic policies as the means to foster economic growth, maintain full employment, and fund the welfare state to ensure the

89 provision of social services and greater social equality. These policies formed the bedrock of Labour’s post-1945 agenda up until the end of the mid-1970’s.

The ideological consensus within the Labour Party was largely maintained by the close relationship between parliamentary elites and trade union leaders. As discussed in Chapter One, the Labour Party is unique among western European social democratic parties in that its finances and internal decision-making processes are formally linked to the trade unions through the Trade Unions Congress (TUC). As an external sponsor and the primary funder of the Party, the trade unions have had an enormous amount of influence on party policy, committee composition, and candidate selection through their bloc votes and control of vast financial resources. However, throughout the postwar period the trade unions have been largely supportive of the party leadership. Rather than asserting their institutional power by using their bloc vote to dominate party programs or impose a leader, the main role of the trade unions was to close off policy options (Taylor 1993). The generally non-confrontive stance of the

TUC allowed it to form a ruling coalition with the parliamentary elites that dominated all of the party’s power centers, including the central office, the Shadow Cabinet and parliamentary party, the National Executive Committee (NEC), and the annual conference. The domination of the party from the top was facilitated by the fact that the

Labour Party had a very small direct membership that exerted a limited influence on the party leadership.

The strong links between the party leadership and the trade unions had traditionally benefitted Labour governments by maintaining political and social stability

90 in times of economic troubles. For example, when the British economy was hit by stagflation in the late 1960’s the Labour government was able to put in place a corporatist system bringing together the state, employers, and unions. The "Social

Contract" of 1972 between the Labour Party and the TUC saw union leaders agreeing to voluntary wage restraints in order to control inflation. In exchange for wage restraints, the TUC was promised favorable social and industrial policies and granted institutionalized access to key policy-making centers.

The ideological consensus within the Labour Party began to break down in the mid-1970's as tensions grew between the party leadership, the trade unions, and constituency activists over the government’s handling of the economy and industrial relations. In 1976 Britain faced a severe economic crisis brought on by low economic growth and high public expenditure and resulting in a currency crisis. In response to this crisis Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan and his cabinet began to shift government economic policies away from Keynesian tenets of demand management toward monetarism. Callaghan demonstrated his strong support for monetarist policies at the party’s 1976 conference by stating "You cannot now, if you ever could, spend your way out of a recession" (quoted in Morgan 1990, p. 382). To help Britain recover from its economic crisis, the Labour government turned to the Internal Monetary Fund

(IMF) for a loan of $3.0 billion. As stipulated by the conditions of the IMF loan, the

Callaghan cabinet agreed to massive cuts in public expenditures and tighter control of the money supply.

91 Many trade unionists were highly critical of the government’s austerity programs and its abandonment of Keynesian policies. At this time the trade union left-wing was growing in power in both the old industrial unions such as the Transport and General

Workers (TGWU) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and the newer public service unions such as the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), the

National and Local Government Officers’ Association (NALGO), and the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE). Left-wing trade unionists began to withdraw their critical support for the party leadership and by 1977 the TUC voted to abandon wage restraint policy in favor of unfettered collective bargaining. The overall level of industrial disputes increased as union activists became more militant in their demands for greater workplace democracy and political participation (Morgan 1990). This situation was facilitated by the decentralized structure of the British trade unions which meant that trade union leaders could not control the outburst of industrial militancy led by local shop stewards and activists (Regini 1984).

The conflict between the Labour government and the left-wing trade unionists intensified in 1978 when Callaghan unexpectedly committed the unions to a pay increase norm of 5% for the next twelve months. An outburst of industrial militancy followed as a number of strikes were called in both the public and private sectors.

During Britain’s "Winter of Discontent" (1978-1979), the Labour government had to contend with striking workers all over the nation, including Ford workers, lorry drivers, health workers, garbage collectors, and grave diggers. The Labour government was

92 forced to give up its wages policy to restore industrial order, thus making Callaghan and other Labour leaders appear weak and incapable of controlling the trade unions.

The Callaghan government was unable to recover from the damage resulting from the Winter of Discontent and the public perception that its economic strategies were incompetent and it was dominated by radical trade unionists. In March 1978 the

Labour government lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons by one vote

(311 to 310). This event marked the first time since 1924 that a government was voted out of office by the House of Commons. In the May general election the Labour Party was defeated by the Conservatives who came to power with a parliamentary majority of forty-four. Labour’s share of the vote fell to 37.8%, its worst performance since

1931, while the Conservatives received 44.9% of the vote. The 1979 election signalled the beginning of a long period of Conservative Party domination and an escalation in

Labour Party in-fighting.

LABOUR’S "CIVIL WAR," 1979-1983

Labour’s "civil war" has been well documented by scholars (Kogan and Kogan

1983, Whiteley 1983, Seyd 1987, Wainwright 1987). The period between Labour’s

1979 electoral defeat and the general election of 1983 was one of great internal strife as traditional party alignments broke down and the Party became polarized between the center-right in the parliamentary leadership and the neo-Marxist left that came to dominate in many constituency parties and trade unions.

93 The structure of internal party alignments and policy making processes facilitated the extension of conflict within the Labour Party. As noted earlier, a critical mass of trade unions abandoned the traditional center-right intraparty coalition in the wake of the Labour government’s handling of economic crises in the 1970’s. At the same time, given the loose cadre organization of the Labour Party and the lack of an active membership in many localities, a radical socialist minority were able to "take over" the party from the ground level. By the late 1970’s Labour radicals were successful in gaining leadership positions in constituency parties across the country. Together the left- wing trade unionists and constituency activists formed a new power center within the

Party. They were able to control conference proceedings through the use of the TUC bloc vote and dominate the NEC from 1979 to 1981 by voting in left-wing supporters.

The division in the party leadership, split between the NEC and the parliamentary party, paralyzed Labour leaders in the central office who were unable to exert control over the radical activists or prevent the adoption of a number of left-wing policy proposals to which they were strongly opposed.

The radical constituency activists who took command of the party represented a new breed of Labour activist (Seyd 1987, Shaw 1994a). Some of these activists had been involved in student activism in the British universities during the 1960’s. They tended to be younger and more highly educated than the average constituency activist and more likely to be employed in public-sector white collar occupations. In his study of the Labour left, Seyd (1987) showed that during the left-wing’s ascendancy Labour’s traditionally working-class constituency parties remained more moderate while those

94 dominated by white collar workers were more radical. As I will show later in this chapter, a number of women who were involved in feminist activism also began joining constituency Labour parties during this period, and they played an important role in pressing for radical change in party organization and policy.

The Labour left offered a more radical alternative to the revisionist social democratic policies of the postwar Labour Party, insisting that structural changes in the

British economy were needed. Left-wing activists pressured the party to adopt more radical means to achieve socialist goals, such as the extension of welfare services, full employment, and a number of constitutional reforms to promote internal party democracy. The well-publicized radicalism of Labour constituency parties led to the public perception that the Labour Party was "... turning into an alienated and irreconcilable cabal of full-time revolutionaries" (Morgan 1990, p.390), a perception that served to alienate large numbers of Labour supporters across the country.

The success of the Labour left wing during this period was in part due to the high level of organization and tactical skill of a number of left-wing groups (Kogan and

Kogan 1983). Perhaps the most important of these groups was the Campaign for

Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) which was founded in 1973 with the goal of ensuring that the decisions of the NEC and the annual conference would be binding on the parliamentary party. More well known was the Labour Coordinating Committee (LCC) which was founded in 1978 and primarily focused on Labour’s industrial policy, trade union reform, and withdrawal from the European Community. Though activists in these groups were not completely unified ideologically, CLPD and the LCC joined with

95 Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist sect, to work together in the umbrella organization

known as the Rank and File Mobilizing Committee. These groups were united by a

common goal - constitutional reform - and their joint efforts were instrumental in the

introduction of an electoral college to elect the party leader and deputy leader and

mandatory reselection of sitting MPs.

On the other hand, the party’s right-wing was in disarray both ideologically and

organizationally. Right-wingers organized in the Campaign for Labour Victory, and

later Labour Solidarity, but they lacked the same level of organizational cohesion as the

left-wing Rank and File Mobilizing Committee. In addition. Labour’s right-wing was severely damaged when many of its most prominent politicians abandoned the party to form the centrist Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. In total, the Labour right

lost twenty-nine MPs to the SDP.

New party leader Michael Foot, who replaced James Callaghan in 1980, was widely perceived as a weak and ineffectual leader, and he was unable to unify the party or exert control over radical activists in the constituencies. The Labour leader’s position was not helped by the party’s institutionalized split in decision-making, which distributed power between the leadership, the NEC, the trade unions, and the Shadow

Cabinet. This was not as much of a concern in the past when the parliamentary elite and trade unions formed a ruling coalition. However, with the ideological divisions that had emerged in the party, the leadership was no longer able to exert a controlling influence over party policy. With control of the NEC and the trade union bloc votes, the party’s left wing was able to push through the 1983 election manifesto The New

96 Hope fo r Britain, which was considered "the most radical set of policies of any socialist party" (Mitchell, cited in Smith 1992b, p.6). Commonly referred to in the media and among politicians as "the longest suicide note in history" (Morgan 1990), Labour’s 1983 election manifesto committed the party to a number of left-wing policy positions including unilateralism, withdrawal from the European Community, the removal of U.S. military bases, an end to the sale of council houses, and the extension of public ownership. All of these policies proved to be unpopular with many Labour voters

(Crewe 1983).

The 1983 general election results sent a strong message to Labour about just how damaging internal dissension and left-wing radicalism had been to the party in the electorate. Labour received 28.3% of the vote, only 2.3% percent more of the vote than the Alliance Party that formed between the Liberals and the Social Democratic Party, and the party’s worst performance in a general election since 1900. In particular.

Labour continued to lose support among the relatively affluent working class in southern England (Butler and Kavanagh 1984). Following this electoral catastrophe, the party leadership, trade unionists, and grassroots supporters began to discuss the need for fundamental changes in the organization and strategy of the Labour Party if it was to regain its support among voters, unify the party, and contain the left-wing activists.

Before moving on to an examination of the Labour leadership’s efforts to recover from its 1983 electoral disaster, I turn to a discussion of feminism in the Labour

Party. Specifically, I detail the reasons for the influx of socialist-feminists in the

97 Labour Party, and the impact these women had on feminism and on Labour Party policy.

FEMINISM IN THE LABOUR PARTY

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s the participation of feminist activists, particularly socialist feminists, in the Labour Party began to increase {Feminist Review

1984, Perrigo 1986, Harriss 1989). The mobilization of socialist feminists in the Labour

Party was facilitated by a number of factors. The ideological and strategic disagreements being debated in the women’s liberation movement encouraged socialist feminists to turn to the Labour Party as an arena for pursuing their social change goals.

At the same time, the left-wing insurgency in the Labour Party and the general sense of embattlement on the left caused by the policies of the Thatcher government opened up spaces in the party for women to mobilize (Perrigo 1995).

By the late 1970’s many feminists felt the women’s liberation movement had reached an impasse due to disagreements among participants on a variety of matters.

As shown in Chapter Four, the growing ideological distance between radical and socialist feminists and the disagreements over goals and strategy led to serious divisions within the women’s liberation movement. From the mid-1970’s onward, radical feminists secured control of the women’s liberation agenda, and lesbianism and identity politics became the dominant foci of their activism (Coote and Campbell 1987). At the same time, radical feminists continued to discourage an involvement in male dominated political institutions, including the Labour Party, preferring instead to form

98 separatist groups that were consistent with their ideals of non-hierarchical, grass-roots

organizing around issues of women’s liberation.

For a long time the socialist feminist wing of the women’s liberation

movement had also avoided participation in the Labour Party despite their commitment

to socialism. To some of these women, the Labour Party represented the epitome of

a hierarchical and masculinist organization, and one that had little to offer women. As

one socialist feminist stated:

I had never thought about the Labour Party before, because it seemed too bureaucratic; I thought that you would get all snarled up in the bureaucracy and achieve little or nothing in the end (Sarah Roelofs in Feminist Review 1984, p. 76).

However, as the divisions between radical feminism and socialist feminism intensified,

a number of women’s liberation activists displayed an increasing commitment to

engaging the state as a site for institutionalizing their political and social change goals.

These women wanted to extend their feminist activism by reaching out to different

constituencies of women, including working class and black women, by making links

between gender, race, and class oppression. For some socialist feminists, this

commitment led them to involvement in the Labour Party and an attempt to develop a

more explicitly feminist dimension to socialist ideology.

The merging of feminism and socialism was the message of an influential work

Beyond the Fragments, a book of essays by Rowbotham, Segal, and Wainwright (1979).

For many women, this book provided a bridge from feminist activism within the women’s liberation movement to Labour Party activism (Weir and Wilson 1984). In

99 1980 a conference in Leeds to discuss the ideas advanced in this book attracted over

1,000 participants (Seyd 1987). According to the authors of Beyond the Fragments, the left could learn a lot from the women’s liberation movement in terms of it values and ways of organizing support. The authors claimed that the feminist principles of decentralization, grassroots organizing, and the politicization of everyday life were essential in building more widespread support for socialism, which would ultimately increase the left’s organizational ability to resist Thatcherism at the local and national levels.

Though many socialist feminists were inspired by the prospect of extending their feminist activism to include participation in more conventional political arenas, they maintained a skepticism of working toward women’s liberation within the context of male dominated political institutions, and they recognized that their attempts to demonstrate the salience of gender issues to the wider socialist cause would be resisted by many party members, both male and female. Women involved in leftist political organizations had long been derided by their male comrades for pursuing feminist issues and accused of drawing attention away from the central issue of class struggle. At the same time, these women realized that the institutional power of the parliamentary

Labour Party made Labour politics an important arena for organizing for political change. In describing her commitment to Labour Party activism, one of the authors of

Beyond the Fragments claimed that "In the absence of any socialist alternative [the

Labour Party] still offer[s] many socialists a way of gaining a wider political influence than, say, involvement in the women’s movement can achieve" (Wainwright 1979).

100 Also women who had gained experience in political organizing through their activist experiences in the women’s liberation movement had more confidence in their abilities and felt more able to participate in the formal arena of Labour Party politics (Perrigo

1986). In addition, socialist feminists believed that the participation of women in the

Labour Party would ultimately benefit the cause of women’s liberation by increasing their access to policy making bodies and resources that could be utilized to provide services for women, such as women’s shelters and child care. One socialist feminist explains her measured support for the Labour Party in this way:

I think its important that we vote Labour not because of what a Labour government may do for us women - I don’t think we can rest our trust in a Labour government - but because it gives us a better chance to do things for ourselves (Sarah Roelofs in Feminist Review 1984, p. 81).

The involvement of socialist feminists in the Labour Party was facilitated by a number of conditions within the Labour Party and in British politics that created a more conducive environment for women to organize within the party (Perrigo 1995). The internal debates over party democracy and the radicalization of a number of constituency parties made Labour a more appealing political outlet for women who had grown increasingly alienated from radical separatist feminism. At the same time,

Thatcherism led to a general feeling of embattlement on the left, and made women more inclined to organize with other threatened groups. Finally, left-wing party leaders at the local and national levels displayed a new openness to women’s issues and actively pursued the support of feminists, seeing them as allies in their efforts to promote internal party democracy (Seyd 1987).

101 Labour Party Constituency Women’s Sections

One of the effects of the diffusion of feminist ideas and the resurgence of women’s involvement in the Labour Party was the renewal of constituency women’s sections in a number of localities. As we saw in Chapter Four, throughout the 1920’s women’s sections were vital centers of women’s activism within the party. However, the general demobilization of British feminism in the postwar period affected women’s sections as well, and most of them did not pursue a women’s agenda during this period.

In his 1977 study of the Labour Party, Harry B. Cole describes the functions of the women’ sections as follows:

The Women’s Organization has a supportive role in the Party and a great many women members feel that their particular role is to act as fund-raisers, to promote education, to act as recruiting agents, to promote social activities, and to participate in election work.

While recognizing the importance of Labour women to the party. Cole’s observations also assign them and their activities a secondary status. It is true that many Labour women did define their role in the party in traditional terms - as the women who served refreshments and held bazaars to raise money for the constituency party. However, this interpretation does not take into account the fact that the Labour Party did not provide opportunities or encouragement for women to extend their political involvement beyond these traditional activities.

However, as feminist ideas spread throughout Britain in the 1970’s there was a clear change in the ways in which many Labour women defined their own roles within the party. A number of Labour women wanted "to turn the women’s sections outwards.

102 and make them more militant fighting organizations which took up women’s issues and fought for women’s rights" (Mildred Gordon in Feminist Review 16, 1984). As women’s sections became more politicized and active around a women’s agenda, activists from the women’s liberation movement began to perceive that the party was making a more genuine effort to recognize women’s issues, and their involvement in the party increased (Sarah Roelofs in Feminist Review 16, 1984).

Part of politicizing the women’s sections included wresting control of them from the male dominated constituency parties. Women needed the approval of the constituency party’s General Management Committee to form a women’s section, and some women resented the attempts of the men to control these sections. One Labour

Party activist describes the debate for a women’s section in her own constituency party;

Although I had never felt intimidated by men, these women comrades said they did and I felt they had a right to have a women’s section if they wanted one. So I was furious when one man after another got up and discussed what we should have, and particularly when a member of the Young Socialists said, ’I think its all right to have a women’s section provided you discuss such-and- such.’ I thought: ’who are they to tell us what to discuss - women will discuss what they want.’ (Mildred Gordon in Feminist Review 16, 1984, p. 77).

Like the separatists of the 1920’s, women in the 1970’s felt that it was important to provide a space within the party structure for women. Many Labour women preferred to organize in separate sections because they provided a more comfortable environment than the constituency party meetings where they had to contend with the "lawyers and accountants who shut us up" (Mildred Gordon in Feminist Review 16, 1984). In addition, the principles of separatism were well established in the women’s liberation movement, so new feminist recruits tended to prefer this separate structure as well. In

103 many localities the women’s sections were run like the consciousness raising groups characteristic of the women’s liberation movement. These women’s sections worked toward promoting women’s issues while also creating a sense of sisterhood among the participants.

However, the influx of feminists and feminist ideas into the Labour Party did not occur without conflict. Socialist feminists who came into the party brought with them strong ideas about the nature of women’s oppression and the best ways to address this organizationally and strategically. These new recruits quickly ran up against the entrenched bureaucratic structure of the party and the resistance of some Labour activists to an explicitly feminist and women-centered interpretation of political issues.

A retired female Labour Party senior officer says this about the debates over feminism in the party:

We [the Labour Party] went through a period in the 1980’s when we went through a big feminist debate. It was felt that the Labour Party had to be transformed. We had a number of feminist organizations that decided their role was in the Labour Party. But it was too much of a shock for the Party. It really was. Because they brought with them a different sort of tradition. The Party is still in many ways very formalized, and they brought with them a tradition which objected to that. It created the most terrible, terrible divide.

This problem stemmed in part from the fact that Labour women did not constitute an ideologically unified group, and therefore feminists had trouble building support among the wider female membership of the party. Some Labour women were unsympathetic to feminism because they viewed it as an anti-male and ultimately divisive ideology.

They also did not agree with the new recruits that the party structure must be revamped in order to open up opportunities to women. Because the new feminist activists were

104 often unfamiliar with the rules, procedures, and culture of the party they were at times

insensitive to the views and experiences of other Labour women (Perrigo 1995). They

were in fact sometimes critical of the women who chose to work within the present

structure of the party. The debate over feminism practice and party structure is

illustrated by this comment by a female senior Labour Party official:

People like me who had been fighting for the women’s cause since the 1950’s were seen [by new feminist recruits] somehow as being absolutely reactionary. Because I believed that things had to be done within the structure if you were going to achieve them. So we did go through a very bad period for about four or five years.

Labour’s new feminist recruits did not represent an ideologically unified group

either. As noted, some of the socialist feminists who got involved at the constituency

level preferred to organize in separate women’s sections that were more similar to the types of organizations in the women’s liberation movement. However, others argued that women’s sections were a form of institutionalized subordination of women and that women should not participate in them. In particular, women who became involved in the Labour Party through the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist organization, were strongly opposed to the idea of women organizing separately from men. These and other conflicts between Labour women over issues of organization, ideology, and strategy, have continued to be sources of debate and controversy within the party.

Women in Local Government and Municipal Feminism

As women’s sections were being started or rejuvenated in Labour constituency parties across the country, a number of Labour-led local councils began to establish

105 women’s committees to promote the welfare and interests of women within their own communities. This trend was particularly apparent in large cities like London, Leeds, and Sheffield where left-wing Labour councils interacted with well established local networks of women’s movement organizations to provide fimding and other resources for women’s services in local government (Flannery and Roelofs 1984, Perrigo 1986).

Local government women’s committees were instrumental in extending services such as women’s shelters, child care services, transportation, and health care.

The involvement of feminists in local government did not occur without a certain degree of conflict. Feminists debated the implications of taking money from patriarchical institutions, and how involvement in conventional politics might compromise feminist principles (Flannery 1983). However, many feminists felt women’s activism within state structures was also essential to the cause of women’s liberation (Flannery and Roelofs 1984).

The women’s committee of the Greater London Council (GLC) is the most well known of these committees. Started in 1982, the GLC women’s committee was committed to transforming local government and services by seeking mass involvement of those who would be using and benefitting from its services. Ken Livingstone, the leader of the GLC, recruited women’s rights activists to help the GLC develop policies on a wide range of issues important to women, including a number of issues that were quite alien to the mainstream Labour Party such as sexuality and violence against women. A number of working groups were established that were independent of the

GLC and open to all women. A coordinating committee was established to oversee

106 policy and the implementation of proposals. In addition, the GLC ran open meetings every three months to allow people to ratify the proposals of the committee (Flannery and Roelofs 1984).

However, this experiment in local democracy came to a halt in 1986 when the

Conservative government abolished all of Britain’s metropolitan councils, including the

GLC. The focus on what were perceived as radical feminist issues, the unconventional practices of the GLC, and the close association of Livingstone with Labour’s "loony left" made the GLC a focal point for the Conservative Party’s assault on the left and on local government throughout the 1980’s. As the Conservative government started to impose a number of restrictions on local government councils around the country, the funding for women’s committees and the services they sponsored were negatively affected. In some localities women’s committees were abolished or subsumed under broader equal opportunities committees.

Though no more than about 25% of Labour-held councils established women’s committees, they had important effects on feminist mobilization and on local government in Britain (Lovenduski and Randall 1993). For example, many women’s committees were successful in securing the passage by their local councils of equal opportunities policies that covered sex equality Second, women gained political skills and experience through their participation in local government committees. This has contributed to a group of professional feminists (sometimes known as "femocrats") who have created a broader network of women involved in municipal politics who are

107 actively promoting the extension of sex equality measures (Lovenduski and Randall

1993).

Labour Women’s Action Committee (LWAC)

An example of a more radical feminist influence in the Labour Party is the

Labour Women’s Action Committee, set up by the Committee for Labour Party

Democracy (CLPD). Formed in 1980, LWAC was a London-based organization committed to promoting the role of women in the Labour Party through changing its structure and practices. LWAC activists had strong links to feminist politics and the women’s liberation movement, and used feminist discourses to critique the institutional arrangements and the position of women within the party. One of LWAC’s fundamental goals was to open up opportunities for women’s participation by addressing the "obstacles placed in women’s paths by the Labour Party’s organizational practice and its patriarchal ideology" (LWAC Bulletin, circa 1982). These activists drew attention to the ways in party practices such as the time and location of constituency meetings operate so as to privilege men;

Work in the home is endless and time-consuming and leaves very little energy for [Labour Party] meetings which are deliberately designed to suit the timetables, habits, language, and organizations of men; and which almost always fail to provide creches or expenses for the child-care women are expected to arrange (LWAC Bulletin, circa 1982).

By improving women’s access to party policy and decisions making bodies, LWAC hoped "to bring down the apartheid barriers built up to keep women . . . out of forums that exercise political power" (LWAC Bulletin, circa 1982).

108 LWAC became well organized and obtained a high profile in the media and within the Labour Party (Perrigo 1995). In the early I980’s LWAC issued five demands which were based upon the demands of the Women’s Labour League (WLL) in the 1920’s (LWAC Bulletin, circa 1982). These demands show the concern of

LWAC activists with increasing the institutional power of women in the Labour Party by extending the role of the Women’s conference and committing the party leadership to the idea of greater female representation at all levels of government. For example,

LWAC demanded that the Labour Women’s conference have the right to elect women for the five spaces reserved for women on the NEC, rather than having them elected by the annual conference, and also that the Women’s conference have the right to forward five resolutions directly to the annual conference to be put on the agenda.

Also, LWAC demanded that there should be at least one woman on every short list for local councillor and parliamentary candidates as a step toward overcoming the bias against women in political office.

LWAC’s proposal containing its five demands was defeated at the 1982 and

1983 annual party conferences. They had received considerable support from a number of constituency parties, but were ultimately defeated by the trade union bloc vote. In part, LWAC was damaged by the close association of many of its members to the party’s left wing. Also, because it was a London-based organization party leaders could argue that LWAC was not representative of Labour women in general, which was not altogether untrue as a number of feminists in the Labour Party did express resentment at the attention given to London feminists and their ability to set the women’s agenda

109 (Perrigo 1986, Lovenduski and Norris 1993). LWAC still exists within the Labour

Party, but does not have the same high profile as it did in the 1980’s. To a large extent, this is because its proposals for increasing women’s representation have been taken up by more mainstream groups within the party, as I will show later in this chapter. However, LWAC is still credited with extending the internal debate about women and representation in the Labour Party.

In the following section I once again turn to an analysis of the internal life of the Labour Party by discussing how Labour’s leadership responded to its electoral crisis of the 1980’s through reorganization and policy changes. As we have seen, women played an important role in challenging the party leadership at the national and local levels, both in terms of party policy and gender relations. I will also show how gender relations, in terms of the status of women in the party and the content and presentation of its appeals to women voters, are central to the restructuring of the party.

THE LABOUR PARTY IN TRANSITION, 1983-1987

Following Labour’s disastrous performance in the 1983 general election the leadership mounted a more aggressive campaign to wrest control of the party from the left wing and to re-evaluate party policy (Smith 1992b, Shaw 1994a). In 1983, Neil

Kinnock was selected to replace Michael Foot as Labour party leader. Under Kinnock’s leadership, the Labour Party made inial steps toward "modernizing" the party in terms of its policy, strategy, and organization. The party leadership recognized that in order to win the next election it would have to make targeted appeals to the millions of voters

no lost to the Conservative Party in the last two elections. In particular, the Labour Party would have to win supporters among middle class voters in the south of England who had been turned off by the radicalism and dissent in the party in the early 1980’s.

Kinnock’s strategy entailed a number of innovations intended to re-organize the party at the national and constituency levels in order to solidify authority within the party leadership (Shaw 1994a). As part of this strategy, Kinnock sought to

"professionalize" the party by bringing into the central office a number of staff members trained in public relations and media skills. In addition, he was successful in placing his supporters in a number of key positions within NEC sub-committees, thus building a base from which the party leadership could exert more control over the policy-making process.

Kinnock’s efforts to re-organize the party were helped along by changing alignments in the party’s left wing (Seyd 1987, Shaw 1994a). In the early 1980’s

Labour’s left had formed a broad coalition that joined the Trotskyist Militant Tendency and the traditional parliamentary left, represented in the Tribune Group, around the common goal of democratizing the party by reforming the Labour Party constitution.

After many of their immediate demands were met, including mandatory reselection of parliamentary candidates and the introduction of an electoral college to elect the party leader and deputy leader, the party’s left-wing coalition began to break apart. They were divided over a number of issues, including the failed deputy leadership bid of left­ winger Tony Benn in 1981 and the efforts of the party leadership to expel Militant supporters from the party (Seyd 1987). Within the parliamentary Labour Party,

111 divisions between left-wing MPs solidified into two factions that came to be known as the "hard left," represented by the newly formed Campaign Group, and the "soft left" concentrated in the Tribune group.

The soft left emerged as an important internal alignment in the Labour Party during this period. Unlike their more radical colleagues in Parliament, Labour’s soft left was prepared to compromise with the party leadership. The ideological distance between the hard left and the right wing provided the soft left with an important position from which to influence party policy (Dunleavy 1993). At the same time, a number of left-wing trade unionists aligned themselves with the soft left, thus enabling

Kinnock to form a center-left coalition within the party from which to re-establish the dominance of the party leadership and the parliamentary Labour Party.

Though Kinnock and the party leadership had some successes during this transitional period in the mid-1980’s, internal party constraints prevented more sweeping organizational and policy changes. The efforts of the party leadership to reverse party strategy on a number of issues were limited because the party’s internal structure and methods of political coalition building were not radically changed (Shaw

1994a). Though the party fought a more organized and unified campaign in 1987, they still failed to attract enough voters away from the Conservative and Alliance parties to win the election. The Labour Party’s major accomplishment in the 1987 election was that it increased its performance against the Alliance Party, outperforming the Alliance by an 8% margin compared to a 2% margin in the 1983 election. This helped Labour to confirm its position as the official government in opposition. However, Labour only

112 increased its percentage of the vote over the 1983 election by 3.2%, winning 30.8% of the vote and gaining an additional twenty seats in Parliament.

One effect of the 1987 election defeat was that it created further divisions within the party’s left-wing. A number of left wing politicians aligned themselves with the party leadership, while other more recalcitrant left wingers "remained remarkably quiet"

(Smith 1992b). The party’s hard left coalition began to break apart as it lost a number of supporters at the constituency level, where it had been strongest, and saw its candidate Tony Benn substantially defeated in the party’s 1988 leadership challenge.

The acquiescence of the party’s left-wing put Kinnock in an even stronger position to further centralize his leadership power and promote more extensive changes in Labour

Party policy. In the following section I turn to a discussion of the next phase in Labour

Party modernization - the Policy Review Process which was initiated in 1987. I show how this review sought to alter the party’s relationships with trade unions and constituency parties, reform traditional Labour policy regarding the economy, security, and social issues, and draw in new voting constituencies, including women.

LABOUR’S POLICY REVIEW PROCESS, 1987 TO 1991

Labour’s third straight electoral defeat in 1987 prompted an even more sweeping change in party organization, strategy and policy (Smith 1992c, Seyd and Whiteley

1992a, Shaw 1994a). Labour’s Policy Review undertook the explicit process of modernizing the party in the face of socio-economic changes and the appeal of

Thatcherism to the electorate. The goal of the policy review process was to make

113 Labour electable by putting its policies in line with public opinion and winning back voters who had supported the Conservatives during the 1980’s. Party leaders sought to institute a new party program to replace the revisionist social democracy that dominated from the 1950’s to the 1970’s and the left-wing socialism that emerged in the late I970’s (Smith 1992b). At the same time, the party leadership was committed to ridding itself of what had widely come to be seen as electoral liabilities such as its policies concerning the trade unions, the nationalization of industry, and unilateralism.

In 1987, seven Policy Review Groups (PRGs) were established by the central office and charged with evaluating all aspects of Labour policy. The PRGs had seven to nine members each, drawn from the three institutional units that made up the party -

the NEC, the Shadow Cabinet, and the trade unions. The make-up of the PRG s was designed to facilitate greater cooperation between all the major power centers in the

Party. In addition, a Campaign Management team consisting of senior party officials and politicians was established to oversee the work of the PRGs.

In its efforts to further professionalize the Labour Party, the party leadership turned to a number of public policy experts and academics for assistance with the policy review. The Institute of Public Policy research, a pro-Labour think tank formed in 1988, was given a prominent role throughout this process, and provided the PRGs with its research findings. In addition, the Shadow Communications Agency (SCA), established in 1986, employed a number of advertising executives and communication experts to conduct qualitative research of public perceptions of the Labour Party and

114 its policies. The research produced by the SCA was used by the party leadership to

develop strategies for both the content and presentation of party policy (Shaw 1994a).

The policy review process culminated in several important documents outlining

the goals and strategies of a modernized Labour Party. These documents were easily

endorsed by the party conference, as many party activists seemed to agree with the

leadership that the modernization process was a necessary and positive step toward an

electoral victory in the next general election. The programmatic stance that came out

of the policy review process has been characterized as "neo-revisionism." It does not

represent a major transition from traditional Labour policy, as the leftism of the 1980’s

had been a departure from the goals and strategies of the party over the last several

decades. Rather, neo-revisionism "was essentially an attempt to adapt Crosland to the realities of the 1990’s" (Shaw 1993, p. 117), in that it emphasized that the party must

adapt to changes in socio-economic conditions and in the values and policy preferences of the electorate. Therefore, neo-revisionism represents a type of social democracy based on reforming rather than transforming capitalism, promoting economic growth, and abandoning state planning and public ownership.

In the policy statements resulting from the policy review process, the Labour

Party reversed itself on a number of its traditional stances. One of the most significant changes was the party’s reversal on its policies regarding the European Community.

Though segments of the Labour Party had been calling for withdrawal from the

European Community for many years, the modernized Labour Party has embraced

European integration for a number of reasons, including its desire to exploit divisions

115 in the Conservative Party over European issues and to present a forward thinking and modem appearance to voters (Shaw 1994b). The party also retreated from its unilateralist policy, a move which a few years earlier would certainly have led to divisive protests from the party’s left-wing who considered unilateralism an article of faith. However, the party left quietly accepted the party’s renunciation of this policy, in part based on a decrease in Cold War tensions, and also the knowledge that unilateralism was widely unpopular among voters. In addition, the party ended its commitment to full employment through Keynesian economic policies, and instead committed itself to "the fullest level of employment possible" in the face of changing economic conditions in Britain and throughout the world (Labour Party, Opportunity

Britain, 1991, quoted in Shaw 1994b). At the same time, the Labour Party demonstrated a greater receptivity to "postmaterialist" issues, particularly in reference to environmentalism. This is evident in the party’s publication in 1989 of the environmental policy paper An Earthly Chance, which offers the most comprehensive policy statement on environmental issues from the Labour Party to date. As we will see later in Chapter Five, the party also turned to an evaluation of its policies in regard to the status of women in the party.

The restructuring process instituted under Kinnock’s leadership has not only transformed the party programmatically, but also organizationally, particularly through greater centralization and direct member enfranchisement. Part of the move toward modernization in the party has been to re-evaluate Labour’s relationship with the trade unions and the labour movement in general. The unique nature of this relationship

116 means that trade unions have exerted a tremendous amount of influence in the party throughout its history. The external sponsorship role of the unions has long been their main argument for claiming a central role in party affairs - for example, in 1992 the political levy raised by the trade unions brought in $7.27 million of the party’s annual revenues of $12.75 million {New York Times, Sept. 30, 1993).

Labour leaders, however, recognized that the involvement of trade unionists in the political process was electorally unpopular, and that many voters believed the party was controlled by the TUC and trade union activists. In addition, the bloc vote mechanism, which granted the unions a tremendous amount of power in terms of annual party conference decisions and parliamentary candidate selection at the constituency level, served to discredit the party as a democratic structure in the eyes of many voters.

(Dunleavy 1993).

At the same time, the party leadership wanted to tame the "undemocratic" influence of the constituency activists. Because party activists are the ones who show up for meetings and hold seats on general management committees and other local party offices, they exert an important influence over the party, particularly in terms of parliamentary candidate selection. Research has clearly shown that Labour Party constituency activists have more left-wing attitudes than Labour Party supporters (Seyd and Whiteley 1992). Therefore, the party leadership sought to undermine the left- wing’s power base at the grassroots level by extending more rights to the individual membership.

117 A major way in which the party leadership attempted to restructure its relationship with the trade unions and constituency parties was through the policy of

"one member one vote" (OMOV), which sought to extend voting rights to ordinary fee- paying members in elections for the party leadership, constituency sections of the NEC, constituency conference delegates, and parliamentary candidates. In 1984, Kinnock unsuccessfully tried to get a OMOV proposal pushed through at the annual party conference, but was blocked by trade union opposition, particularly from the huge

Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU). By 1987, however, Kinnock was successful in reducing the power of constituency general management committees to select parliamentary candidates by establishing an electoral college in which a minimum of 60% of the vote was cast by individual members, with the remaining votes cast by affiliated union organizations. A few years later, OMOV was extended to voting for the constituency sections of the leadership electoral college and the NEC, and for constituency conference delegates. Kinnock’s strategy to reduce the influence of constituency activists by devolving voting rights to individual members seemed to have its intended effect, and by the late 1980’s the NEC was dominated by the right wing and the party in central office and the Shadow Cabinet were firmly in control of party policy.

Finally, in 1993 the party leadership moved decisively to diminish the power of the trade unions by limiting their role in conference voting, in choosing the party leader and deputy leader, and in selecting parliamentary candidates. Labour leader John

Smith, who had replaced Kinnock in 1992 following Labour’s fourth straight electoral

118 defeat, pushed through a new OMOV measure at the annual party conference by a margin of just 3%. This measure was particularly controversial in terms of parliamentary candidate selection procedures. Under the previous system, locals of affiliated unions controlled blocs of up to 40% of the nominating votes in each constituency. Under the 1993 system, candidates will be selected by local party organizations on a OMOV basis, thus ending union participation in the selection of parliamentary candidates. Smith and other Labour Party leaders and members felt this was a necessary measure to alter the public perception of union control of the Labour

Party. So by eliminating the electoral college and the system of bloc voting, the leadership extended party democracy, which was appealing to voters, while also centralizing its own authority by reducing union influence.

In the following section I turn to an analysis of the effect of party restructuring on the status of women in the party and on its attempts to "capture" women as a voting constituency, as well as how gender and gender relations are related to organizational transformation and programmatic change.

WOMEN AS LABOUR PARTY VOTERS AND SUPPORTERS

Changes in socio-economic conditions and voting patterns over the last few decades provided a clear indication to ± e Labour Party leadership that it would have to re-evaluate its policies and means of organizing voters in order to remain electorally vital. Significantly, the leadership recognized that it could no longer depend on the bedrock electoral support of male working class trade unionists. Not only was Labour’s

119 "natural constituency" declining in size, but it was also increasingly likely to vote for the Conservative Party. As part of its restructuring process. Labour is attempting to broaden its appeal to a number of electorally valuable constituencies, including middle class voters and women. In this section I show how the party's appeals to female voters have resulted from the organized efforts of Labour women and the party’s desire to attract a new voting constituency.

The influence of Labour feminists is evident in one of the party’s early initiatives to evaluate its policy stances toward women. Labour’s Programme 1982 represented quite a dramatic departure from the party’s traditional rhetoric about the role of women in the party and society. In fact, under the influence of left-wing feminists, the programme provided an overtly feminist analysis of sexism and gender inequality in British society. For example, this programme acknowledged that women’s inequality is tied to their position in families:

One of the main reasons for this continuing inequality is that women still carry the major, yet undervalued, responsibility for looking after the home and family. Most women in paid employment therefore have two jobs to do, while most men only have one (Labour Party 1982, p. 195).

Furthermore, this Labour Party document contained the rather radical assertion that women are "forced into economic dependency on men, subject to considerable stress and deprived of the opportunity to exploit their full potential (p. 195). In addition, the programme states that:

[Women’s] dependency is reinforced by the narrow stereotyped roles assigned to women by society. They are venerated as wives and mothers and exploited as sex objects. They are rarely recognized as "successful" and when they are, they are dismissed as exceptions - a man’s mind in a woman’s body (p. 195).

120 While providing an incisive analysis of the role of women in society, the 1982 programme also committed the party to a number of policies intended to improve conditions for British women, including a statutory minimum wage, the expansion of child-care facilities, and a positive action program to help women get the training necessary to get better paying and more highly skilled jobs. However, the 1982 programme represents a clear departure from traditional party policy toward women, as well as in a number of other policy areas. As previously discussed, the party’s left- wing was dominant during this period, and they were able to exert a controlling influence over all party policy. In the years to come, the language used to describe the position of women in society was toned down considerably, and party documents no longer offered an overtly feminist interpretation of gender inequality.

The 1983 NEC document Charter to Establish Equality for Women Within the

Party is another early example of the party’s efforts to promote the status of women in the party. This document provided nine recommendations that demonstrate the party’s rhetorical commitment to involving more women in the party. Four of these recommendations are as follows (quoted in Atkinson and Spear 1992):

1. Each level of the Party should examine its own structure to determine if women are being discriminated against and prevented from reaching the decision-making bodies.

2. An examination should take place of the timing of, and venues for, meetings to ensure that they do not deter women’s participation.

3. Constituency/branch parties should arrange for creche facilities and/or baby­ sitting services for all meetings, conferences, etc., and aid with transport if required.

121 4. We should ensure that sexist questions are not asked at selection conferences and on any other occasions when women are being interviewed.

These recommendations are evidence of the party’s recognition that there are many obstacles to women’s political participation. However, the NEC did not mandate any actual steps to be taken to alter this situation, leaving it up to individual constituency parties to decide how to address these issues. More sweeping measures to promote women in the party would not come about until the Labour Party’s policy review process was initiated in 1987, as we will see below.

From 1983 to 1986, the efforts of many Labour women were focused on the establishment of a Ministry for Women. Labour MP Jo Richardson was the major force behind this campaign. Proponents of a women’s ministry cited the fact that 24 other countries had ministries for women, including France, Spain, New Zealand, Australia,

Austria, and Germany, while many others had departments, offices, and bureaux devoted to women’s issues. Therefore, they argued that Britain needed to catch up with other nations in terms of its commitment to addressing the needs and rights of women.

This campaign was successful, and in 1987 the Labour Party pledged to establish a

Ministry for Women as a cabinet position when it became the majority government, and

Jo Richardson was installed as the first Shadow Cabinet Minister for Women. There was, however, a mixed reaction to the idea of a Ministry for Women (Atkinson and

Spear 1992). To some, it represented quite dramatically the party’s commitment to promoting women and women’s issues. To others, it was viewed as a rather cynical

122 attempt on the part of the Labour Party to appeal to women voters without actually spelling out its commitment to ending gender inequality.

From 1987 onward as the Labour Party moved forward with its modernization process, the party began to address more seriously the internal issues of women’s representation and Labour’s lack of appeal to the female electorate. For example, the

PRG s established by the party leadership were given the explicit task of assuring that women’s needs would be addressed in all areas of the policy review process. In addition, a Women’s Monitoring Group, made up of all female members of PRG s, was set up to make sure the PRG s achieved this goal.

Also at this time. Labour’s Shadow Communications Agency began to conduct research focusing on women in terms of their attitudes toward policy and the party.

Not surprisingly, researchers found that Labour has an image problem when it comes to women. Many continue to see Labour as a party run by and for working class men, and its "masculine" image scores negative ratings from large groups of British women

(Hewitt and Martinson 1989). While none of the parties rate very well in terms of giving a high profile to women. Labour Party researchers found that some British people think the Conservative Party actually has more female MPs than the Labour

Party. Though this is not the case, the fact that a woman was the Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister certainly has helped the Conservatives establish a higher profile among women voters.

The appeal of the Conservative Party to women voters is apparent in the gender gap in British voting (Labour Party 1993, Norris 1993a). With the exception of 1987,

123 British women have been more likely to vote Conservative than Labour. Class and age are also significant to an understanding of the gender gap in Britain. Research has shown that the Conservative Party has its greatest support among elderly middle class women while the Labour Party has its greatest support among young working class women. However, these groups do not balance one anther out. Older middle class women make up nearly 20% of the population, while young working class women make up about 7%. In addition, younger women are far less likely to vote than older women and they are declining in proportion to the rest of the British population. As

Labour politicians and strategists have begun to take more seriously the gender gap in voting, they have advocated that the party make more targeted appeals to older, middle class women (Hewitt and Mattinson 1989, Labour Party 1993, Labour Party 1995).

Since the late 1980’s, a number of party strategists and politicians began to cast the "women’s vote" as the key to winning future elections. Increasingly women are being promoted as Labour’s "natural constituency" (Hewitt and Mattinson 1989). This flies in the face of assumptions about how women are the more conservative sex. For example, many people have blamed women voters for getting Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party elected into office. Through focus groups and analyses of attitudinal research, party strategists have shown that women are more likely to respond to Labour’s social agenda than men. British women tend to believe in things like an enabling state that regulates business and industry, redistributes income and wealth, and provides a high level of social services such as health care, education, pensions, transportation (Hewitt and Mattinson 1989). Yet, British women continue to vote for

124 the Conservative Party. According to Labour Party officials, this situation points to the need for the party to evaluate how its policies and politicians are viewed by women voters, and more effectively communicate its policy proposals to different categories of women.

The MPs and Labour Party officials I interviewed firmly believe that the Labour

Party should overhaul its policies concerning women and its means of organizing women as voters. In order to appeal to women voters, the party must recognize that women’s lives have changed over the last few decades in important ways. The traditional family consisting of two children and a stay-at-home mother now accounts for just 5% of all households (Hewitt and Mattinson 1989). Therefore, party members are encouraging the leadership to respond to these changes in family and work patterns by making appeals to dual-earner couples with children.

A common theme among Labour Party politicians is that the party needs to show women how politics affects their daily lives. Often, women do not define their daily struggles and local concerns as "proper politics," and they show a lack of confidence when asked about politics (Hewitt and Mattinson 1989). Women might be more active than men on the local level in terms of visiting MPs surgeries and participating in tenants groups and school associations, but many women do not see this as political activism. However, Labour politicians are aware that local level issues that directly affect women and their families often serve as routes to women’s political involvement.

This recognition is expressed by a Labour Party activist and trade union official who relayed an example of a previously non-involved woman who quite suddenly became

125 active in local politics when her local council changed a street crossing that affected traffic at her childrens’ school. She reported that "there is no turning back" once women recognize the significance of the political process to their daily lives and get involved in political campaigns.

People in the party are also discussing more imaginative ways of involving women in Labour politics at the grassroots level. In order to achieve this goal, the party must recognize the structural and cultural barriers that affect women’s opportunities for political involvement. Labour politicians are aware that women’s family responsibilities can drain them of the time and energy to get involved in Labour constituency parties. This situation is expressed by a second term MP who says:

If [women] have to walk down the road (to attend a meeting) when they’ve just washed up and the kids have gone to bed and he’s sitting in front of the telly with a beer, and you think "can I be bothered?" Rationally, the answer is no. And you’re probably right to do so. So we’ve got to give [women] more.

In order to promote women’s involvement at the local level, the party needs to find ways to make Labour party activism more accessible and rewarding for larger numbers of women. This awareness is evident in the following comment made by a long-time female Labour MP:

What we ought to be asking ourselves is what kind of support does a woman with two or three kids really need to be encouraged to get active in the Labour Party. Why aren’t we attracting them? And if we do attract them, why don’t we keep them? Some of the reasons are obvious, but some of the others aren’t.

Many Labour politicians recognize that part of the reason the party fails to attract women is because it continues to depend on its traditional means of organizing activists and supporters. Historically, the Labour Party has drawn in many of its

126 participants through trade unions and workplace associations. As a means of mobilizing

women, however, this approach is less than satisfactory. As one female MP says,

"women are a much more diffuse target" than men, and therefore established party

efforts to attract supporters and activists often fail to connect with large numbers of

British women. A second term MP makes this point with the following statement;

We still are almost automatically assuming that . . . if we use our traditional form of getting information out, we’re meeting the needs of the voters. But we’re not, because large numbers of women are not organized in that way. Now that makes it much more difficult.

This idea is also expressed by a long term MP who acknowledges that if the party is to successfully promote itself among women voters, it must recognize that the organization of women’s lives, in terms of family and employment patterns, is often quite different from Labour’s traditional working class male supporters. She says:

We actually have to sit down and do a serious amount of work about the way in which we disseminate information. Within trade unions, the advantage you always had was that in a workplace people would discuss amongst themselves . . . they would moan and groan in the tea break. But there would be some exchange of information. Women working in the homes don’t have the time or the same back-up systems. And if they work in non-union establishments, they might not even get a tea break.

Because women are a "more diffuse target," many Labour Party politicians indicate that the party must more actively seek out women at the constituency level.

Labour MPs suggest that party activists should "talk to women at the school gates" as they collect their children, and ask women to explain what it is they want from a political party. Only by altering its traditional means of organizing voters and opening

127 up opportunities for women’s participation will the Labour Party be able to move beyond its image as a male dominated party with limited appeal to women voters.

At the same time, several Labour MPs expressed their awareness that British women do not constitute a monolithic group. According to a first term MP, the Labour

Party must move beyond its perception of women as "just one big amorphous mass."

Traditionally, Party officials have tended to target the women’s vote in terms of the issues of child care and education. These are of course central issues to many women, but it also promotes a rather one-dimensional view of women as political actors, rather than recogitizing that women, like men, are a diverse group with various concerns and issue preferences. If the leadership is committed to its goal of promoting itself as "the party for women" it must develop policies and voter appeals that are meaningful to a wide variety of British women.

It would be easy to interpret Labour’s appeals to women as a small and neglectable part of a process really geared at capturing middle class voters. Yet because "old Labour" was clearly not just a working class party but a party of and for working class men, any attempt to redefine the identity of the party for the electorate will necessarily involve a change in the way in which the party is gendered. As this analysis has shown, gender has become an increasingly salient cleavage in the Labour

Party since the 1980’s. This has occurred largely because female activists have organized around gender issues, such as female representation and a variety of policies affecting British women, and pushed them onto the party’s agenda. At the same time, as the party responds to changing environmental conditions and its declining electoral

128 support, many people in the party are showing a greater recognition that women are a valuable and also diverse voting constituency. Labour leaders have made some important steps toward evaluating how their policies and politicians are perceived by women, and have discussed how to attract women to the party at the grassroots level, though not necessarily in the ways suggested by female Labour activists. Still, the

British case highlights how important an analysis of gender relations is to the study of party change.

CONCLUSION

The Labour Party has been and continues to be transformed both organizationally and programmatically. Its restructuring process has created a more unified party, yet also one that is more centralized and oligarchical. As we have seen, the leader’s office and Shadow Cabinet have reasserted their authority over the party, the hard left has been silenced, and OMOV procedures have limited the "undemocratic" influence of left-wing constituency activists. At the same time, party restructuring has created opportunities for women and the promotion of gender issues within the party.

As the party seeks to modernize and make itself more appealing to a broad electorate, it has turned to women as a new constituency to court, and has thus started to pay more attention to issues of gender equality.

In Chapter Six I turn to a focus on female politicians in the Labour Party.

Through an analysis of interviews with female MPs, I show how the operation of the party and of Parliament continues to limit women’s access to political office. Also, I

129 show a number of ways that Labour women have organized to promote a women’s agenda in the Party and open up opportunities for women’s political representation at all levels of the party.

130 CHAPTER VI '

WOMEN POLITICIANS IN THE LABOUR PARTY AND IN PARLIAMENT

The representation of women in British politics, particularly in the House of

Commons, has become an increasingly contentious issue in recent years. The profile of women politicians has increased considerably since Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 and Britain’s Prime Minister following the

Conservative Party’s 1979 electoral victory. Throughout the 1980’s the number of women parliamentary candidates and MPs gradually increased in all British parties.

The well publicized advances made by women in Parliament, along with the less high profile increases in the number of female politicians in local government, stand as symbols of women’s growing influence in British politics. However, while women are beginning to break through the barriers limiting their political roles to voters and volunteer campaign workers, they continue to be disadvantaged in politics as they are in other social institutions. Women are still far from achieving proportionate political representation at all levels of government. Moreover, becoming a woman politician can

' Portions of Chapter Six have appeared previously in print in Halcli and Reger (1996).

131 be a difficult process and those aspiring to political careers often find the journey fraught with obstacles.

In this chapter I examine the experience of being a woman politician through an analysis of interviews with female Labour MPs and other British women involved in organizations committed to increasing female political representation. These women discussed the processes of becoming a politician and some of the obstacles women may encounter in the Labour Party and in the House of Commons. Their experiences illustrate how political institutions are "gendered" in that they reflect and reinforce societal gender arrangements and systems of inequality. In other words, parties and government bodies continue to operate in ways that privilege men over women. I examine how gender relations are evident in the workings of political institutions in

Britain and how this shapes the opportunities and experiences of women politicians.

GENDERED POLITICS

This analysis of women politicians draws upon recent theory on gender which calls attention to a structure of gender relations that sustains power differentials between men and women (Connell 1987). In this view, gender, like race and class, operates as a fundamental means of organizing social relations and creating "difference" among categories of people (West and Fenstermaker 1995). The behaviors, attitudes, and expectations of men and women are shaped by this structure of gender relations as they go about their daily activities. Gender arrangements are also embedded in the everyday practices and structures of social institutions including the family, work, education, law.

132 religion, and politics (Lorber 1994). These institutions are "gendered" in that they reproduce a system of inequality that sustains male dominance and marginalizes women.

Current research on workplaces advances our understanding of how organizations are gendered (Acker 1990, Beechy 1988, also see volume by Mills and

Tancred 1992). According to these scholars, conceiving of organizations as gender neutral conceals the fact that their structures and practices assume a male participant.

Acker (1990) identifies a "gendered substructure" within organizations that privileges male workers and masculinity. This substructure is reproduced daily in practical work activities, the division of labor and authority, and the routines and policies by which organizations are run. Workplace organizations support systems of inequality by offering male and female workers different types of rewards and opportunities.

Employers, guided by established routines of organizations and societal gender arrangements, perpetuate gender inequality in the workplace by allocating greater opportunities and privileges for men.

Political institutions are also gendered in that they reflect and maintain a system of inequality between men and women. Women in politics are often marginalized because political institutions are organized with the presumption that politicians are male. This means they operate under rules, practices, and organizational structures that sustain male privilege and limit women’s access to political careers. To investigate this gendered substructure, I first explore the cultural and structural barriers encountered by women seeking political careers. I then examine two ways that women politicians respond to these barriers, specifically the ways they have organized to bypass them and

133 how they sometimes challenge prevailing ways of "doing politics." To provide a context for this discussion, I begin by briefly outlining the processes of candidate recruitment and selection in the Labour Party.

CANDffiATE SELECTION

The 651 parliamentarians who sit in the House of Commons are elected from single-member constituencies by a simple plurality. British political parties control the candidate selection process for local and national elections." Therefore, potential candidates must win the support of local party organizations to be selected as parliamentary candidates. In the Labour Party, constituency parties seeking a parliamentary candidate may turn to the party’s "A" List which contains the names of about 180 applicants who are sponsored by trade unions. Sponsorship by a trade union gives a distinct advantage to a candidate in terms of status and resources. For example, trade union sponsored candidates may have up to 80% of their election expenses covered by their union. In addition, the sponsoring organization many donate up to

£750 (approximately $1,125) each year directly to the candidate’s constituency party.

The potential for additional campaign resources may give trade union sponsored candidates an edge in the selection process in constituency parties. (Norris and

Lovenduski 1995).

" For an extensive discussion of the recruitment procedures and candidate selection procedures for all British political parties, see Norris and Lovenduski (1995).

134 The Labour Party’s "B" list contains the name of about 650 applicants whose candidacies are sponsored by constituency parties. Appearing on the party’s "B" list is accorded less status than the "A" list because its does not bring financial sponsorship.

The party’s "C" list contains the names of candidates sponsored by the Cooperative

Party and cooperative societies, which are organizations that have been affiliated to the

Labour Party since its founding at the turn of the century. The Cooperative Party reached its peak in the early 1950’s and now sponsors fewer candidates than it did before, though it is still influential in some areas of the country (Norris and Lovenduski

1995). Since 1989 the Labour Party also has had a "W" list containing the names of any woman who appears on the party’s other lists. The "W" list is made available to constituency parties that may be interested in selecting a female candidate. Between

1989 and the general election of 1992 this list contained the names of 156 women

(Norris and Lovenduski 1995).

Despite recent increases in the number of female parliamentarians, by 1992 only

9.2% of MPs from all parties were women (see Table 6.1). Though the Labour Party has more female MPs than either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats, just 37 out of the 271 Labour MPs (13.6%) are women. As shown in Table 6.2, women in all parties also have made some progress in terms of being selected as candidates, but still accounted for just 18.3% of parliamentary candidates in the 1992 election. Women were selected as candidates in 138 of the 635 seats (21.7%) that the Labour Party contests, indicating that women still have a long way to go in terms of gaining the support of party selectors.

135 As detailed in Chapter Five, the Labour Party in recent years has shown greater

interest in increasing the number of women in elective office for a number of reasons.

In part, this concern is a response to the organized efforts of Labour women to gain greater political representation. In addition, the promotion of women in the Labour

Party is related to Labour Party restructuring and the leadership’s attempt to make the party more "electable." As we saw, many party officials and strategists believe that women candidates will help the party overcome its masculine image and attract women voters. The Labour Party took an important step toward increasing women’s representation when it instituted a quota system in 1993 by which 50% of all constituencies with vacant "safe seats" (seats traditionally held by the Labour Party) and

50% of its most winnable marginal constituencies (competitive seats the Labour Party has a fairly good chance of winning) must select female parliamentary candidates for the next general election. The aim of the quota system was to increase the number of female Labour MPs in the House of Common from the present 37 to between 80 and

90 following the next general election. However, as I will discuss later in this chapter, the party’s quota system has been a highly divisive issue within the Labour Party, and has attracted both positive and negative responses from the public-at-large.

GENDERED BARRIERS

Geraldine Ferraro, after her 1984 vice presidential bid on the Democratic Party ticket in the United States, coined what has been dubbed as Ferraro’s First Law of

Gender Politics. The law, simply stated, is "it’s easier for guys" (quoted in Witt, Paget,

136 and Matthews 1994). The sentiment of Ferraro’s statement is echoed by women politicians in Britain. Female politicians face a variety of barriers resulting from women’s positions in social institutions. The gendered images, expectations, and responsibilities associated with women’s traditional activities in societies often create obstacles for women interested in pursuing political careers. In this section I explore how societal images of "women" and "politicians" may keep women from seeing themselves, and being perceived by others, as potential candidates. I also examine the barriers women politicians encounter resulting from the structures, practices, and rules of political institutions that privilege masculinity and male actors.

Being a "Woman" Politician

Historically men have been expected to operate in the public sphere as the breadwirmers and civic leaders (Bernard 1981). Women, on the other hand, continue to be associated with the private sphere of families and domestic responsibilities, despite the fact that large numbers of British women work outside their homes. Women who do actively participate in public life often find themselves performing traditional activities as helpmates to men (Kessler-Harris 1981). What has long been thought of as the "proper" role for women in party politics is exemplified by Harry B. Cole (1977) in his study of the Labour Party. While clearly recognizing that women were not represented in proportion to their numbers as delegates at the annual conference, as representatives in party offices, or within the Parliamentary Labour Party, Cole believed that many women preferred to play a supportive role in the Labour Party. He stated:

137 . . . many Labour Party women who confine their activities to those organized by their Women’s sections or by the Women’s organizations, feel as fulfilled in respect of their political activities as any female member of the Parliamentary Labour Party (Cole 1977, p. 35).

Though large numbers of women undoubtedly found personal fulfillment through participating in politics in this auxiliary role. Cole’s personal observations reveal a commonly held assumption that women are not political "by nature" and are best suited to their traditional female roles of providing support services for male politicians. In the political realm, this means women are more likely to be campaign volunteers than candidates.

Because women have traditionally been positioned as auxiliaries to men in families and workplaces, they may have trouble picturing themselves as "candidate material." Several MPs express concern that some very talented and competent women are deterred from becoming politically active because they lack confidence in their abilities. Promoting women in politics, according to one MP, depends on "persuading women in the Party that its quite reasonable for them to think or assume that they could do a very good job as [local] councilors or MPs."

Even when women come forward as potential candidates, they still encounter the attitudes of some party members that politics is an unsuitable field for women. Because societal notions of the "typical politician" are deeply gendered, ideas about what makes a "good" MP may serve to disadvantage women seeking political careers. This view is expressed in a Labour Women’s Action Committee (LWAC) publication discussing how "hidden assumptions and attitudes" among Labour Party selectors privilege men in the candidate selection process.

138 First of all, [Labour Party selectors] thought, it is imperative that he should be a man. Second, he should, in order to feel at home in the House, be slightly balding and possess a pot-belly. Third, he should wear grey suits and a Labour Party tie. Fourth, he should be a professional, trained at Oxbridge and with some experience of the Law. Now anyone attending a selection meeting armed with these assumptions is going to deliberately tum off when a person walks in who is clearly not balding and wearing a grey suit, but on the contrary has boimcy hair, wears a pink dress and speaks with experience and authority on matters such as housing problems, child-care and the need for an economic plan that does not reinforce existing divisions between women and men. Such a woman will come slap bang up against widely held assumptions about what makes a good MP (LWAC circa 1982, p.3).

In addition, cultiural images of appropriate gender behavior may mean that women who are very confident and capable in the political realm may be sanctioned for not conforming to a more traditional female gender role. This obstacle is expressed in a publication by the 300 Group, one of the major groups in Britain working toward increasing female political representation.

The characteristics perceived as being necessary to a politician - opinionated, articulate, self-confident, assertive - are deemed suspect in women, who are more likely to be described as strident, brash, and bossy if they display them (300 Group Information Pack circa 1993, p. 4).

Not only does the image of a "typical politician" serve to block women’s access to political careers, but as women operate within male dominated political organizations their differences from male politicians are accentuated. In part due to its long-standing links with trade unions, the Labour Party is still perceived by many as a party run by and for working class men (Cockbum 1987, Perrigo 1995). In fact, 61% of the party membership is male (Seyd and Whiteley 1992b). Women politicians indicate that their minority status in the Labour Party and in Parliament often leads to a sense of being an "outsider." A Labour MP recalls how she felt after being elected to the House of

139 Commons for her first term when just 10% of Labour MPs were women: "When I came in 1987 there was only about thirty of us [female Labour MPs]. And it felt like being completely overwhelmed!" As these women report, being a female in a male dominated institution can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Because male privilege is maintained by differentiating between men and women, female politicians find that their "feminine" qualities are emphasized and scrutinized. Several women report having unwanted attention paid to their physical appearance and feeling great pressure to put extra effort into their looks and style of dress. Male politicians are rarely subjected to the same level of scrutiny with regard to their personal appearance. As one MP notes, while men are likely to get away with

"a few clean shirts and some old ties," how women look may receive more attention than their political work. A first term MP says this:

I get fed up with the times people in my constituencies say ’I saw you on television last week. I’ve seen you in that blue suit before.’ Or, ’Are you wearing that pink again?’ And I ask ’What did I say.’ And sometimes they can’t remember. But they remember what you were wearing. People never remember what men were wearing. They listen to them.

Along with the focus on their appearance, women report that the intense scrutiny of their political work accentuates their feelings of difference. Women politicians state that this attention results in a need to "prove" themselves and the perception that women are being held to higher standards than their male counterparts. Many women in the

Labour Party report that getting selected as a parliamentary candidate is much tougher for women. According to a second term MP, "men have managed to get selected [as candidates] just by being well thought o f . . . Because the boys supported them."

140 Women, on the other hand, perceive they must possess extraordinary abilities to gain the attention of party selectors. A first term MP notes that during the selection process female politicians are judged by a different criterion:

So you have a woman who perhaps isn’t the most brilliant performer, but certainly above average, and at least as competent as any of the men. But she will be singled out as not being up to scratch. Whereas a man doing the same job and same level of performance would not be.

Because they feel they are held to higher standards, women also report feeling additional pressure to present their ideas flawlessly. One first term MP says:

Sometimes women feel that in order to [participate in political debates] ... they have to know 90 percent of all there is to know about it. Whereas men feel quite happy getting away with 30 percent.

In general, female politicians feel they have to work harder than their male colleagues to gain recognition for their work, which can make political participation a daunting experience.

The experiences of women politicians in Britain are shaped by societal gender arrangements that make it "easier for guys" to succeed in politics. Gaining the confidence to pursue a candidacy, confronting expectations of women as helpmates and subordinates, and being judged by higher standards are some of the barriers women politicians report. In the next section, I explore how women’s opportunities are shaped by these gender arrangements as they are embedded in the practices, rules, and structures of political institutions.

141 Encountering Gendered Politics

While societal images that conceive of "woman" and "politician" as mutually exclusive categories contribute to women’s marginalization in politics, women also encounter structural barriers to their participation in politics. These barriers result from a gendered division of labor in families and workplaces that affects women’s abilities to acquire the skills, networks, funding, and partisan support necessary to pursue a political career. In addition, this gendered division of labor and associated cultural images of "appropriate" gender behavior are embedded in the very operation and practices of social institutions, including politics.

A gendered division of labor is a fundamental aspect of the structure of gender relations (Acker 1988). As women continue to be associated with the private sphere of families and households, they also shoulder a significant portion of the responsibilities necessary for its maintenance (Warde and Hetherington 1993, The

Guardian, August 9, 1995, p. 4). Childcare and domestic responsibilities may restrict women’s opportunities to become involved in the same types of political activities as men. As detailed in Chapter Five, Labour women are well aware that family responsibilities make it more difficult for women to attend constituency party meetings and annual Labour Party conferences. Thus, they have fewer occasions to develop the networks and political skills necessary to launch a political career.

The gendered division of labor in families is mirrored in workplaces and occupations as well and affects the routes that women and men take to political careers.

Male dominated occupations that serve as typical career routes to Parliament, including

142 trade union official and Labour Party organizer, provide a "training ground" for men to develop important political networks and skills. A 300 Group official notes how the gendered division of labor and occupational segregation have implications for women’s ability to launch political careers:

. . . men are career politicians, but women very rarely are. Men are out getting all these fabulous skills like public speaking, and women are at home having kids. Of course [women] are capable of standing up and talking to a room full of 200 or 300 people, but they are not going to have the confidence to do it.

Being shut out of the occupational and political networks that lead to political careers can block women’s access to the financial support necessary to pursue candidacy. Because the Labour Party has limited resources to aid prospective parliamentary candidates, both men and women experience financial burdens when running for office. Men, however, often have other sources of sponsorship, particularly from trade unions which rarely sponsor women. In the 1992 election, for example, 90% of all trade union sponsored candidates were men (Emily’s List U.K., 1993a).

In some instances, the unwillingness of party elites to offer adequate support to female candidates is due to the fact that women are often selected or nominated for seats their party has little hope of winning. For example, though the Labour Party selected 138 female candidates for the 1992 general election, 101 of them ran in "safe seats" of other parties, thus showing that few female candidates were serious contenders

(Norris 1994).

Part of the reason women are not supported as viable candidates by party elites is that women’s work is often seen as less skilled and less valuable than men’s (Phillips and Taylor 1980, Steinberg 1990). Labour women commonly voice the sentiment that

143 women’s skills are considered less relevant than the skills men are more likely to have developed through their occupational and political experiences. For example, a first term MP notes that a significant part of the candidate selection process hinges on

"whether you can make a rousing speech to the party faithful." She explains how this bias towards prospective candidates with stirring oratory abilities overlooks individuals, typically women, with equally relevant yet different types of political skills:

Perhaps a more measured assessment of how effective you will be as a parliamentarian would be how well organized you are, whether you are sympathetic to your constituents, whether you are able to deal with their problems. Whether you are effective on television. And lots of women have strengths in some of these other parts that are requirements [for being] a good MP but which are not given such high priority in the selection process.

Her account illustrates how deeply gendered notions of the skills and abilities necessary to be a "good" politician influence the practices of parties and serve to lead to the perception among some selectors that women are less qualified and viable candidates.

Overcoming the lack of access to skill building opportunities, political networks and financial support, and the devaluation of their abilities are formidable barriers to increasing female political representation. Despite these barriers, many Labour women have the conviction and experience to pursue political careers and are seeking ways to overcome these barriers. This point is illustrated by a senior trade union official and unsuccessful parliamentary candidate who wants to run again in the next general election. She says:

I’ve got the confidence. I’ve even got the cash (to run a campaign) ... What I need now is a network - a strategy. I want some help with that.

144 In the following section I explore how female politicians in Britain come to recognize these barriers and seek ways to bypass them by organizing with other women and challenging the gendered practices of political institutions.

GENDERED RESPONSES

Developing responses to gendered barriers hinges in part upon women recognizing that disadvantages they experience as politicians are attributable to a masculinist political system and gender-stereotyped notions of what a "typical" politician should be. In order to identify and respond to this system of inequality, women politicians draw on their pre-existing beliefs, feminist ideology, or experiences of discrimination within politics. While the women in this study do not necessarily embrace a feminist identity, most of them nevertheless perceive British politics as favoring male politicians and a more masculine political style. This recognition allows

Labour women to develop both individual and collective responses to the barriers blocking their pathways to political office. I focus on two of these responses. First, women bypass barriers by forming their own professional organizations and informal networks. Second, women directly challenge masculinist ways of "doing politics" by trying to change practices and routines of political institutions.

Bypassing the Barriers

As the experiences described earlier illustrate, women often find it difficult to acquire the skills, networks, and the partisan and financial support to launch political

145 campaigns. A primary way in which women compensate for these barriers is to create their own sources of funding and organizational support. In recent years women in

Britain have formed professional organizations and informal support mechanisms to promote women candidates at all levels of government.

The 300 Group was the first British organization devoted to increasing the number of women in Parliament. With the slogan "A Woman’s Place is in the House of Commons," the 300 Group was launched in 1980 as an all-party effort to increase the number of female parliamentarians to a minimiun of 300, or roughly half of the 651 members. Lesely Abdela, a former researcher in the House of Commons, founded this organization after her experiences as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party in

1979 made her aware of the obstacles encountered by women in politics.

The 300 Group has a London-based national office that is staffed by a paid coordinator and volimteers. Its policy is set by the 10-member Board of Management elected by the 300 Group membership. In addition, the 300 Group presently has 12 branch groups around the country, though they vary widely in terms of their level of activity. As its not a highly centralized organization, the branches are free to decide on their own programs and run their own activities. Members of local branches who pay a small membership fee may also join the national organization and participate in all the activities sponsored by the national office. Presently, the 300 Group has about

1,500 official members, but according to a group official the organization could easily double their membership if they coimted the people who attend branch meetings but do not join the national organization.

146 A primary focus of the 300 Group is providing skills training for women interested in pursuing parliamentary careers. For example, the group sponsors learning weekends that are attended by women from all parties, as well as intensive one-day training courses covering topics such as getting involved in local government or getting a public appointment, training in public speaking, and writing a curriculum vitae for a party candidate selection committee. Media training is an important aspect of the 300

Group’s training program, and the group holds one-day workshops in a rented television studio to allow women to practice presentation skills and public speaking.

In addition, the 300 Group sponsors consultative conferences to which it invites speakers, often an MP or Cabinet member, to address its membership on a variety of issues. Group members maintain that they want to educate women about a wide range of political issues in order to help them launch successful campaigns and overcome the tendency for people to think that female politicians are only interested in "social" issues such as child care and health services. A 300 Group official made this point when she talked about organizing consultative conferences:

. . . we try to have issues that are not perceived as "women’s issues". So we have economics rather than ’there should be a creche in the House of Commons.’ Its very easy to have women be marginalized and have them confined to women’s issues.

The 300 Group takes a strictly non-partisan approach to the political parties and does not comment on public issues. Its membership includes Conservative, Liberal, and

Labour MP’s, Members of European Parliament (MEPs), Peeresses and Peers, and other politically active women and men. A slight majority of its subscribers, however, are

147 members of the Conservative Party. Maintaining a non-partisan stance has created some difficulties for 300 Group officials in its dealings with the political parties and its membership. Officials recognize that many members suspect that the group is actually more supportive of one party or the other. A 300 Group employee says "Every single party seems to think we are more biased toward the others. We’re not at all."

In addition, the 300 Group’s refusal to comment on public issues has became an issue of debate within the group. Some members feel that the group should move toward taking a stance on a limited number of issues in order to demonstrate its relevance to the British public. For example, the 300 Group may not want to comment on a highly controversial issue such as abortion, but may speak in favor of a less hotly debated issue, such as the reform of parliamentary sitting hours. On the other hand, more politically ambitious group members want the 300 Group to remain unattached to political issues and maintain its primary commitment simply to advancing women in

British politics.

The Labour women interviewed for this study did not express a high level of support for the 300 Group. One long-time MP says "I don’t know that anyone’s got to Parliament through the 300 Group. . . . I don’t think they’ve made a lot of difference." Many Labour women have little desire to work within a non-partisan organization. There goal is not simply to increase the number of women in Parliament, but to increase the number of female parliamentarians from their own political party.

A Labour MP expresses this view in the following statement:

I wouldn’t join an organization like the 300 Group that was solely concerned with getting more women [into Parliament] irrespective of views. I mean 1

148 couldn’t promote Margaret Thatcher. I would rather have a left-wing man than a Margaret Thatcher. I wouldn’t join an organization that was saying ’It doesn’t matter. We are all girls together. We’ll work to get into Parliament and the hate one another when we get there.’ Its up to the party to push its own.

The original mission of the 300 Group has been changed somewhat in the last few years. The group has now broadened its goals to include the promotion of women in local government, the European Parliament, and public life in general. In part, the

300 Group’s change of focus is a response to competition from the parties themselves.

In recent years, both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have begun to develop their own mechanisms for funding and promoting women. As we will see below, the Labour Party has taken the most active role in promoting more women in politics.

Two organizations. Labour Women’s Network (LWN) and Emily’s List U.K.

(Early Money is Like Yeast), have emerged to provide skills training and financial assistance for Labour women interested in pursuing parliamentary careers. LWN was started in 1988 by four women discouraged by the fact that only twenty-one Labour women were elected to Parliament in the 1987 general election. LWN currently has over 500 subscribers, and its membership is open only to female members of the

Labour Party. The group founders define LWN as "an enabling, rather than a policy making organization which encourages, assists, and supports Labour women who want to stand for public office" (LWN pamphlet, circa 1987).

LWN’s first order of business was to conduct a survey of the ninety-two female

Labour parliamentary candidates in 1987. The results of the survey indicated that the candidates felt they needed more "information and training" while standing for political

149 offices, and these goals became the focus of LWN activity (LWN 1994a). Much like

the 300 Group, LWN sponsors seminars and workshops to provide prospective

candidates with training in public speaking and media skills, instructions on writing a

curriculum vitae for a selection committee, and information about public policies. For

example, at a training session in Manchester topics covered included "assertiveness and

power, time management, selection procedures, and speech preparation." Women

attending this training session also presented a short speech that was video recorded, and then received feedback on their performance along "with tips for packing more punch to a meeting." (LWN 1993). LWN also sponsors social events "to enable women to build up networking links" among themselves (LWN pamphlet, circa 1987).

From 1988 to 1991, LWN was devoted to supporting women parliamentary candidates for the 1992 general election. Their efforts included circulating lists of

LWN subscribers interested in being selected as candidates to constituency parties, and operating a helpline for women needing advice on getting selected for a seat and finding out which Labour constituencies were seeking candidates. Since the 1992 election, LWN has expanded its mission to helping women gain seats in the European

Parliament and in local government. LWN also has published the "Uphill All the Way" series to help Labour women who are interested in pursuing candidacies for Parliament, the European Parliament, or local government seats (LWN 1994b, 1995). This series reads like a political instruction manual in that it outlines in great detail the Labour

Party’s complicated selection procedures and offers advice on choosing a constituency to target for selection, writing a selection statement, and dealing with interviews by

150 selection committees. A LWN official notes that "there is a tendency to keep the selection process very opaque, and that benefits men" {New Statesman and Society,

February 25, 1994, p.7). By demystifying the selection procedures, LWN hopes to encourage more women to stand for office. Labour men also have found this series helpful in their quests for candidacies, and a LWN official notes that "[the ’Uphill All the Way guides are] bought by an awfid lot of men as well, who don’t know much about the process either. They slip us secret notes asking us to send them a copy" {New

Statesman and Society, February 25, 1994, p.7).

In response to the success of LWN, a British version of the American Emily’s

List was organized in February 1993 to encourage women to donate money to help

Labour women launch political careers. Barbara Follett, the founder of Emily’s List

U.K., sees this organization as a natural extension of the work being done by LWN.

As an organization committed to raising political money for women, its sponsors recognize that women are resource disadvantaged compared to men, and need money as well as training opportunities in order to launch successful candidacies. Follett says:

. . . it was clear after the last General Election that many women could not stand without financial support at the very start. Now money could go, for instance, to a woman who comes to us and says ’I live in Leeds but I want to try for a seat in Liverpool. That means at least 40 trips between the two cities, and 1 simply can’t afford it. {The Guardian, January 27, 1993, p.8).

The American version of Emily’s List has been quite successful in helping women get elected to Congress and as governors. For the 1992 election, Emily’s List raised $6.2 million and distributed it to 44 candidates {The Guardian, January 27, 1993,

151 p. 8). Ann Richards, former Texas governor, describes how the American Emily’s List helped her to laimch a successful political campaign:

My opponent had pockets deeper than a Texas oil well. But I had Emily’s List on my side and I struck political gold {The Guardian, January 27, 1993, p.8).

The short length of British general election campaigns (lasting approximately 4 weeks from the date the election is annoimced to the actual polling day) and electoral spending laws mean that British elections are not nearly as expensive as their American counterparts. The greatest need for potential candidates is access to resources and funding necessary to get selected as a candidate by a local constituency party in the first place. Therefore, the primary goal of Emily’s List U.K. is to sponsor a select number of women and help them get selected for parliamentary candidacies. The founders asked donors to give £30 (approximately $45) over a five year period or make a one-time payment of £150. So far, about 1,000 women have donated money to Emily’s List

U.K. The money raised is to be used to help those women chosen for sponsorship pay for training, buying a "professional" wardrobe, travel to selection meetings and accommodation, child care, and other expenses women encounter when running for a political office.

Initially, Emily’s List U.K. selected eleven women for sponsorship out of a total of over 100 applications. As a requirement for sponsorship, these women had to be pro- choice, which created a certain degree of controversy in the Labour Party and the media. The women selected range in age from 38 to 48. Some of them have stood for

Parliament in previous elections, and most have been coimcillors in local government.

They come from a variety of occupations including charity worker, teacher, tax

152 manager, and MP researcher. Emily’s List provided these women with £1,000 each

(approximately $1,500) and additional training worth over £5,000 (approximately

$7,500). As of December 1995, two of these eleven women had been selected as parliamentary candidates.

In the Spring of 1995, the Emily’s List U.K. board decided to put to use its remaining funds, but did not want to go through the long process of selecting additional women for sponsorship, as it had taken over five months to select the first eleven women. Because many constituency parties had already started the process of selecting parliamentary candidates, the board introduced the Emily Grant Scheme to more quickly distribute funds to a larger number of Labour women seeking seats. As of December

1995, £9,000 (approximately $12,000) in grants had been paid out, with grants ranging in size from £175 (approximately $263.00) to £475 (approximately $713.00) (Emily’s

List U.K. official, December 1995, personal correspondence). A total of 38 Labour women received these funds, eight of whom have been selected as candidates as of

December 1995. In the future, Emily’s List organizers hope to expand its financial capacities to sponsor women for local councils and the European Parliament.

While Labour Women’s Network and Emily’s List U.K. are not officially affiliated to the Labour Party, they have very strong ties with the parliamentary Labour

Party and the party’s central office. Members of these organizations note that remaining independent from the Labour Party was important so that they would not be subject to all the rules and regulations of the party that would complicate its procedures for selecting candidates and distributing funds. As an Emily’ List U.K. member notes.

153 one of the great things about her organization is that its "completely undemocratic," and therefore in her eyes, more efficient and beneficial to women seeking candidacies than working through the institutional procedures of the Labour Party.

Emily’s List U.K. has generated quite a lot of attention since its founding, and it has been successful in raising money for Labour women and focusing attention on the low levels of female representation in Parliament. Many British women, and a number of men, have donated money to Emily’s List U.K. because they believe in the principle that British political institutions should have more female members. A participant in a women’s movement organization expresses her support for EMILY’s

List U.K as follows:

Its quite exciting. Its the first time that women went to other women and said ’you don’t have to give me a lot, give me £40. Its like the States. So women who actually weren’t Labour Party or Labour supporters donated money. They felt they were doing something constructive to help women. It was the first time that anyone had ever asked them. And they were like ’yes, this is great, here, take a bit.’ . . . The success shocked everybody.

A number of women reported that the idea of women helping other women to advance political careers was new and appealing to them. This view was also expressed by a women’s movement activist:

The concept of women paying for other women is really quite new in this country. Traditionally women think that they don’t have any money because men have the salaries and they don’t. The thing about Emily’s List is that it doesn’t have to be a large amount of money.

While receiving the accolades and support of a number of British women,

Emily’s List U.K. and some of its most prominent members have been subjected to

154 some harsh criticism from political opponents and media analysts. In an article titled

"Pass the Sick Bag, Emily," the centrist Independent on Sunday noted that much of the disapproval of Emily’s List U.K. is directed at the fact that its "American" and represents the Labour leadership’s admiration for "Clintonia" (January 29, 1995, p. 9).

Others have criticized Emily’s List as an elitist organization committed to getting the

"right" kind of women - meaning centrist modernizers - into Parliament. In addition, the organization has been accused of offering an unfair advantage to women who are not qualified for high level political jobs. These views are expressed by a women in an editorial written to The Guardian:

Emily’s List, in common with all-women short-lists and quotas for women, is a mechanistic device that may help and empower those women who need it least help. In other words, those women who are already active and are participating in the selection process. More importantly, it gives substzuice to the charge that these women who have their position needed special help and are therefore not up to the job (February 4, 1995 p. 26.).

Supporters of Emily’s List U.K. have responded to these criticisms in a number of ways. Some see the media representations of this organization as evidence of continuing male chauvinism in the media and a backlash against women’s quotas.

Emily’s List U.K. organizer Barbara Follett recognizes that her organization is seen as

"a London-based, middle-class, fast-track organization. (The Independent on Sunday,

January 29, 1995, p. 9). For example, no women from Scotland even applied to be sponsored. But Follett claims this misunderstanding is due to the fact that its opponents are only looking at the big names on the organization’s letterhead. She says "Its a

Robin Hood organization. Those names are to attract money, because they are already

155 successful. The point is that they want to give other women a hand up" (The

Independent on Sunday, January 29, 1995, p. 9).

Emily’s List U.K. has had very high profile support from women MPs, most of whom appeared at its launching in 1993 and made public appearances on its behalf.

All but one of the MPs interviewed are involved as sponsors of Emily’s List. However, even the MP’s who are generally supportive of the organization express reservations about its operation and procedures. An MP discusses her concerns:

I support [Emily’s List] but I haven’t supported it particularly actively. One individual gripe: I have young children and my husband has had to give up work, and I have huge expenses [in London]. I can’t actually find myself in a situation where 1 can subscribe to pay for another woman to get [into Parliament] while I can hardly manage.

Several MP’s expressed the feeling that Emily’s List U.K., though well intentioned, still fails to comprehend the problems faced by many Labour women who might be interested in running for an elective office. As a second term MP notes, getting selected is "not just a matter of how much money you have to buy nice outfits and travel the country." In fact, systems of gender and class can intersect to create additional barriers for poor and working class women in their efforts to gain the experience and sponsorship to launch political careers. A retired Labour Party official notes that the professional and middle class nature of Emily’s List U.K. and LWN may deter the participation of many Labour women. She says: "I know it could put ordinary working-class women off. [The women in Emily’s List U.K. and LWN are] better dressed, they’re better spoken, they’re confident women." The required procedures to gain sponsorship from Emily’s List U.K. have also been identified as creating barriers

156 for some Labour women. For example, the Emily’s List U.K. application form requires women seeking sponsorship to write an essay describing the qualities they can offer as a parliamentarian. Though this may not present much of an obstacle for women with university degrees, one MP felt it was off putting to women "who hadn’t had the benefit of a good education." The fact that women have to go through such a procedure to attain sponsorship is also indicative of the continuing obstacles to women’s political participation. She notes that ". . . men have managed to get selected as MP’s just by being well thought of. They never had to write an essay because the boys supported them."

Emily’s List U.K. and LWN provide evidence of the ways in which Labour women have organized to help women who aspire to political careers. But Labour women also assist one another in much less formalized ways. This is apparent in the

"sisterly" feeling that has been fostered among women parliamentarians. Many female

Labour MPs report that they draw on one another for support, advice, and encouragement in their jobs in a male dominated institution. One MP discusses how much she values the informal support system established among other female Labour

MPs:

... Tomorrow night all the [Labour] women MP’s are going out for a meal together. It’s unheard of to be so social. It’s very noticeable. And the men that are coming in don’t have that same kind of support. So once [women] do get here there is a wonderful sort of support system.

As her comment indicates. Labour women have created support mechanisms to help them manage their minority status and overcome their feelings of isolation in the House

157 of Commons. These informal types of support are also valuable in helping women attain skills and contacts necessary to advance political careers.

From forming professional political organizations to raise campaign funds to providing emotional support. Labour women recognize the barriers embedded in political institutions and find ways to bypass them. Organizing with other women, as these accounts indicate, enables women politicians to create opportunities both for themselves and other aspiring candidates. In the following section I address a second way in which women respond to gendered barriers by examining how they seek to change political practices and structures that disadvantage women.

Challenging Gendered Politics

Dorothy Smith (1990) asserts that for a "gender revolution" to happen, women need to recognize and challenge the ways that social institutions operate. This idea is echoed by many Labour women who see themselves as directly challenging the gendered barriers and practices of the Labour Party and Parliament. These challenges take a variety of forms, including creating a more "woman friendly" space in an institution long the exclusive domain of men, and by working toward fundamental change in the rules and operation of the Labour Party.

One way in which Labour women have organized to challenge the gendered nature of Parliament and the party is through their involvement in the Parliamentary

Labour Party (PLP) women’s committee. This committee was established following the

1992 general election when a record 37 Labour women were elected to House of

158 Commons. One of major goals of this committee is to provide support for women politicians and women’s issues in the House of Commons. As PLP women’s committee chair Dawn Primaroio says:

The House of Commons can be a very lonely place for newly elected women MPs. By working together we hope we can ensure that issues concerning women are raised in the Commons . . . (Labour Party, "Parliamentary Labour Women’s Groups Launched," circa 1992).

The PLP women’s committee has been instrumental in drawing attention to the fact that the House of Cormnons operates in ways that discourages the participation of women. Committee members recognize that such seemingly harmless practices as the sitting hours of Parliament can create obstacles to female political participation. When in session. Parliament routinely sits until the late hours of the evening. This tradition clearly presents difficulties for anyone with family responsibilities, and may discourage people, particularly women with children, from seeking a parliamentary seat. Precisely for these reasons, the PLP women’s committee has taken the reform of parliamentary sitting hours as one of their main objectives in order "to make working as an MP a more practical option for women with families" (Labour Party, circa 1992). A second term MP describes her support for a reform in sitting hours, and her recognition of how this practice creates strain for parliamentarians, in the following way:

. . . there is no point in letting more women into the system to live a life [in Parliament] which is obscene, impossible, and revolting. The hours here are ridiculous. You do a job here, you do a job in the constituency, you get as neurotic and tired as I am today because you’ve worked all weekend. Why do you want to wish this on other women?

Specifically, the PLP women’s committee wants to end the long evening sessions and alter the House’s calendar to allow for fixed recess dates that fit in with school

159 holidays. One female MP talked about how the issue of parliamentary sitting hours

affects male and female MP’s alike:

[A reform in sitting hours] will actually probably make a lot of the male MP’s better family people. Because here we [the Labour Party] are talking about making policies for families, yet most people here abandon their families from late on Monday night to Friday. And they appear to boast about it and think it’s part of being an MP.

The long tradition of male dominance in British political institutions is also evident in the failure of politicians from both the Labour and Conservative parties to make child care available to people working in the Houses of Parliament. Noting that nearly every British department of state has instituted some type of child care provision for its employees, the PLP women’s committee has actively pushed for child care in

Parliament. Child care proponents have found themselves battling deeply held assumptions that child care is an unnecessary expense in the House of Commons.

According to a female Labour MP, the lack of support for child care in Westminster is indicative of the failure of male politicians to recognize that working conditions can create difficulties for female employees who traditionally have the primary responsibility for running households and caring for children:

First of all, that makes the assumption that only women like me whose children are grown are going to stand. [Also] it ignores the fact that the majority of people who work in the Palace of Westminster are women. They work as researchers, they work as secretaries, they work as librarians, catering workers, ancillary workers, cleaning workers. So child care applies to them too.

Another way in which party members have sought to create more opportunities for women is by promoting fundamental changes in the rules and operation of the

Labour Party itself. Most significantly, over the last few years a number of factions in

1 6 0 the party have pushed for women’s quotas for parliamentary candidates as a necessary, and perhaps temporary, means to force the party to select more women as candidates.

Supporters of quotas noted that compared to other countries, Britain ranks very low in terms of female representation in political office, with women making up only 9% of

MPs (See Table 6.3). According to them, the low percentage of female representation is not due to the lack of qualified women candidates, but to the unwillingness of male

Labour Party selectors to nominate women for parliamentary seats. They also note that in countries where political parties have instituted quotas for female candidates, women’s political representation is significantly higher than in Britain (see Table 6.4 for a list of levels of women’s quotas in other socialist parties). For example, the

Norwegian Labour Party has mandated that 40% of its candidates are women, and presently the party has 33 women MPs and 34 men MPs.

At the 1989 annual conference, the Labour Party took the first step in establishing the principle that quotas were a necessary means to achieving greater representation for women. The conference passed Composite 54 which urged the NEC to mandate positive discrimination to guarantee that women would make up a larger percentage of parliamentary candidates in the next general election. It also stated that quotas should be instituted at all levels of the party, including local party committees, the NEC, and the Shadow Cabinet. Composite 54 built upon the voluntary reforms set up by the NEC in 1983, as discussed in Chapter Five, but tried to give them more weight by urging party leaders to make them compulsory. At its 1990 annual conference, the party endorsed the target of having women make up 40% of the Labour

161 MPs by the year 2000, though it still did not mandate a quota for women's parliamentary representation. The party did, however, adopt a 40% quota for women on the NEC, on constituency Labour parties offices and delegations, and as branch officers.

Finally, in 1993 the party conference voted to establish a policy of positive discrimination for women in parliamentary elections. The party set a target of 50% women candidates in all seats where an MP is retiring and 50% of the most wiimable seats. No seats with sitting Labour MPs who indicated they wish to seek selection at the next election would be affected. This policy passed through the conference with little debate and with a solid majority of votes (54% to 35%) (Norris 1994). It was hoped that the final number of seats with all-women short lists would be around 8%, or around 50 of the 635 seats Labour contests. Including the sitting female MPs, this could increase the number of female Labour MPs to nearly 80 (Emily’s List U.K

1993b).

The establishment of a quota system for female parliamentary candidates was to a large extent the result of a well-organized and effective campaign launched by

Labour women and directed at all levels of the party (Perrigo 1995). At the same time, as discussed in Chapter Five, the organizational and programmatic changes resulting from the party’s policy review process helped to open up opportunities for Labour women to mobilize around issues of representation. As the party attempted to overcome negative public perceptions of itself as too "masculine" and broaden its appeal to women voters, the leadership grew more receptive to women’s demands for quotas.

162 They recognized that this issue could benefit the Labour Party in a number of ways.

As stated in a 1990 party document, "increasing women’s representation within party decision-making would not only be fairer, it would also be popular with the electorate at large (Labour Party 1990, quoted in Atkinson and Spear 1992). Therefore, it was hoped that the quota system would both increase gender equality in the party and attract female voters.

Despite the support of much of the party leadership in the early 1990’s, the quota system was a highly divisive issue within the party. Many saw quotas as a

"necessary evil" to overcome the unwillingness of party selectors to nominate women.

Other party members and MPs saw women’s quotas as a discriminatory practice that pushed forward inexperienced and unqualified women at the expense of a number of

"bright young men" who had been nursing parliamentary seats for years.

Constituency representatives attended regional consensus meetings throughout

1995 to decide which constituencies would have all women short-lists. A number of constituencies volunteered to be selected as target seats for female candidates.

However, other local parties felt that the imposition of an all-women short list was a violation of their right to choose their own candidates, and a number of them had to have these lists imposed upon them by the central office. In 1995, two Labour Party men who were barred from standing for seats in constituencies with all-women short lists filed a discrimination suit against the Labour Party. In January 1996 an industrial tribunal in Leeds unanimously declared that confining the chance to fight parliamentary seats to one sex was contrary to the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. According to this

163 ruling, the position of the 34 women candidates already chosen from all-women short lists would not be affected, but the party was forced to suspend all 14 outstanding all­ women selections. Surprisingly to some, the Labour Party decided not to appeal the ruling of the industrial tribunal. In part, this decision is based on the fact that the appeal process could take up to 12 months, and with the next general election expected in about a year the party could not divert the time and energy necessary to battling this ruling.

On the other hand, new Labour Party leader Tony Blair, who replaced John

Smith in 1994 following his unexpected death, does not appear as firmly supportive of the quota system as was his predecessor. In fact, in July of 1995 Blair announced that quotas for female parliamentary candidates would be abandoned following the next general election. The official rationale behind this move was that the present quota system would ensure that enough women would gain parliamentary seats, and therefore the policy would not need to be extended to the following general election. This move by the new Labour leader indicates the limitations of the party’s commitment to increasing women’s participation through compulsory actions. As I will analyze in

Chapter Seven, Tony Blair’s actions also may indicate shifts in the opportunity structures for women in the "New Labour Party," as the party has started to promote itself.

As this discussion of the organized efforts of Labour women has shown, women in the party are finding ways to respond to experiences of exclusion and discrimination in political institutions. These efforts range from working for a more visible female

164 presence in government to challenging the rules and routines of parties and political institutions. Labour women have challenged the cultural and structural barriers to female political participation by pooling their resources and encouraging other women to pursue political careers. As more women become involved in national and local level politics, they also have greater opportunities to challenge the political policies and practices that disadvantage women in all spheres of social life.

CONCLUSION

The experiences of women politicians illustrate how distinctions between

"masculine" and "feminine" become institutionalized and have far reaching effects.

Within political institutions, masculine privilege is evident in the gendered images of the typical politician and in the practices, rules, and values embedded in parties and

Parliament. This analysis of female Labour politicians illustrates how women may find themselves disadvantaged in terms of cultural images of appropriate gender behavior, their family responsibilities, and their occupations and skills. By meeting the institutionalized code of gender expectations for appropriate feminine behavior, women find themselves disadvantaged when they try to gain entry into an arena designated for men, in this case, electoral politics.

I illustrate how British women often come to recognize that they are disadvantaged by cultural and structural barriers to female political participation, and confront these gendered obstacles by working to create greater opportunities for women in politics. By increasing women’s visibility and working to change the system from

165 within, women continue to increase their political power and challenge the structure of gender relations. By revealing how institutions are gendered, we can understand more completely how male privilege is replicated, sustained, and challenged in our societies.

166 Con. Lab. Lib. Others Total % Total Women MPs 1945 1 21 1 1 23 3.8 1950 6 14 1 0 21 3.4 1951 6 11 0 0 17 2.7 1955 10 14 0 0 24 3.8 1959 12 13 0 0 25 4.0 1964 11 18 0 0 29 4.6 1966 7 19 0 0 26 4.1 1970 15 10 0 1 26 4.1 1974 (Feb.) 9 13 0 1 23 3.6 1974 (Oct.) 7 18 0 1 27 4.3 1979 8 11 0 0 19 3.0 1983 13 10 0 0 23 3.5 1987 17 21 2 1 41 6.3 1992 20 37 2 1 60 9.2

Table 6.1. Women Elected in British General Elections, 1945-1992.

Source: Lovenduski and Norris (1993) Notes: Con., Conservative; Lab., Labour; Lib., Liberal 1945-1979, Liberal, SDP or Alliance 1983-1987, Liberal Democrat 1992. Others represents minor parties including Plaid Cymru and Scottish Nationalist Party.

167 Con. Lab. Lib. Others Total Total % Total Women Cand. MPs 1945 14 41 20 1 76 1,542 4.9 1950 29 42 45 0 116 1,721 6.7 1951 25 41 11 0 77 1,349 5.7 1955 33 43 14 1 91 1,367 6.6 1959 28 36 16 0 82 1,487 5.5 1964 24 33 24 1 81 1,661 4.9 1966 21 30 20 0 71 1,605 4.4 1970 26 29 23 10 88 1,686 5.2 1974 (Feb.) 33 40 40 10 123 1,971 6.2 1974 (Oct.) 30 50 49 9 138 1,971 7.0 1979 31 52 52 7 142 1,929 7.4 1983 40 78 76 16 210 2,009 10.4 1987 46 92 105 15 258 2,004 12.9 1992 63 138 143 22 366 2,003 18.3

Table 6.2. Women Candidates in British General Elections, 1945-1992.

Source; Lovenduski and Norris (1993) Notes: Con., Conservative; Lab., Labour; Lib., Liberal 1945-1979, Liberal, SDP or Alliance 1983-1987, Liberal Democrat 1992. Others represents minor parties including Plaid Cymru and Scottish Nationalist Party.

168 Year % Candidates % MPs Sweden 1988 41 38 Norway 1989 41 36 Netherlands 1989 na 21 Germany 1990 na 20 Canada 1988 19 13 Italy 1987 16 13 USA 1992 12 11 Britain 1992 18 9 Ireland 1989 14 8 Australia 1990 18 7 France 1988 12 6 ALL 21 16.5

Table 6.3. Women’s Share of Parliamentary Candidacies and Seats.

Source: Labour Party (1994).

169 Canada (New Democratic Party) 50% Norway (Norwegian Labour Party) 40% Denmark (Social Democratic Party) 40% Germany (SPD) 40% Sweden (Swedish Social Democratic Party) 37% Finland (Social Democratic Party of Finland) 37% Switzerland (Socialist Party) 30% Spain (Spanish Socialist Workers Party) 25% Austria (Socialist Party of Austria) 25% Portugal (Socialist Party) 25% Belgium (Belgian French Socialist Party) 25% Belgium (Belgian Flemish Socialist Party) 20% France (Socialist Party) 20% Italy (Italian Socialist Party) 20% Israel (Labour Party) 20% Israel (Mapam) 20%

Table 6.4. Level of Women’s Quotas in Other Socialist Parties

Source; Brookes, Eagle, and Short (1990).

170 CHAPTER Vn

CONCLUSION: COMPARATIVE IMPLICATIONS

Since the late 1970’s Labour women have made some notable advances in terms of their status within the Labour Party. As we have seen, a number of socialist feminists entered the party during this period, in part due to the ideological divisions within the women’s liberation movement and also due to their desire to promote their social change goals within the arena of mainstream politics. These women widened the debate about gender by critiquing the culture of masculinity as it is manifested in the rules, practices, and organization of the Labour Party. At the same time, Labour women who were involved in the party at the national and local levels and through trade unions were also influenced by feminist ideas and became involved in efforts to transform women’s status in the party. Two mainstream organizations, Labour

Women’s Network and Emily’s List U.K., were formed to provide skills training, networking opportunities, and funds to help women pursue political careers. These are examples of how Labour women have organized to provide other women with opportunities to overcome the disadvantages that may result from lack of involvement in, or exclusion from, the occupational and political networks that lead to political careers within the Labour Party. Overall, the organized efforts of Labour women have

171 had the effect of increasing the salience of gender issues in the Labour Party, both in terms of women’s representations and a number of policy issues that concern British women.

I’ve also shown how internal party changes have affected the opportunities for women to mobilize within the party. Throughout the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, the

Labour Party has taken a number of steps to modernize the party in response to a proportionate decline in the size of its traditional working class base, a serious ideological split between its left and right wings, and a dramatic decline in its electoral performance. Changes in party organization and strategy created a more conducive environment for an evaluation of gender relations in the party to occur. As women pressed for a number of changes in party policy, they adapted their goals to the processes of modernization and the leadership’s overwhelming desire to make the party electable. In this process, more radical women’s agendas promoted by groups such as

Labour Women’s Action Committee were accorded less significance by the party leadership.

Women in other social democratic parties also have mobilized to promote gender issues in a number of different ways and with varying success. In the concluding chapter, I show how this study of women in the Labour Party contributes to a comparative understanding of gender and political parties by reviewing the experiences of women in other social democratic parties. In particular, I focus on how party institutional factors and political system variables have affected gender relations in other parties and shaped the opportunities for women to mobilize for change. In

172 addition, I offer a brief discussion of very recent changes in the Labour Party since the election of Tony Blair as party leader in 1994, and discuss some of the possible implications for gender relations in the party in light of the rise of "new Labour."

GENDER AND PARTY POLITICS

The political representation of women has been an issue for social democratic parties since they formed across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Initially, women mobilized around the issues of female suffrage so they could participate more fully in the political life of their countries. Many of these women were committed to using the vote and the accompanying political influence to promote the welfare and rights of women. After women gained the franchise, they continued working to increase their influence and representation in a number of different ways that were conditioned by the particular social and political circumstances of their countries.

The emergence of second wave feminism and women’s liberation movements in the 1960’s led to marked changes in women’s involvement in social democratic parties and conventional politics. Initially, some feminists were uninterested in participation in mainstream political institutions, preferring instead to organize in autonomous women’s groups (Lovenduski 1993). But as we’ve seen in the British case, the mobilization of women in political parties increased in the 1970’s and early 1980’s as feminists sought to institutionalize their social change goals. Social democratic parties served as an important site for women’s activism, and the agendas of many

173 parties were altered by the addition of policies that recognized and sought to ameliorate gender inequality.

Women have demanded and secured party reforms with varying degrees of success. In Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden, women in social democratic parties have made notable advances in terms of their level of political representation (see Table 6.3). Women have not fared as well in political institutions in countries such as Britain, Ireland, Australia, and France, where their representation in national legislatures is still below 10%. To a large degree, women’s demands and their success in institutionalizing their demands are shaped by political parties, electoral systems and other political variables in the countries in which they live. One explanation for variations in how women fare in political institutions focuses on differences in "political culture." Broadly defined, political culture refers to "the dominant values and attitudes toward the role of women in society and political life"

(Norris 1993b). A number of scholars have pointed out that women tend to do better in countries with more egalitarian political cultures, such as Scandinavian countries.

For example, in her study of Norway Hege Skjeie (1993) claims that women have done well in politics in part because "a passion for equality" is a characteristic of Norwegian culture. Therefore, both parties and voters have been accepting of an active role for women in the country’s political life. As noted, women make up 35.8% of all

Norwegian MPs, and within the Labour Party 33 out of the 77 MPs are women. In contrast, Britain is considered to have a less egalitarian political culture. Therefore, attempts to more fully incorporate women into politics have presented more of a

174 challenge to gender relations and been met with greater resistance by politicians and voters.

The "rules of the game" within electoral and party systems also structure women’s opportunities to pursue political careers. As we’ve seen, several aspects of the British electoral system disadvantage women in the political realm. Research has shown that women have more difficulty getting selected as candidates under electoral arrangements in countries like Britain and the United States with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post system. In countries with proportional representation and party lists, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, women have been far more successful in obtaining candidacies (see Table 6.3). In part, this is due to fact that "the logic of choice" is quite different in a proportional system where voters choose from a list of candidates. As Norris (1993b) describes, in such a system"... parties have a rational incentive to present a ’balanced ticket’ " to appeal to as many different kinds of voters as possible. In countries like Britain where candidates are chosen from single-member districts by a simple plurality, choosing a female candidate is seen as posing more of an electoral "risk," and therefore fewer constituency parties are willing to put forward female candidates.

The nature of party competition is also significant to an understanding of variations in women’s representation. The concept of party competition takes into account two conditions: 1) the number of parties, and 2) their position on the ideological continuum (Norris 1993b). Women do not fare as well in countries where the national legislatures are dominated by two parties, whether or not the parties are

175 ideologically polarized, as in Britain and Australia, or more like catch-all parties, as in the United States, Ireland, and Canada. In general, researchers have found that women do better in countries with a number of nationally competitive parties, such as in Italy,

Norway, the Netherlands, and post-unification Germany. Its believed that multi-party systems create more opportunities for women to get selected as candidates. However, there are cases that do not fit this explanation of the influence of party competition on women’s representation. For example, France has numerous political parties, but in the last election women were only 12% of the candidates and now make up just 6% of the

MPs. Because party competition alone cannot explain the low participation and representation of women in French politics, it is also necessary to examine the impact of political culture and political party variables to explain this pattern (Appleton and

Mazur 1993, Norris 1993b).

As I’ve emphasized in the study of Britain, the institutional structures of political parties also affect the success of women in politics. In particular, the ways in which parties are organized to select candidates can have a significant impact on women’s opportunities to pursue political careers. As we’ve seen in Britain, the selection of parliamentary candidates in local constituency parties has created a highly decentralized system in which women have found it very difficult to obtain candidacies. When the

Labour Party instituted a quota for women parliamentary candidates in 1993, it was met with resistance not only by those who believed that unqualified women were unfairly advancing in the party, but also by those who saw it as yet another attempt by the party

176 leadership to further centralize the party and interfere with the autonomy of the local constituencies.

In contrast, regional SPD parties in Germany have a powerful influence over the candidate selection process in local parties. Party leaders have strongly persuaded local parties to select female candidates, and backed up this commitment by mandating that women constitute 40% of the candidates on party lists. As a result, German women have been more successful in increasing their political representation, and now make up 20% of all German MPs.

As this discussion indicates, electoral and party system variables are essential to an understanding of how well women are represented in political institutions. At the same time, its also important to look at the particular configuration of women’s activism in different countries, both inside and outside of parties. As Lovenduski says: (1993, p. 15). .. the way a party responds to women’s claims is a product both of the nature of those claims and the strategies used to press them." An analysis of variations in women’s mobilization is beyond the scope of this chapter, but as we’ve seen in the

British case, it is as important to gaining a full understanding of gender relations in political parties as are systemic factors.

THE RISE OF "NEW LABOUR"

When Tony Blair was selected as Labour Party leader in July 1994, he and his followers launched a far-reaching campaign to more thoroughly "modernize" the party in terms of its organization and programmatic appeals. The new party leadership

177 believed that the previous leaders had not transformed the party enough in terms of making it a modem social democratic party that could appeal to a wider base of voters.

As Blair said at the party’s 1993 annual conference, "we need to appeal to the world in which people live - not the world they lived in 30, 40 years ago." {New York Times,

October 1, 1993). The following year when he became party leader, Blair started to promote the party as the "new Labour Party," moved the party to the right on a number of social and economic issues, and challenged party members and leaders to join him in his "renewal" project by abandoning electorally unpopular aspects of Labour Party orthodoxy.

Tony Blair and the modernizers represent a new type of Labour politician characterized by their youth, pragmatism, and "single-minded determination to secure electoral victory" (Shaw 1993, p. 127). In keeping with the tradition established during

Kinnock’s leadership, new Labour is intent on developing policies and strategies to appeal to middle-class voters. At the same time, they have continued Kinnock’s campaign to alter the party’s relationship with its traditional supporters. The party leadership continues to take steps to distance themselves from the TUC and trade union supporters, who are seen as an electoral liability. Blair also has made direct appeals to

British business leaders, insisting that a Labour government would be good for business and pledging not to return to a punitive taxation system on the rich. In its attempts to reach out to a broader base of voters, new Labour has abandoned appeals based on social class in favor of the rhetoric of "community" and of the individual responsibilities of citizens.

178 One of Blair’s most significant policy initiatives was his call to remove Clause

IV of the party constitution, which commits the party to "the common ownership of the means of production." Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell’s attempt to rid the party constitution of Clause IV in 1959 failed at the hands of a coalition between the party’s left wing and moderate trade unionists. Though the party in the postwar period has been firmly committed to a mixed economy, one cannot underestimate the significance of Clause IV as evidence of the party’s symbolic attachment to its socialist roots. To some, the failure of the party leadership to remove Clause IV in 1959 represented the ability of the party’s rank and file "to resist the attempts of opportunistic leaders to ditch principles in the pursuit of power" (New Statesman and Society, April 28, 1995, p.5), and the leadership did not initiate any serious attempt to reevaluate this clause in the following decades. However, when Blair called a special party conference on

Clause IV in April 1995, the party’s rank and file gave the leader their overwhelming support by voting for its removal from the party constitution. Many party members felt that Clause IV was no longer an adequate expression of the party’s values, and should therefore be removed. As indicated by the widespread consensus on Clause IV, it seems that traditional socialist principles do not fit with the notions of both leaders and activists of what a modernized political party should be, and therefore will continue to have less influence on party policy in the future.

It is clear that Labour’s new leadership also has been positively influenced by

Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party in the United States. Labour leaders and MPs have praised Clinton’s 1992 campaign, both in terms of its policy appeals (particularly

179 their efforts to attract middle class voters) and the way it was organized and managed.

Some of the themes promoted by Bill Clinton, including the idea of the "new

Democrats," are echoed in Tony Blair’s actions and rhetoric as well. Analysts have interpreted Blair’s focus on "new Labour" and "renewal" as an attempt to Americanize

British politics {New Statesman and Society, October 6, 1995, p.5). In fact, a familiar criticism of new Labour is that they are trying to "Clintonize" the Labour Party by focusing on winning the "yuppie" vote at the expense of appealing to its traditional adherent (Dunleavy 1993). The leadership’s strategy has led to protests from those who feel that new Labour is abandoning the principles and policies with which the party has historically been associated. So far, no major divisions have erupted between the dominant modernizing coalition and the party’s left wing, but these ideological and strategic differences indicate the potential for future conflict.

THE FUTURE OF WOMEN IN THE LABOUR PARTY

At this point in time it is difficult to assess the impact of recent changes in the

Labour Party in terms of their effects on opportunities for women and the transformation of gender relations. Certainly in terms of symbolic politics, the Labour

Party has demonstrated an increased commitment to promoting the status of women in the party and in British society. The party’s central office has issued policy statements that indicate its desire to improve conditions for British women in a variety of ways, including in terms of employment policy, health care, child care, pensions, poverty, and domestic violence. In addition, the Labour leadership has pledged to establish a

180 Ministry for Women when it becomes the majority government, thus indicating that it sees the promotion and protection of women’s rights as a function of British government.

However, a number of people have remained skeptical about the prospects for dramatic changes in women’s status under a Labour government. In part, this skepticism is a reaction to the rhetoric and leadership style of new Labour. For example, even before the Industrial Tribunal ruled in 1996 that Labour’s quota system was discriminatory against men and therefore illegal. Labour leader Tony Blair announced the abolishment of women’s quotas following the next general election.

Blair made this statement without the consultation or approval of the party conference.

While some people saw this move as evidence of Tony Blair’s strong leadership style, others are concerned that its indicative of the top-down nature of Labour’s modernization process, in which the party leadership has managed to centralize power in its own hands while the party’s grassroots has become more and more acquiescent.

So while the new Labour Party continues to demonstrate its rhetorical support for promoting women in the party, it seems this process will continue in ways that are compatible with the new leadership’s conception of party modernization. While mainstream organizations such as Labour Women’s Network and Emily’s List U.K. seem to fit within the leadership’s mold of how to advance women in the party, it is unlikely that women who raise demands that more fundamentally challenge gender relations in the party and in British society will be given a voice.

181 The future prospects for women in the Labour Party hinge in part upon whether or not the party can win a parliamentary majority in the next general election, which must be held by May 1997. As of September 1996, the Labour Party has carved out a 20 percentage point lead in opinion polls over the Conservatives, indicating that the party has a good chance of becoming the majority government for the first time since

1979. We must wait for the results of the next general election to begin to determine how Labour leaders will attempt to ameliorate gender inequality in the party and in

British society, as well as what the role of female Labour politicians and activists will be in working toward these changes.

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