Peoples Republic of South Devon

Political Women

April 19th, 2008

posted by Jess Sains

The MP for Exeter (1966-1970) and Totnes councillor (1963-1966), Gwyneth Dunwoody, died this week at the age of 77. She was Parliament’s longest serving female Member. Gordon Brown has described Dunwoody as “politics at its best”, so why then is it still so rare to find female politicians?

If we assume, which many people will, that the burden of childcare falls more heavily on women, then being a Member of Parliament is not perhaps the best job in the world for a mother – or carer of any sort. It will perhaps surprise you to hear that the House of Parliament does not have a crèche. It does have a gun alley, a huge number of bars and all sorts of other exciting entertainment venues, but no where to leave your offspring whilst you are busy running the country. Breastfeeding is banned, as well; after the upsurge of women MPs post-1997 some female Members dared to try and challenge the establishment and breastfeed on the benches; then Speaker Betty Boothroyd and others quickly quashed this and put a blanket ban on such baby related sustenance.

Also, there are the unholy hours MPs have to put in. Many debates and votes take place quite late into the night, or at least in to the evening, because MPs hours are still designed around the hours of ‘gentlemen’. The times of Parliament rather assume that all Members have no second job, no family, and certainly no children. They may have suited Pitt the younger, but perhaps not the modern Minister.

Women who enter Parliament often end up with more labels shoved on them than your average intravenous drug user. They are “Blair’s Babes”, “Iron Ladies”, “battleaxes”… At least you get a high with drugs, one imagines, whereas debating housing in Stockon-on-Tees hardly gets the blood going – even if you are a politics geek like me! It is also very off-putting, I am sure, to the up and coming young women who wish – unlike myself, although I got it three or four times a week anyway – to become politicians to constantly be asked ’so, are you the next Margaret Thatcher, then?’ They all think it is so cute, too; it used to make me feel mildly nauseous.

There it is, the big frightening word: THATCHER. The most male woman in politics. Femininity is so often based around the growing and rearing of children that it makes me shy away from that argument, but one thing Thatcher was completely without is empathy. Not a female only trait I know, but one that is more obvious, often, in the female of the species. Empathy and compassion she left somewhere back in Grantham – if she ever had them – when she became that very frightening thing: the person made of metal. The one who saw things in terms of the economical instead of the social, said that there was no such thing as society.

Yet women voted for her in the droves. Middles-class women who saw her as protecting their values, working-class women who felt she’d make them middle-class women. Or something… A lot of studies suggest that women, as mothers, as sisters, as carers, as nurturers want to protect the status quo. So there I am, that rare thing, the woman with radical politics. And that’s the same reason I do not want to be an MP, I am too political to settle for the current system, the current political climate of ‘centre-right is best’. Too political for politics… But that’s a whole other debate, isn’t it?

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Entry Filed under: Society