Role of Women in Public Life

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and perhaps I may match him story for story. In 1834, when this building was burned down, the House of Commons had to meet in the old House of Lords, which had somehow miraculously survived. In 1835 there was a proposal that galleries should be added to the Chamber so that women could come to watch the proceedings. The House of Commons, to a man, was shocked at the idea that women should be allowed to watch them. As one Member said, if women were there, it would cramp their style—I have put that into modern parlance—and therefore it would be a bad thing. Luckily, they were overruled and women were able to watch politicians in Parliament. So progress has been made, although it has been rather slow.

I have another story. In about 1974—I think it was before Mrs Thatcher was elected as leader—I was babysitting my young daughter, who was about two or three years old, and I took her to the LSE. It was a glorious summer’s day and we were standing outside a pub. Robert McKenzie, my colleague at the LSE, was there and I said, “What do you think of Shirley Williams’s future? How soon do you think she could be Prime Minister?”. Robert McKenzie looked at my daughter and said, “It will be lucky if we have a woman Prime Minister by the time your daughter attains maturity”. In 1974 he thought that there would not be a woman Prime Minister for another 20 years. So sometimes time speeds up and sometimes it is very slow.

We have heard lots of very good speeches, especially reminiscences and examples of people who are not in the public eye. I want to make a suggestion which has not been made so far. I think that we need a museum for the women’s franchise and their struggle for the vote. I have recently been associated with another museum which my wife has set up, the theme of which is the partition of India and Pakistan. Memories are still alive there—they have been recorded. We can still record people’s memories about their mothers and other people they knew. Those memories of women who were local councillors, mayors and so on need to be preserved for posterity. If we do not do so, they will be lost. It would involve a lot of work and a lot of money, which I am sure could be raised from private donations. I urge not necessarily the Government but people here to make a concerted effort to set up a museum to pay tribute to women’s progress in our society. Of course, there has not been enough progress, as we all know.

In this debate there has been talk about suffragettes versus suffragists, but I do not think you can have one without the other. The suffragists, starting in the 1890s, patiently burrowed away at Parliament but eventually it was the suffragettes who made progress. They may have publicly lost the support of the Commons but I can tell your Lordships that the Members of the Commons were frightened out of their wits. The suffragette movement was perhaps the most violent political movement in the British Isles—even more violent than many trade union movements had previously been. However, something like that had to be done to wake people up to the fact that there was a burning desire on the part of women to get some sort of equality. Of course, the First World War helped as well. It was not just the suffragettes and suffragists; Rosie the Riveter helped too. Had women not worked as a vital part of the wartime economy, men would not have realised that women could do more than just sit at home and cook. Therefore, those three things—the suffragettes, the suffragists and the First World War—together were very helpful in building the case for women’s suffrage.

Many noble Lords have mentioned that, yes, there has been equal suffrage, but there has not been equality. One has to say that getting the vote is a very small part of the struggle for equality. There is no equality among men, there is no equality among women and there is no equality between men and women. Political action and political democracy are a very small part of what generates the day-to-day inequalities in income and wealth. We could talk about all sorts of disadvantages that we find very hard to remove, and there are parts of the world that still have gender selection of children. Women suffer disadvantages from birth onwards. Very often, even well-to-do families will send their boys to private school but their girls to the local state school. The advantages for the male child are built in from the early years onwards. Those things add up.

Substantial equality between men and women and between all people is a distant goal that we will be able to achieve, but political action is one thing that we can do now collectively. That is why it is important that we go on, through the legislative process, trying to remove the many disadvantages that women suffer. We must hope that, in the future, other people will follow our path and achieve equality. So I welcome this debate and I look forward to the debate in 10 years’ time, when we will celebrate the centenary of universal adult franchise. That is when the country became a real democracy.

Let me add one more thing. The impact of 1918 and 1928 was even more profound on the Commonwealth. All the countries that became independent from the Commonwealth had, at the outset, universal adult franchise. India had universal franchise for men and women in 1950, upon its birth. That would not have happened without 1918. That is a tribute to what was achieved.