Woman’s Illustrated February 15 1958 Page 27

Votes for Women-Mrs. Pankhurst 

wears the slogan which started it all

Eleanor Rathbone, "the greatest woman 

who ever sat in Parliament" 

Ellen Wilkinson, who had flaming hair 

and "effective claws in debate"

IF YOU ASK ME - BY LADY VIOLET BONHAM CARTER 

Have Women Failed in Politics?

IT has been interesting to read the views of some of our hereditary legislators, the Peers of the Realm, upon this subject. The proposal to admit women to the House of Lords as Life Peers has given them an opportunity of telling us what they think of women in general and of women as politicians in particular. The way in which some of them have seized this opportunity will cause amusement to most women, and I think (to do them justice) to the great majority of men as well. 

Lord Ferrers, a-young peer twenty-eight years old whose opinions date from well before the Flood, finds women in politics" highly distasteful." In general they are "organizing, pushing and commanding. Some do not even know where loyalty to their country lies. . ." 

"Why," he asks, "should we allow women to eat their way, like acid into metal, into positions of trust and responsibility which previously men have held?" He also spoke, with doubtful diplomatic courtesy, of the "rather vulgar example set by Americans of having female Ambassadors." 

Lord Glasgow expressed strong repugnance at the idea that women might sit beside him, or even that he might meet them in the library. He compared the House of Lords to a men's club suddenly presented with a demand for the admission of women.

Lord Mansfield seemed to think that Peeresses in their own right would be slightly less offensive to their Lordships. He said "It would be an absolute insult to your Lordships' House" that hereditary. Peeresses should be excluded "while unknown female whatnots with Heaven knows what qualifications are to be put among us." 

Lord Airlie, moving that women should be excluded, said that some peers might think that ladies had been a "howling success" (laughter) "in the Commons" but that did not justify their inclusion in the Lords. 

Now having aired their Lordships' views (and fresh air is surely what they need) let us get hack to the question: Have women failed in politics in the thirty years since their enfranchizement?

"When the women get the vote . . ." what hopes, what fears hung on that once remote contingency! 

ON the one hand we were told that there was going to be no more war, no more poverty, drunkenness, overcrowding-some even hinted no more men! 

And then the other side of the picture was presented to us in lurid colours. Chivalry would be killed stone-dead, women would grow long beards, homes would be ravaged, hearths grow cold, beauty would shrivel, babies cease life would resolve itself into one long, ugly scrap between the sexes. 

It seemed too good, or too bad, to be true. And so indeed it has proved. The vote has neither gloriously freed women nor hideously unsexed them. Many are still the slaves of household chores and there are still some for whom men stand up in buses. 

Citizenship is a highly skilled calling in which it takes some time, some trouble and some talent to graduate. You cannot turn a woman, or a man either, into a citizen merely by passing an Act of Parliament. I maintain that in their short apprenticeship women have made good use of their time and opportunities. 

To-day there is hardly a position in public life or the professions which is not open to them and, what is more important, not one which they are not willing and eager to fill. 

Many women have been Cabinet Ministers and chairmen of their Party organizations. The Foreign Office has opened its doors to them. They are eligible to be judges and there is nothing to prevent a woman from becoming Lord Chancellor. 

I think that women are natural social reformers-fearless, selfless and uncompromising. 

In politics neither caucus, catchword nor theory can intervene between them and the things they feel need doing. They are individualists, far less inclined than men to be stampeded by the herd and vote the Party ticket. 

And they are realists, because they are up against brass-tacks every moment of their lives.

I was amused at reading in an article by Mr. Charles Curran in the London Evening News that "as politicians women are just as harmless as kittens." I think he would have found Miss Eleanor Rathbone, the mother of Family Allowances and the greatest woman who has ever sat in Parliament, a formidable "kitten."

Miss Ellen Wilkinson, with her warm heart and flaming hair, who was to my mind our most accomplished Parliamentarian, was a "kitten" who in debate unsheathed effective claws. 

But Mr. Curran is right in saying that "the idea that women will vote as a sex is merely a masculine nightmare." 

There are all kinds of men; there are if possible even more kinds of women. They have already fallen into their natural political sockets-either as fiery progressives, stick-in-the-mud reactionaries or tepid mugwumps-just as men have done. 

THE most vivid, human and representative women are often driven to "contract out" of public life by those very human claims which they are best fitted to champion and express-the claims of family and children. 

Yet they count. For politicians are well aware of their demands-and of their voting-power. It is to their existence that we owe (amongst other things) the grant of Widow’s Pensions and the fact that Family Allowances are rightly paid to mothers. 

Far more important than the number of women who sit in Parliament or even in the Cabinet is the number of women in the country whose minds and hearts can break through the confines of their own lives and see beyond. To-day the windows of every home should open on the world. The woman in the home can pull her weight in politics as well as, and sometimes better than, the woman on the hustings. 

THE WEEK AFTER NEXT LADY VIOLET BONHAM CARTER WRITES FOR YOU AGAIN