The recent referendumm got me thinking about government. Women in the UK lost the vote in 1832, and only some got it back in 1918. Universal suffrage didn’t come in until 1928. That’s frighteningly recent, but perhaps not as firghtening as the misogyny of Britain under Queen Victoria. Still, before they could elect MPs, women could stand for election to Parliament, in one of the less logical moments of British government.
Nancy Astor is perhaps the most famous of these pioneering lady MPs, because of her wit (some of her one-liners can still be devasting, if used well). She first campaigned for her husband’s Commons seat in 1919 after he inherited a title and therefore had to move to the House of Lords. In the beginning of her career, she was a formidable force, and taken seriosuly by her peers (possibly partly because of her husband and social connections, but nonetheless). Unfortunately, as time went on, some of her views went out of fashion, and her heavy involvement in Appeasement branded her a Nazi-sympathiser. It probably had more to with the horror of the Great War, during which she had worked in a hospital for Canadian soldiers, but despite her subsequent patriotism, she never escaped the taint.
She was the first woman to take up her seat in Westminster, but not the first to be elected. Contance Markiewicz was elected in 1918, but didn’t take it up because of her Irish Republican politics. She went on to become a Minister in the Irish government in 1919.
“Battling Bessie” Braddock may have been elected after women’s enfranchisement, but at least she had no fear of taking on the old boys at their own game – like Astor before her, she had a reputation for using wit to get her way with the likes of Churchill.
They paved the way for Thatcher to gain the PM position a few decades later. One thing all these women have in common, despite wildly different politics, is that they are strong. Iron-willed, determined, bordering on ruthless. But when you get right down to it, so are the men that history remembers equally.
