The Real Iron Lady (21 page)

M
adame Chairman, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, as you know July is a particularly busy month for politicians and ministers but I agreed to come and give this lecture out of supreme respect for Dame Margery [Dame Margery Corbett Ashby] and because I was very honoured to be invited to be the first person to give this memorial lecture.

The life and work of Dame Margery spanned almost a century, from her birth in 1882 to her death last year. And rarely, I think, has a century so exemplified Disraeli's maxim that in a progressive country change is constant. Dame Margery, who was instrumental in bringing about so much change, was herself born into a world of change.
And I want just to develop the theme. 1882 was a world of change. She was born into a world of change. She brought about so much change and what now are we going to do in the future, to transmit the very best of the truths that have been handed down to us, to future generations?

Let's have a look at the kind of changes that were taking place in 1882 – when she was born.

It was a world of political change where not only women were deprived. It is obvious that the issue of women's right to vote arises only when people's right to vote has been established, or at least is on the agenda. And for most of human history it has been absent. In 1882 only 33 per cent of men had the right to vote. Two years later the Reform Bill doubled that percentage, extending civil rights to an extra two million men.

It was a world of educational change. Elementary education had just been made compulsory by an act of 1880. Schools and colleges for women were springing up. Newnham College, Cambridge, where Dame Margery was to take a degree in classics, had been founded in 1871.

It was a world of scientific and religious change. In 1882 Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution had challenged many accepted beliefs and disturbed many faiths and brought about a radical change in all human thought, was buried in Westminster Abbey, to the disgust of many churchmen. Some years earlier, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, in his argument with the Darwinians, had shown the typically Victorian chivalrous
attitude to women. He said that he could accept that his grandfather might have been descended from an ape, but not his grandmother.

It was a world of social change, much of it generated by the numerous voluntary organisations founded at that time. Their names read like a roll-call of compassion. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children founded in 1884, the St John Ambulance Association in 1887, the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen's Families Association in 1885, the Church Army in 1890 – and many, many more. They were years of voluntary activity. They were years of enormous confidence in the future.

It was a world in which we were just beginning to see the first glimmer of change in the professional status of women – for example, in nursing and medicine. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had qualified in 1865. You'll recall, Madame Chairman, that the suffragettes did not fight for the right of women to work because so many women had of necessity to go out to work. Indeed Shaftesbury had commented adversely on that trend when he said: ‘Domestic life and domestic discipline must soon be at an end; society will consist of individuals no longer grouped into families.'

In 1881 some 27 per cent of the female population of the United Kingdom already worked outside the home. It's interesting that today the percentage is only 32 – not so very different from or not so very many more than that time. We think that women going out to work is a new thing. We tend to forget that during those extremely
difficult years of the last century, so many had to go out to work and often do work which was distasteful to them.

What Dame Margery and her generation did fight for was the right of women to be admitted to the professions – the law, the civil service and the Diplomatic Service.

It was, also that year, a world of legal change – and those of you who are lawyers will remember that it was the Married Women's Property Act that was passed in 1882. It affected a major advance in women's rights. Before that time no married woman had been allowed to hold property of her own. It automatically passed to her husband on marriage. From that time, women were then allowed to retain and own property independently of their husbands. This reasonable measure, which stopped the married woman from being a mere chattel of her husband, caused much distress in its passage through Parliament. And I did one or two very interesting bits of research.

One Member felt that its enactment should be delayed until 1885:

‘In order,' he said, ‘to give men who were contemplating matrimony, time to change their minds when they found the law altered.'

Another feared that:

‘No man would marry a woman with property, knowing that she could set him at defiance – the Bill was against Scripture.'

He had obviously never reflected on the words of the marriage service when, as the man said:

‘… with all my worldly goods I thee endow.'

Until then, for women who had property, it had really been the other way round.

So Dame Margery was born into a world of change, the educational change, the social change, the political change, the legal change, the scientific change. And really change is an essential characteristic of the human condition. But history is shaped by the way in which men and women respond to that change. They may resist it absolutely, so that all its opportunities are wasted, like the religious sect who will not use buttons because they regard them as a product of a decadent modern civilisation. Or they may accept change so wholeheartedly that novelty becomes a virtue in itself and all the lessons of history and experience are just dismissed. This attitude has caused much political upheaval, as whole regimes and civilisations have sometimes been swept away in the name of change which is assumed to be beneficent just because it is change.

Then there is another response that is one which welcomes and uses change, but refuses to be ruled by it, testing each new development against the eternal verities.

I believe that this last was the attitude of Dame Margery in her great contributions to the century of change through which she lived, in her services to women and society, in Britain and throughout the world. She was co-founder of the Townswomen's Guilds, of the Commonwealth Countries League and the National Women Citizens Association. She was President of the International Women's Suffrage
Alliance from 1923 to 1946 and an office-bearer in it for seventy years. She gave her first presidential speech at the Sorbonne in 1926, soon after I was born. She presided at Berlin in 1929, Istanbul in 1935, Copenhagen in 1939 and Interlaken in 1946. What a fantastic record she had.

Her first concern was that women should have the same political rights as men. With that end in view she became Secretary of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies as far back as 1907 working tirelessly until full adult female suffrage was achieved in 1928. Some of you will recall that women first got the vote in 1918, but only women who were aged over thirty. I think it's the only time in legislation when the year thirty has been of legal significance in a woman's life. And then in 1928 on the same terms as men.

The task was not made easier – the task of women's suffrage when Dame Margery took it up – wasn't made easier by the fact that the leader of her chosen party, Mr Asquith, was resolutely opposed to votes for women. He followed the tradition of Mr Gladstone, who in 1884 and then Prime Minister, had spoken against women's suffrage. He – and I quote – ‘feared that voting would trespass upon their delicacy, their purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature'.

Dame Margery is proof that it did none of those things. It is of course true – and I should make a clean breast of it – that Winston Churchill had often felt the same way about women in political life. And when I went to see Lady
Churchill, shortly after I became Leader of the Party – because I wanted to see her, she was a wonderful woman in her own right – and she reminded me of this; and she said, ‘…but you know I always used to argue with Winston over it'. And I guess she did.

I am very conscious of the fact that it is due to the efforts of Margery Corbett Ashby and others like her, that women today are able to play such a major part in political life. All women received the vote in 1928 and 1929 saw the appointment of the first woman Cabinet minister, Margaret Bondfield. But this wasn't enough for Dame Margery. In her speech of that year to the British Commonwealth League, she deplored the fact that women did not have the right to sit in the House of Lords. Almost thirty years later, in 1958, the Life Peerages Act gave women that right. This was extended in 1963 when the same government admitted hereditary peeresses to the House of Lords.

Last year we achieved another ‘first' when I asked Baroness Young, who has done so much for public life, to become the first woman leader of the Upper House. I like to think that Dame Margery would have approved.

In the House of Commons, more than half a century after all women got the vote, there are only twenty-one women Members of Parliament out of a House of 635 Members. And I think this would have been a great disappointment to the early suffragettes whose main fight was for the rights of women to full participation in politics, local government and the community. They did this partly
because it is just and equitable that women should have such rights; but also because they wanted public life to be shaped and influenced by the special talents and experiences of women.

To quote Dame Margery again, in her 1926 Presidential Address to the Congress of the International Alliance at Paris:

My generation put it in virtually the same way, when we say that the home should be the centre but not the boundary of a woman's life.

Now what are these special talents and experiences which women have to bring to public life? Are they any different in kind from those of men? Yes – I think they are, because we women bear the children and create and run the home. It is noticeable, Madame Chairman, that many of the suffragettes were very womanly. Like Dame Margery, they had the inestimable privilege of being wives and mothers and they pursued their public work against the background of full and happy domestic lives. They neglected no detail of those lives – so that they were warm
as well as immensely capable women. And it was these enriched lives, with their breadth of experience, that they devoted to public service.

The many practical skills and management qualities needed to make a home – and I often stress to audiences that you have to be a manager to run a home – those many management qualities give women an ability to deal with a variety of problems and to do so quickly. And it's that versatility and decisiveness which is so valuable in public life. And I may say that I think I am able to make decisions at a tremendous speed in public life because I have been used to doing that in the home. It also means that one is able, quite naturally, to deal with an enormous volume of work and to switch your mind to whatever problem is at hand. Indeed I sometimes think it wouldn't be a bad maxim in life if you said, ‘what we have to do, and do well, is the very next job that comes to hand'.

Now, after the victory for women's suffrage had been won here Dame Margery went on to work for it in other countries, through the International Alliance. Their 1935 Congress was held in Turkey where, despite promises and statements of relevant legislative intent in 1930, 1931 and 1934, Turkish women had still not received the vote. So, on her arrival in Istanbul, Dame Margery told the Mayor that it was a pity ‘that women will come from all over the world to Turkey and find Turkish women without the vote'.

That remark found its way to the President of Turkey – President Ataturk – and very soon Turkish women had
been granted the vote on the same terms as men and seventeen women Members of Parliament were elected. What quiet power Dame Margery had.

It was also after 1928 that she turned to the second great strand of her work, your Guilds, the Townswomen's Guilds, born in 1929 out of the earlier suffrage societies. The significant achievements of the Townswomen's Guilds in the last half-century owe much to her example and her vigour. And it is useful to remind ourselves of the objectives which guide your work:

I understand you've modified that latter part a little now. It reads in a much more modern way; but you know, so many things, they're not always quite so clear as the older ones. So I thought I would take the older one. You know, it still expresses really what we stand for and what we set out to do.

Now, of course, Dame Margery worked hard for legislative change. She and others knew that only legislation could give women the vote and certain fundamental rights. But she knew too that legislation is not enough. As she
said when I was privileged to share a platform with her in Westminster Hall in 1978, at the celebration of fifty years of women's suffrage: ‘It's comparatively easy to change the law. What is difficult is to change the attitudes of the community.'

She set out to change those attitudes through the Townswomen's Guilds, and her work in them illustrated the belief that legislation can provide only a foundation for action. And the rest is up to us. To give a person a vote is a remarkable achievement, but to help people to understand how democracy works, and its dependence on the exercise of personal responsibility, is much harder. And is that not part of the role of the Townswomen's Guilds?