Our history books are awash with the tales and political achievements of ‘great men’ – but what about the frustratingly elusive narratives of women?
Throughout British history, politics has been persistently coded as an exclusively masculine zone, seen as a natural extension of the male gender’s ‘inherent tendencies’ towards strength and leadership. A truly fascinating example is the case of Queen Mary I, popularly known better as “Bloody Mary”, who was referred to by her advisors as a king. Though accepting her royal authority, these men could simply not articulate an understanding of a woman in such a high position of power! Studying history and politics myself, I have been continuously disappointed by the relegation of women’s contribution to politics to a single paragraph — if that.
There are, of course, well-known ‘remarkable exceptions’ of well-educated activists who broke the mould, and are given special status as ‘feminist icons’ for doing so. Here, the Pankhurts and other middle class suffragettes of the early 20th century spring to mind. Though their achievements are monumental, their opportunities and recognition are not representative of the masses of women whose political presence has been systematically disregarded. This is a classic case of exclusion, from key political moments and from our historical memory.
Whilst it would be unwise to ignore the myriad of barriers faced by women and the resultant restraining of them to domestic spheres, this does not mean that they did not engage in politics at all. Unfortunately, many academics lazily accept these barriers as a given, and do not inquire further. Women’s absence from our history is explained by their absence from political spaces. The notion of the importance of women’s access to physical space is well known in popular literature, particularly Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The assertion that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” applies equally to politics. This was understood by historical contemporaries too, such as one 19th century article in the Cooperative News which stated ‘Women are, as a rule so hemmed in by their domestic surroundings that they have far fewer chances of becoming interested in the national affairs than men’. This consensus, however, is both pessimistic and inaccurate. In reality, women possessed vast agency in the face of these barriers and used ingenious methods to create a political role for themselves – by politicising the a-political.
Indeed, women lacked institutionalised access to political spaces: since the onset of democracy, parliament, local government, political parties and trade unions had been male dominated. Nonetheless, women did not just passively accept this. They re-applied their existing gender roles – previously used to justify their restriction to the private sphere as mothers, carers and domestic consumers – to spaces which were not traditionally political. 19th century British middle-class women, for example, developed their stereotypical role as domestic consumers to gain a political voice in the boycott against slave-grown cotton and sugar. Their working class counterparts also engaged in this re-appropriation, with Women’s Co-operative Guilds creating an opportunity for female consumers to become a controlling power in social reform campaigns. The Women’s Labour League in 1908 justified the employment of women in local government by reasserting the centrality of motherhood and domesticity to female identity. Katherine Bruce Glacier argued that as mothers, women could teach the men the needs of women, the needs of the children, and of the needs of the homes of the people- critical concerns for local governance.
In each of these cases, women accepted the role given to them by patriarchal stereotypes, but turned it on its head to justify access into politics. Lacking access to formal channels, these reappropriated norms were applied in previously a-political spaces. In the campaign for the election of Thorley Smith, the first MP to stand on a platform of women’s suffrage, working class women independently arranged 80 meetings in a single fortnight; outside factory gates, street corners, gas works, tram sheds – anywhere they could find an audience. Here, women could use the patriarchy, a concept we view as holistically oppressive, to voice their political demands by reclaiming and redefining norms of femininity.
Unfortunately, this narrative of exclusion still rings true today. Women have entered institutionalised, formal political spheres, as we can see by the recent (and short) term of our third UK female Prime Minister, though this achievement appears much less significant given nearly 95% of British prime ministers have been men. Nethertheless, a political gap persists and though women’s political voices are now much louder, they still cry out for the same basic demand: greater inclusion in politics. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that gender parity in politics will not be attained before the year 2166. This is not just about numerical involvement but also the ability of women to effectively contribute to decision making, as evidenced by the increasing popular and academic discourse that a seat at the table is not enough.
Evidently, the masculine norms of politics which inhibited our ancestors persist today. We must learn from their ingenuity, confidence and bold choices to claim patriarchal norms for their own positive political use, and to tackle our contemporary crisis of representation.