PERSONALITIES OF "OUR GIRLS"

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 58, 6 September 1938, Page 16

PERSONALITIES OF "OUR GIRLS"

Twelve women members now sit together on the green benches of the House of Commons, writes Clair Price, of London, in the "New York Times." The twelfth is the Labour victor of the recent West Fulham by-election— a 36-year-old woman doctor who practices in Harley Street under her maiden name of Edith Summerskill. A few days affer she had made her bows to the clerk and shaken hands with the Speaker she rose for her maiden speech, a properly provocative assault on the Chancellor and his Budget.

Being the daughter of a doctor, the wife of a doctor, and herself a doctor, she has a doctor's interest in social problems—though the issues on which she thrashed the Government at West Fulham were those of foreign pojicy. In intelligence and fluency she is a notable addition to the little band of women members. Incidentally, she is one of the best-looking women in

the House. The mother of Parliament is a noble old lady, but her daughters as a rule are not a beauty chorus. They take themselves seriously—and nowadays they are taken seriously.

The women members present a variety which the men of the House seem' to lack. In their clothes, their manners, and their modes of thinking the men of the House belong to the black-coated and striped-trousered herd. No such dull uniformity characterises the women members. They are much less distrustful of individualism than the men are—though they live under such a spotlight of publicity that one of Lady Astor's hats has been known to make front-page news. - A SOCIAL INFLUENCE. Lady Astor is the senior of the twelve. Though she was Americanborn and is British only by marriage, she was the first woman to take her .seat in the House, and she has been an M.P. continuously since 1919. She has never been a politician, not at least in the House of Commons sense. She is no debater, though she can fight like a terrier when she feels deeply. Despite all her impulsiveness and vivacity, at heart she is an intensely serious woman with a strong strain of hard-hitting and hard-hating Puritanism in her. ," Her real influence is social rather than political, and, in fact, she usually treats the "House as if it were a tea party. She begins visiting as soon as she has curtsied to the Speaker and taken her seat, and she continues to shake a minatory white-gloved forefinger until she leaves the tea party, turning at the bar to drop another curtsy to the Speaker as she goes. Outside the House she has long been the foremost Anglo-American hostess in England, and just now her weekend house parties at Cliveden on the Thames are being popularly associated with the Prime Minister'^ foreign policy. i "Wee Ellen". Wilkinson is a very different person. Physically she is the smallest member of the House. She has a glorious head of red hair, a laugh with a volley of "tut tuts" in it, especially when foreign policy is I being debated, and as much energy as if she were electrically charged. She represents Jarrow in the north of England, which used to lie very near the j bottom of the pit of unemployment; and her first, last, and only love is politics—Labour politics with a merry savagery in it. | THE "RED DUCHESS." The scholarly Duchess of Atholl is a Tory, but like Ellen Wilkinson she has watched Franco's aeroplanes bombing Madrid—and a British Duchess cannot be suppressed by the Tory whips as easily as the smaller fry can be. The Government's foreign" policy has turned her to the left, and nowadays she is sometimes called the "Red, Duchess," presumably because she still j clings to the quaint old-fashioned gospel of democracy. Megan Lloyd George is apt to turn pink when she is accused of "following in father's footsteps." Nevertheless people who foresee a woman Prime Minister in Britain usually have her in mind. Motherly Mrs. George Hardie is a sister-in-law of the great Keir Hardie who, with John Burns, was the first Labour M.P. to enter the House. Lady Davidson is presumed to have an important political future, for her husband is a former chairman of the Tory Party and the confidential adviser of Tory Prime Ministers. Eleanor Rathbone, who sits as an independent for the English Universities, is a tenacious and immensely capable woman in her sixties. Thelma Cazalet began her politics as an Alderman on the London County Council, and on social questions her Toryism has a distinct streak of independence in it. After Lady Astor, she is reputed to be the wealthiest of the women M.P.*

A DOZEN DAUGHTERS OF PARLIAMENT

men to get themselves elected to the House, especially men who can put down £400 or so as a contribution to local party funds.

Politically-minded women have a much stiffer grade to make before they reach the Commons. For one thing, they, are apt to be given the more hopeless seats to fight, the kind of seats which in the case of men would go to the candidates who are wholly dependent on the party for their election' expenses. For another thing, women candidates still have to overcome a certain amount of opposition from their own sex. "Women simply as men are no better than men," Lady Astor once told her fellow-women in the House. Yet "simply as men" the women of the House seem determined to regard themselves. They play the game of politics according to the existing rules, they insist on being judged by the existing political standards —and the rules and standards are those set up by men. The women get the same pay as the men of the House—£4oo a year— and they work the same hours. CARRYING THEIR WEIGHT. When Lady Astor first crossed the threshold of the House in 1919 the green benches had been sacred to men for 600 years.- The first women members, beginning with Lady Astor, were put up and elected for seats their husbands had vacated, and were regarded as merely shadows of their men. No unmarried woman was elected to the House until the General Election of 1923 It is just possible that in those pioneer days, when women M.P.s were regarded as Parliamentary "freaks," they spoke and voted as women more often than they do today. During the nearly two years in which Lady Astor was the only woman in the House she was M.P. for women at least as much as M.P. for the Sutton division of Plymouth. With the co-operation of women's organisations all over the country she fought in committees and on the floor of the House for legislation on air sorts of women's subjects— widows' pensions, the legitimacy laws, the guardianship of children, the criminal laws, the employment of women police, the raising of the school age, the non-sale of liquor to minors. Women's legislation still falls largely to the women M.P.s and it tends to draw them together regardless of party labels. As private members some of them have achieved the Parliamentary triumph of piloting to success their own Bills on social problems. Ellen Wilkinson has done it lately with her Bill correcting the abuses of the hirepurchase system. Such laurels sometimes put a glow of something like fatherly affection into the House's attitude towards "our girls." But these activities are overshadowed nowadays by their work as party members. In this respect they have grown immeasurably since Lady Astor first entered the House. They bear their full share of the collar work of committees and the rough and tumble of debate. They ask no quarter and thay receive none. If ever they succeed in impressing themselves on the mass of women voters, politics in Britain will cease to be as exclusively a man's game as it is today. When that time comes the House's attitude towards "our girls" will be something interesting to look into. '