Clarisse Berthezène - Rethinking Right-Wing Women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the Present

Rethinking right-wing women

Series editor
Richard Hayton

The study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly interest and importance, and is also of great significance beyond the academy. In spite of this, for a variety of reasons the study of conservatism and conservative politics was traditionally regarded as something of a poor relation in comparison to the intellectual interest in the Left. In the British context this changed with the emergence of Thatcherism, which prompted a greater critical focus on the Conservative Party and its ideology, and a revitalisation of Conservative historiography. New Perspectives on the Right aims to build on this legacy by establishing a series identity for work in this field. It will publish the best and most innovative titles drawn from the fields of sociology, history, cultural studies and political science and hopes to stimulate debate and interest across disciplinary boundaries. New Perspectives is not limited in its historical coverage or geographical scope, but is united by its concern to critically interrogate and better understand the history, development, intellectual basis and impact of the Right. Nor is the series restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage original research from a plurality of perspectives. Consequently, the series will act as a voice and forum for work by scholars engaging with the politics of the right in new and imaginative ways.

Reconstructing conservatism? The Conservative Party in opposition, 19972010

Richard Hayton

Conservative orators from Baldwin to Cameron

Edited by Richard Hayton and Andrew S. Crines

The right and the recession

Edward Ashbee

The territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales

Alan Convery

David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation?

Edited by Gillian Peele and John Francis

Rethinking right-wing women

Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present

Edited by

Clarisse Berthezne and Julie V. Gottlieb

Manchester University Press

Copyright Manchester University Press 2018

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 7849 9438 9 hardback

First published 2018

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Introduction
Clarisse Berthezne and Julie V. Gottlieb

1 Open the eyes of England: female unionism and conservatism, 18861914
Diane Urquhart

2 Christabel Pankhurst: a Conservative suffragette?
June Purvis

3 At the heart of the party? The womens Conservative organisation in the age of partial suffrage, 191428
David Thackeray

4 Conservative women and the Primrose Leagues struggle for survival, 191432
Matthew C. Hendley

5 Modes and models of Conservative womens leadership in the 1930s
Julie V. Gottlieb

6 The middlebrow and the making of a new common sense: womens voluntarism, Conservative politics and representations of womanhood
Clarisse Berthezne

7 Churchill, women, and the politics of gender
Richard Toye

8 The statutory woman whose main task was to explore what women were likely to think: Margaret Thatcher and womens politics in the 1950s and 1960s
Krista Cowman

9 Conservatism, gender and the politics of everyday life, 1950s1980s
Adrian Bingham

10 Feminist responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism
Laura Beers

11 The (feminised) contemporary Conservative Party
Rosie Campbell and Sarah Childs

12 Conserving Conservative women: a view from the archives
Jeremy McIlwaine

13 Women2Win and the feminisation of the UK Conservative Party
Baroness Anne Jenkin, introduction by Sarah Childs

Figures

Tables

Laura Beers is a Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham, specialising in modern British political history. She is the author of Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Harvard, 2010) and Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Harvard, 2016), and the co-editor, with Geraint Thomas, of Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars (London, Institute of Historical Studies, 2012).

Clarisse Berthezne is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris Diderot. She is the author of Training Minds for the War of Ideas. Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the Cultural Politics of Britain, 19291954 (Manchester University Press, 2015) which was awarded the PSA Group Prize 2016 for the best publication on conservative politics and the study of conservatism, and (with Jean-Christian Vinel) Postwar Conservatism, a Transnational investigation. Britain, France and the United States, 19301990 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is currently working on Conservative women, voluntary associations and local government, 19181951.

Adrian Bingham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. He has written extensively on the national popular press in the decades after 1918, examining the ways in which newspapers both reflected and shaped attitudes to gender, sexuality and class. He is author of three books: Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford University Press, 2004), Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 19181978 (Oxford University Press, 2009) and (with Martin Conboy), Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Peter Lang, 2015). He is currently working on a new project entitled Everyday Politics, Ordinary Lives: Democratic Engagement in Britain, 19181992.

Rosie Campbell is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck University of London. She has recently written on parliamentary candidates, the politics of diversity and gender voting behaviour and political recruitment. She is the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Representative Audit of Britain, which surveyed all candidates standing in the 2015 British general election, and co-investigator of a Leverhulme-funded study of British parliamentary candidates and MPs from 1945 to 2015 (www.parliamentarycandidates.org). She has co-authored reports on gender and political participation for BBC Radio Fours Womans Hour