The Women Members' Room
Remembering some of the first women MPs
There was only one room for women Members, with an adjoining smaller room which boasted a small iron Victorian washstand with a tin basin in which stood a jug of cold water. After a chilly wash one pulled out the plug and the water flowed into an iron bucket standing underneath. The Conservative women (Mavis Tate, Nancy Astor, the Duchess of Atholl and Joan Davison), Ellen and I accepted this crude arrangement without complaint and indeed with some amusement, and it was not until Jenny Adamson came into the House and demanded modern ‘ablutions’ that a change was made. Nobody other than women Members, were allowed to use our limited accommodation and the rule was strictly observed. The Duchess of Atholl, looking a little like a Victorian governess, would, on changing her frock, present her back to the half-open door to enable her maid, standing in the corridor, to fasten the numerous small buttons which only the maid’s practised hands could manipulate.
Dr Edith Summerskill, A Woman’s World
As of 5 July 2024, there are 263 women serving as Members of Parliament; at 40 per cent of the House, this represents an all-time high. Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons when she took over her husband’s Plymouth seat in 1919: but by the time that Dr Edith Summerskill was elected as the Labour MP for Fulham West in 1938, there were nearly forty women who had taken a seat, if only breifly. But still they had to make do with sharing the one room, known as the Tomb, by the women, or the Boudoir, by the men - and if there were more women MPs than desks, they sat on the floor to do their paperwork. Even after the 1945 election, when the number of women more than doubled, Jean Mann wrote ‘Just seven desks and twenty-six women MPs in a room the same size as my lounge-cum-dining room and in the small powder room adjoining, not one wardrobe…You can have a coat hanger if you buy it yourself…’
In 1938, Edith Summerskill, a practising GP with two young children, found herself one of just a dozen female MPs in a House of over 600 members. The women were predominantly Conservative, but all with credentials as supporters of rights for women, or at least with an interest in improving social conditions for children and families. However, only Eleanor Rathbone, who stood as an Independent candidate, was prepared to join Edith in calling herself a Feminist. Labour women were for the most part unwilling to identify themselves with women’s rights, because it went down so badly with the trade unionists who controlled the Party.
Cramming all the women MPs into one small room, even if it did overlook the Terrace and the river, had the unintended consequence of allowing these women, of such different backgrounds and political heritage, to discover they had many causes in common, and enabled them to teach other the ropes and to join forces on particular issues. Edith quite often used the weary hours of all night sittings to write to her young daughter Shirley, (herself later an MP) and in 1957 these letters were published as Letters to my Daughter. She describes herself as sitting in the Women Members’ Room, in the corridor behind the Speaker’s Chair ‘with its settee and chairs recently upholstered in a gay chintz, quite an innovation for the Mother of Parliaments.’ But, she wrote, ‘It is during these sessions that we learn a great deal about each other. The House of Commons is no different from other institutions where human beings live in close proximity. We have men and women of all kinds, complex creatures all of us, and some of our desultory chats are quite revealing.’
One of Edith’s first concerns, raised in the House, was the question of analgesia for women in childbirth. Edith, as a mother and a doctor, believed that all women had the right to pain-free labour: unfortunately the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, was opposed to letting midwives administer anaesthetics as they feared (pre-NHS, of course) that it would put GPs out of business. She raised the question in the House with the Minister of Health back in July 1939, and found herself warmly supported by Eleanor Rathbone. Afterwards, she and Eleanor had a long chat in the Women Members’ Room
She was much older than I, and experienced in the ways of the House, and knew that reforms such as the one I had ventilated would not come unless every opportunity was seized for focusing public attention on the matter…I asked her what should be my next step in this new campaign. Sitting back and holding her spectacles which were attached to her neck by a long silver chain she said ‘Always remember this; twenty-five years generally elapses between the inception and the fruition of a new idea.’
Eleanor Rathbone became an early ally of Summerskill. Born to a wealthy Liverpool family in 1872, she had first been elected in 1929, campaigning on an openly feminist ticket: "I am standing as a woman, not because I believe there is any antagonism between men's and women's interests but because I believe there is need in the House of Commons for more women who can represent directly the special experience and point of view of women." Whether this would have won her a seat in a local constituency is doubtful: but she was elected by the Single Transferable Vote system adopted when the Combined English Universities constituency of two members was established in 1918. Her constituents were effectively the graduates, men and women, of the ‘red brick’ universities: Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Reading and Sheffield.
Edith Summerskill (1901-1980) is little remembered or spoken of today, although she was an extraordinary pioneer for women’s rights, and for the Labour Movement in general. As early as 1930, she and her husband were founder members of the Socialist Medical Association, which called for the establishment of a National Health Service. In 1938 she founded the Married Women’s Association, a pressure group which campaigned for the recognition of a woman’s role in the home, the rights of housewives, and the financial equality of men and women within a marriage. Its impact can be traced today in the Married Women’s Property Act of 1964. During the Second World War she campaigned for women to be brought more fully into the war effort: for women who joined the Home Guard to be trained to use arms, for more nurseries to be established so that women could join the workforce, for women to be entitled to the same compensation for war injuries as men. In 1940 Winston Churchill set up the Woman Power Committee to look at ways of utilising women in the war effort: Edith and Agnes Hardie were the two Labour representatives on the committee throughout the war.
In 1945, when Labour came to power, Edith was rewarded with ministerial responsibility, although she never made it into the Cabinet. Her first job was as a Junior Minister for Food, a very unpopular job at a time of increasing rationing, which Edith probably made worse by a rather bossy over-insistence that the British housewife should be required to buy, cook and enjoy a fish called a snoek. One of her major failures…After this, she worked with Nye Bevan at the Ministry of Health, as Minister for National Insurance and Industrial Injuries. When the Labour Government fell, she busied herself with the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, which she chaired in the particularly difficult year of 1954-5, when Nye Bevan’s opposition to nuclear weapons nearly led to his being expelled from the Party.
Throughout her life, Edith had causes which she pursued with great energy, following Eleanor Rathbone’s advice. One of these was highly successful: the compulsory pasteurisation of the milk supply, to guard against TB, enacted in 1949. Less successful was her attempt to get boxing banned. In 1961 she was created a Life Peer, and in 1966 a Companion of Honour. She was only the fifth female life peer to be created. While in the House of Lords she supported the Abortion Law, the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Acts. By then she had inspired and encouraged a whole new generation of women MPs. Far too many to fit in the Women Members’ Room behind the Speaker’s Chair!
You can read more about Edith in her memoir. A Woman’s World, (1967) or in an excellent recent biography by Mary Honeyball - Edith Summerskill: The Life and Times of a Pioneering Feminist Labour MP
Great writing as ever. Churchill must have been desperate to utilise women during the war- considering he ordered suffragettes to be force fed in prison…
Fascinating! Thank you.