Women and the Vote - Alison McGovern MP
Aden Simpson
| PoliticsHome
Labour MP Alison McGovern tells PoliticsHome that the battle for equal representation is not yet won, as she maps the progress of the women’s movement from 7 June 1866 to 7 June 2016.
150 years ago yesterday, on 7 June 1866, the House of Commons formally, and for the first time, recognised that women wanted the vote.
A female discussion group, The Kensington Society, had formed a committee, drafted a petition and collected 1,521 signatures from women all over the country. This petition was then presented to the Commons by the radical liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill, on June 7.
Mill, who was then briefly serving as MP for City and Westminster gave this address:
“When the complaint is made that certain citizens of this nation, fulfilling all the conditions and giving all the guarantees which the Constitution and the law require from those who are admitted to a voice in determining who shall be their rulers, are excluded from that privilege for what appears to them, and for what appears to me, an entirely irrelevant consideration, the least we can do is to ascertain what number of persons are affected by the grievance, and how great an addition would be made to the constituency if this disability were removed.”
Alison McGovern, the Labour MP for Wirral South since 2010, is marking this historic moment with an adjournment debate this evening.
“The Battle is not won,” she tells PoliticsHome, and will be using the opportunity to promote the ongoing women’s movement in the 21st century, and an ever more representative House.
“There had been various bits of campaigning to get women the vote by this time, but this is the first acknowledgment by the House of Commons that this was something a group of women wanted,” said McGovern. “And this is the first record that there was a great number of women who were prepared to publicly sign that they wanted to get the vote.”
“It obviously took some years after that for women to fully get that right, but this was the formal beginning of the House of Commons’ role in that very historic time.”
1866 also saw the introduction of the Reform Bill, which sought to extend the franchise to the ‘ten pounders’ - ‘respectable’ working men who paid rent of at least £10 per year - while continuing to exclude the unskilled ‘residuum.’
As well as moving the petition, Mill tried to amend this Bill to also include women; efforts which ultimately failed. The wording of the document however, referred to ‘man,’ which at that time was common judicial language referring to ‘mankind,’ and subsequently 4,000 women in Manchester tried to claim their right to vote under the terminology, triggering a series of debates. The period of activity ultimately led to the suffrage movement, and women winning their right to vote in 1918.
“In many ways the Commons today is unrecognisable from how Mill would have known it,” said McGovern. “The mere presence of women and the subjects that are debated - that moment when Jess Phillips read out all the names of women who had been killed by their husbands that year - I like to think that we’ve come such a distance; that Mill would be shocked by how far we’ve come. Which makes you wonder about possibilities in the future.”
“In another way,” she tempered, “the current EU debate has been strikingly male. Obviously, women have the vote in equal terms in this referendum, but it’s hard to square that with a debate that has been dominated by men.”
This is in stark contrast to the developments in voter turnout. The last general election saw 67% of males turning out to vote, and 66% of females. Female turnout was higher in several elections in the 80s and 90s, but turnout has since declined across both genders.
“I think that demonstrates that there’s no natural reason why women wouldn’t want to vote, and yet the public debate is somewhat male dominated.
“It’s really important that we ask ourselves some questions about why that is,” she added. “There’s clearly a disconnect between the political system and the general public.”
In the Commons, representation is still far behind voters. In 1979 female MPs comprised 19% of the lower house, today they make up 29% (up from 22% in 2010); progress to be sure, albeit incremental and way out of kilter with public engagement. The UK is also some way behind other countries: Sweden’s lower chamber is 45% female, Belgium’s 41% and Iceland’s 40%.
“There’s a lot to be done still, and we have to ask ourselves: How did we get from 1866 to now? And how can we apply those lessons to the situation we find ourselves in today?”
Since 2015’s intake, 45% of Labour MPs are now female. McGovern acknowledges this has not been solely a natural progression, but largely thanks to the party’s ‘all-female shortlists,’ which ensures female candidates are selected. That these shortlists exist amidst the various protocols and procedures for selected candidates is subject to lengthy debate and deliberation.
“If you look at the House of Commons now, it’s more diverse because of the steps that the Labour Party took, for the most part, but also other parties who felt the need to demonstrate that they too thought that equal representation was important.
“That process has proven that it’s only through effectively making the rules, guaranteeing that you select women, will they actually be selected. Because if you look at the experience of those who haven’t taken these steps, it doesn’t happen on its own.
“It’s not perfect but it works.”
This is also the case for other groups - ethnicities, faiths and disabilities - who are woefully underrepresented in parliament. There are funding schemes available, she notes, to help people with disabilities reach public office, although they are often underused and badly designed.
McGovern hints at a number of possible measures to improve diversity, such as targeted support through education that the House of Commons provides and enabling marginalised groups to see parliament in action. But primarily she hopes MPs will maintain pressure on political parties to look at how they select candidates, and aim for a broader range.
“The battle is not won,” she said. “And we need to ask ourselves what our role is now. I don’t think there’s an easy policy solution, but there are a range of things that we can keep doing to make sure there is more balance in the House of Commons.”
