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This volume examines how the British Conservative Party has appealed to women, the roles that women have played in the party, and the tense relationship between women¿s activism on the Right and feminism.
List of contents
Introduction: Considering conservative women in the gendering of modern British politics
Clarisse Berthezène and Julie V. Gottlieb
1. ‘Does the right hon. Gentleman mean equal votes at 21?’ Conservative women and equal franchise, 1919–1928
Mari Takayanagi
2. The Elusive Lady Apsley
Madge Dresser
3. Women in the organisation of the Conservative Party in Wales, 1945–1979
Sam Blaxland
4. Diana Spearman's role within the post-war Conservative Party and in the ‘battle of ideas’ (1945–1965)
Stéphane Porion
5. Housewives having a go: Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and the appeal of the Right Wing Woman in late twentieth-century Britain
Jessica Prestidge
6. Free markets and feminism: the neo-liberal defence of the male breadwinner model in Britain, c. 1980–1997
Ben Jackson
7. From ‘I’m not a feminist, but … ’ to ‘Call me an old-fashioned feminist … ’: conservative women in parliament and feminism, 1979–2017
David Swift
8. The Iron Ladies revisited: Julie Gottlieb interview with journalist, writer and political activist Beatrix Campbell
Julie V. Gottlieb and Beatrix Campbell
About the author
Clarisse Berthezène is Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris, France, and she has published widely on conservatism in Britain and abroad in the 20th century, including Training minds for ideas. Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the cultural politics of Britain, 1929-54 (2015).
Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield, UK, and she has published extensively in the field of women and politics in the first half of the 20th century, including ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Interwar Britain (2015).
Together the co-editors of this volume organised the Rethinking Right-Wing Women conference in Oxford in 2015.
Summary
This volume examines how the British Conservative Party has appealed to women, the roles that women have played in the party, and the tense relationship between women’s activism on the Right and feminism.
