Introduction
During the course of my research I have often been asked how it was I came to be studying such a seemingly obscure topic. It actually began six years ago, when I was still an undergraduate in Canada. I was writing a paper on the first women in the British House of Commons, and it struck me during the course of my reading that while there had been volumes written on women's suffrage and women in the House of Commons, there had never been a study of women and the Lords. This seemed to me to be a gap in our historiography, for while women have served as members of the House of Commons since 1919, it was not until as recently as 1963 that women were finally represented in the upper house on equal terms with men. Just as politicians neglected the question for over forty years, the story of how this remarkable situation was allowed to come about has since been ignored by historians. It has only been in the past fifteen years or so that feminist historians have looked at the question of political rights, and then they have focused more on the more dramatic story of suffrage, while historians of the House of Lords have rarely been attracted to so seemingly marginal an aspect of its constitution as the place of women.

As a result, the final chapter of the story of the political emancipation of British women has fallen between the cracks of gender and constitutional history. The topic seems all the more timely now, as in the recent Lords reform debates there have been numerous calls for a system which will ensure greater representation of women, and Labour has even defended its call for a largely-appointed house with the argument that this will make it easier to ensure proper numbers of women and minorities. Tonight I would like to share with you some of my findings, both the largely unknown story of women's admission to the Lords and the subject's wider significance.

Chronology of events
Although women have been allowed to inherit peerages in certain cases for hundreds of years, they never had the political rights of male peers, and there was no serious discussion of this until 1918. Even suffragists avoided the issue of women's right to sit in the Lords so they wouldn't scare off marginal supporters of women's enfranchisement. But following the qualification of women to the House of Commons, the exclusion of the hereditary peeresses living at that time seemed anomalous, though the government drew a distinction between allowing voters to choose a woman MP - and many believed very few women would actually be elected - and flooding the upper house with the twenty women who would have been affected by a removal of the sex bar.

The matter would probably have remained there but for the inconvenient presence of these peeresses, and the determination of one of them, Lady Rhondda. Lady Rhondda was a former militant suffragette who had been to prison for her activities and succeeded her father to the peerage in 1918. She decided to try and claim a seat in the Lords, and her claim was based on the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, which stated that 'a person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function'. It seemed safe to assume that these words included sitting in parliament, and the committee to which her petition was referred determined that she did have such a right. However, this decision alarmed many peers, not least Lord Chancellor Birkenhead, who took the extraordinary step of referring the matter back to the committee for reconsideration, and this time he served on the committee himself, along with almost thirty other peers. Not surprisingly, they quickly voted to reject Rhondda's claim. Here, like many times during the suffrage struggle, women were angered not so much by the setback itself as by the sense that they had not been dealt with fairly.

Since the current law had proved insufficient to admit women, Lady Rhondda decided to try and change it. She had her lawyer draft a bill removing the sex bar, and then asked Viscount Astor, husband of the woman MP and a supporter of suffrage, to introduce the bill in parliament. Between 1924 and 1930 he did so almost annually, coming within two votes of success in 1925. However, the narrowness of the bill's defeat galvanised the opposition and they circulated a memo urging members to come and defeat the bill the following year. The result was a 126 to 80 defeat for the bill. Between 1910 and the late 1950s the average size of divisions was 80, and for over 200 to attend shows how seriously this question was taken by the peers.

The admission of women to the Lords should most logically have taken place between the years of 1918, when women over thirty received the right to vote, and 1928, when they received the vote at twenty-one, same as men. It was during this time that governments, eager to please the new women voters, passed a raft of acts improving women's status as it related to divorce and property law, child custody, as well as the right to serve as judges or jurors. It was also during the 1920s that more serious attempts were made to reform the lords than were to be seen again until 1968.

Yet the postwar period also witnessed a reaction against the advances women had made in World War I. Furthermore, the organised women's movement outside of parliament was not as united as it had been before the war, when it was agreed that obtaining the vote was their top priority. Once the vote was won, many women felt that there was no longer a need to seek equality on male terms, but to work for women's special needs as wives and mothers. Feminism was thus split into so-called 'new feminism', who were perhaps more old-fashioned as they worked for women's interests as women, and 'old feminism', which continued to focus on political rights but were seen by many younger women as boring and irrelevant. The opportunity having been lost, the question was not debated for over fifteen years until after World War II.

When the issue was revived in the 1940s, Lady Rhondda and others decided to launch a petition to demonstrate public support for women in the Lords, and in its first six months the petition succeeded in obtaining 50,000 signatures, including those of the principals of the Oxbridge women's colleges. Yet the need to present the petition was preempted by the Lords themselves, who in 1949 finally passed a motion calling for women's admission. Although the Labour government had previously stated they would admit women to the upper house once the lords themselves proved agreeable, it now fell back on its professed disapproval of the hereditary principle, saying it would be wrong for these women to sit by virtue of birth, and refused to introduce the promised legislation. Prime Minister Attlee doubted that their position would cost them any support except among 'extreme feminists', but this was typical of the Labour party's attitude at this time. Because of its trade union origins, Labour was not only dominated by as masculine ethos, but saw issues in class terms. This made it difficult for them to see issues from a gender perspective and recognise that women had their own distinct interests and needs, and the House of Lords issue was but one example of this.

Although it had been this promise of imminent full-scale Lords reform and democratisation which had been used to postpone women's admission to the Lords, it was the urgent need for a limited reform measure to save the House of Lords which finally facilitated the first breach of the sex barrier. By the mid-50s, slack attendance was rendering the House of Lords ineffective as a legislative assembly, and fewer younger men were willing to join as they did not want to burden their sons and grandsons with a hereditary peerage. The new leader of the house, Lord Home, realised that it would be nearly impossible to gain all-party support for a comprehensive scheme of reform, and instead introduced a simple bill to create peerages for life. Women, of course, were to be eligible. As Lord Hailsham said, when they were faced with a shortage of members, it would be 'idiotic' to continue to exclude half the population.

Yet there were those who did not think such a position was idiotic, and made a last-ditch rearguard stand against the life peeresses. However, it was easily overcome, and one of them confided to me that deep down they all knew they were fighting a losing battle. Five years later, there was no dissent when the government decided to remove the final statutory political sex inequality and admit the hereditary peeresses.

The intellectual context
This was the long story of justice denied, but why did it take so long? What were the reasons offered against women's admission? I have put the arguments used into four categories, some of which can apply not only to politics, but other male bastions such as the MCC, the church, or Oxbridge colleges. One of the oldest was the 'slippery slope' argument, that if women were granted this one concession, all sorts of other institutions hitherto held exclusively by men, such as the army and navy, ambassadorships, or the church, would inevitably follow. During the early 1920s it was certainly in the back of people's minds that if women were granted representation in the House of Lords, then they would have to receive equal voting rights, and voting as a bloc, would control the destinies of the empire. An equally frightening prospect was that if a hereditary peeress was allowed the rights of a male peer, the laws of succession would be changed to put sons and daughters on equal footing. While this may seem perfectly reasonable to you and I, as late as 1994 the House of Lords rejected such a scheme.

Another was the lessons of experience argument, that the experiment with women in the House of Commons had failed, or that the low numbers of women elected showed that the people, even women voters, did not want women in parliament. Many of the first women MPs were the wives of former MPs, and it was therefore claimed that they could only get elected on their husband's coattails. It was also claimed that these peeresses, if allowed to sit, would not bother to do so, and in fact many of them, with of course the exception of Lady Rhondda, were indifferent to the question of whether or not they sat in parliament.

The most persuasive and persistent were the constitutional arguments. The main variation of this, which has been echoed in the current reform debates, held that the House of Lords could not be reformed incrementally, step by step, but only in one comprehensive measure. Given that an even greater set of problems were attached to the question of second chamber reform than that of women's political rights, this effectively ensured the indefinite delay of the completion of women's political representation.

An interesting parallel exists between this question and suffrage. In both cases the obstacle was whether the admission of women to the electorate or the House of Lords should precede or form part of a wider scheme of reform. Women argued that so long as a property-based franchise, or a hereditary upper house existed, they should be allowed to take part in it on the same terms as men. The demand for peeresses in the Lords was attacked not as the removal of an outdated sex disqualification, but the extension of the hereditary principle, and thus a backward step. But as one peer noted, when these women died and were succeeded by their sons, they would have the right to sit. And so-called democratic suffragist politicians claimed that to allow women to vote on the same limited property basis as men presently did would simply compound the unfairness and illogic of the existing system. As one frustrated suffragist put it, politicians had eaten, enjoyed, and digested their cake, and only discovered it was poisonous when a hungry beggar asked for a slice.

Yet the problem was that long before women were demanding admission to the lords, the peers themselves had been trying to democratise their house. Since the 1850s there had been attempts to reform the composition of the upper house, but once the peers lost their veto and the right to consider financial legislation in 1911, the question of powers complicated the matter and for many peers, became the most important consideration.

Although it was the constitutional argument which did the most to frustrate the admission of women to the Lords, the argument which I suspect will be of the greatest interest to this audience are the essentialist arguments, that women's very nature made them ill-suited for politics in general or the Lords in particular.

One of the old anti-suffrage essentialist arguments was that women's weaker constitutions and child-bearing function disqualified them from the rough and tumble of politics. Yet given the differences between the two houses of parliament, and the more refined nature of the Lords, the essentialist argument could effectively be turned to women's advantage. The Lords had no stressful election campaigns, nor were did it have the late-night sittings which would be improper for women. One MP stated that while any decent, patriotic woman would be busy having as many children as possible to fight in the next war and would therefore be unable to endure the rigors of politics, she could sit in the lords without any risk to herself.

Not only women's physiology but also their temperament and character suited them to the Lords better than it did to the Commons. For one thing, any second chamber was meant as a check on the hasty action of the elected chamber, and therefore had to be conservative. One widely-held belief during this period, reinforced by women's voting habits, was that women were innately more conservative than men - therefore they would make the ideal members of an upper house. Also, if women were less aggressive and confrontational and therefore ill-suited to the raucous atmosphere of the House of Commons, then surely they would feel more at home in the more respectable atmosphere of the Lords.

In response, a new variation of the argument was formulated by Lord Birkenhead. The only reason why these women had ever been allowed to succeed to the peerage, he asserted, was so that they might produce a male heir. In other words, these hereditary peeresses were 'physiological conduit pipes' through which the title could be passed from one male generation to the next. These women would never have been allowed to succeed had it been envisaged that they might claim the right to sit. He added a cheap gibe that not a few of these women had disappointed the reasonable expectations placed on their physical fecundity. In fact, only five of the twenty peeresses at this time were childless, but sexologists of the postwar period made a connection between women's frigidity and their desire - one even used the word 'lust' - for political power. This played on the fear, fuelled by the large numbers of spinsters created by the war, that women's demand for political equality was connected to the abandonment of the traditional family role.

Fred Pethick-Lawrence, the veteran suffragist and later a member of the House of Lords, said that the real reason behind the opposition to equal rights was that men deal with women largely on an emotional plane, and it was therefore impossible to think of them as colleagues. Despite charges that women were the emotional sex and men were ruled by reason, many of the arguments against women were rooted in instinct. After warning that women were less rational than men, Lord Glasgow stated bluntly that 'we simply don't want them here. We don't want to meet them in the library or sit next to them on these benches. This is a house of men...we don't want a House of Lords and Ladies! This is the last place in the country where men can meet without women. For heaven's sake let us keep it that way!'

Many like Glasgow regarded their house not as an assembly which made laws for millions of men and women, but as a club whose membership they had a right to determine. Parliament was often called 'the best club in London', and never was this parallel so apt as when the club was threatened with female membership. Men's clubs, like parliament at this time, were a haven not from other classes, but from the expectations and restrictions which women's presence placed on men. Lady Ravensdale, one of the peeresses, described the peers as 'a drowsy lot of flies buzzing comfortably in a warm room, afraid of the entry of a few hornets'.

What was the effect of the hornets expected to be? According the Evening Standard, whether an MP liked women MPs or not, he felt awkward in their presence - women simply got in the way. The introduction of women into an assembly which for hundreds of years was exclusively male did have an impact. The sense of invasion which many felt was perhaps best expressed by Winston Churchill. He declared that the presence of a woman in the House of Commons was as embarrassing to him as if she had burst into his bathroom when he had not even a sponge with which to cover himself. Aside from making men uneasy with their very presence, women would also, without even realising it, exercise an undue influence. Lord Banbury wrote that women did not use these powers willfully but were so accustomed to getting their own way and influencing men that they could not help but do so in parliament.

Women in parliament would also take advantage of male chivalry in other ways. Lord Llewellin said that while the Commons had a Speaker who could order a woman MP to be quiet, there was no similar system in the lords, and he doubted any of its members could be so bold or ungallant as to move a woman no longer be heard. While some had argued that women's style of politics were more appropriate to the Lords than the Commons, others relied on the old stereotype of women as unable to keep quiet.

Women in the House of Lords
However, this particular peer, like virtually all other doubters, now admits that women have been a great success in the House of Lords. For all the fears that the presence of even one woman would disturb the house's decorum or sensibilities, women found their place in the House of Lords with perhaps greater ease than they had in the commons. Once the battle was over and women took their place in the Lords, by all accounts the peers acceded with good grace, and the four women appointed in 1958 found a more welcoming atmosphere than Nancy Astor had in the Commons. Just as many of the first women MPs were the wives of former MPs, the first four women appointed had similar connections. Lady Ravensdale was a hereditary peeress, Lady Swanborough was the widow of a peer and founder of the Women's Voluntary Service, and Lady Elliot was a widow of an MP. The fourth, Lady Wootton, said she wanted to abolish the House of Lords, but so long as it existed she couldn't resist 'blitzing an all-male institution'.

Lady Wootton, a Gorton graduate, who used her place in the Lords to fight for such causes as abolishing the death penalty and restricting handguns, admitted in the 1970s that women enjoyed greater front-bench representation than their numbers entitled them to. The only discrimination they did encounter, she recalled, was from the waitresses in the Lords dining room who felt they should sit at a separate table. While the Commons is typically full of ambitious men, many members of the Lords are in the twilight of their careers and do not feel as threatened by women as MPs do. In this year's Lords reform debates, numerous speakers have criticised the hereditary system's male preference, but cited peeresses such as Lady Mar and Lady Wharton as exemplifying the valuable work hereditary members can perform. Although a study of women's contributions to the Lords in the late 1970s and early 1980s concluded that they did not devote a notable amount of time to what might be called 'women's issues', it is generally agreed that they have fit in well in the House of Lords and, as individuals, made a real contribution.

Conclusion
In 1963, when the hereditary peeresses were finally to be admitted and women in Britain at last were to receive equal political rights, Lord Chancellor Kilmuir said 'the exclusion of hereditary peeresses from this house is something of which we have all been secretly ashamed.' the two landmark acts of 1918, allowing women to vote and allowing them to stand for the House of Commons, each left unfinished business, and the question of women's full representation in parliament was left unresolved longer than in any other enlightened western liberal democracy. The fact that this question was treated as simply one aspect of Lords reform, rather than an inference of the inferior status of over half the population, illustrates the low priority which governments of both parties placed on gender equality.

As Lady Rhondda admitted, the question of whether twenty hereditary peeresses sat in the House of Lords was a small matter. But the decision to maintain the bar on women's full participation in the governance of the country implied every woman's inferior status. She said: 'status is at the root of most things. It affects wages, salaries, opportunities, conditions…and the refusal to admit women to the House of Lords has just slightly lowered the status of all women so that it is just a little more unlikely that any professional or working woman will get a fair chance ungoverned by the accident of her sex.' Now that the principle of equality has rightfully been conceded, it will be interesting to see what place women have in the new elected or appointed upper house in the 21st century. Thank you.

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