Ahead of next Tuesday’s hybrid Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Ellie Lowe of Selwyn College, Cambridge. On 13 June, between 5.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m., Ellie will discuss the reinvention of the political wife in the age of suffrage.

The seminar takes place on 13 June 2023, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to book to attend online or in-person are available here.

Pauline Prescott’s memoir blends seamlessly on a bookshelf with any bestselling romance novel. From the dusky pink cover, Pauline gazes up with heavily mascaraed eyes alongside her signature scrawled in pink. Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking was publicised as a ‘tale of Catherine Cookson-eque tragedy’, that would shock and amaze readers with its story of ‘not your typical politician’s wife’.

But what does it mean to be a ‘typical politician’s wife’? It’s incredibly hard to say – the behaviour varies so much by time period, by political party and by individual circumstances. But however much they vary, the relationships between political husbands and political wives are significant in British parliamentary history.

My paper for the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar next week will examine how these relationships were reinvented in three ways in twentieth-century Britain. The first reinvention for political wives was the way that they were able to become elected politicians themselves. When women had the opportunity to stand in parliamentary and local elections from 1918, many of the first women to do so took over parliamentary seats from their husbands.

This has been called ‘the halo effect’ by historians, as it describes the way that women benefitted from the way voters considered them as an extension of their husbands and so trusted them accordingly. I’ve written about this elsewhere, where I’ve argued that it is useful to analyse the circumstances that led to seat inheritance rather than just decrying nepotism. But there is also an underexplored reason behind seat inheritance – that many of them were married to each other because they both wanted to be involved in politics.

This transition from political wife to politician was replicated many times in parliamentary elections, but also in local councils, in twentieth-century Britain. Thousands of husbands and wives were politically active together within political parties, and many met each other in this way. Particularly in the Labour party, this was a very common occurrence with couples such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ethel and Philip Snowden, Margaret and Ramsay MacDonald, Jennie Lee and Aneurin Bevan, Ruth and Hugh Dalton, Katherine and John Bruce Glasier, Lucy and Jim Middleton, to name just a few. This meant that their roles within the marriage could change depending on the circumstance.

Often women would initially support their husband in his political career, but might take a higher profile role themselves once he retired. Or one spouse would win an election when the other would not, and so it was clear which partner would support the other. Thinking about the lifecycles within marriages and politics together is useful for seeing political agency for women whilst being only a ‘political wife’.

The ways that men supported their wives, or became ‘political husbands’, is the second reinvention. As some women’s political presence and influence grew, there were greater tensions around the role of their husbands. Some men took on the practical support of their political wives, accompanying them to events or acting as their secretaries or campaign managers. There were often very gendered attitudes to this, and men playing these roles were often spoken about as ‘strategisers’ or ‘organisers’ rather than consorts or companions.

This model of the politician and their supporter was not just limited to heterosexual relationships. Many politicians who were bachelors, spinsters, gay men or lesbians also formed relationships that could support them in their political lives. Elected politics, but also political activism, placed large demands on domestic and personal lives. Those who weren’t married normally co-opted other (usually female) relatives such as mothers, brothers, sisters and friends to fill their place.

The last reinvention that I’m going to discuss was the new public profiles that political wives developed. There is a genre that can be analysed of the ‘spousal memoir’ which is a collection of about a dozen memoirs all written by women about their marriages and lives in politics. This is interesting from a perspective of not only the greater public profile that women had developed, but also their increasing desire for their efforts to be remembered. In doing so, women formed new ways of articulating the identity of political wives through their writing of fiction and memoir. This is a tradition that was built throughout the twentieth century and has continued – just think of Sasha Swire’s recent bestseller.

Through the study of political wives (and husbands) we can see how political parties sought to accommodate gender into public life after 1918. These reinventions are helpful in thinking about how women navigated their increasing influence in both their political and personal lives – and how difficult it was for many couples to disentangle these two concepts. 

EL

The seminar takes place on 13 June 2023, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to book to attend online or in-person are available here.

Further reading:

Elizabeth Vallance, Women in the House: A Study of Women Members of Parliament (London: Athlone, 1979).

Pat Jalland, Women, marriage and politics 1860-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Sarah Richardson, The political worlds of women: gender and politics in nineteenth century Britain (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Pamela Graves, Labour women: women in British working-class politics 1918-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Susan Pedersen, ‘Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2018: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Balfour Family’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2019).

Clarisse Berthezène and Julie Gottlieb (eds.), Rethinking right-wing women: gender and the Conservative party, 1880s to the present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).