Rethinking right-wing women

Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present

Julie V. Gottlieb
Editeur : Manchester University Press
Parution : 2017-12-01 10:37:26
Nombre de pages : 264

Publication | Table des matières | Critiques

Résumé

Rethinking Right-Wing Women explores the institutional structures for and the representations, mobilisation, and the political careers of women in the British Conservative Party since the late 19th century. From the Primrose League (est.1883) to Women2Win (est.2005), the party has exploited women’s political commitment and their social power from the grass-roots to the heights of the establishment.

Yet, although it is the party that extended the equal franchise, had the first woman MP to sit Parliament, and produced the first two women Prime Ministers, the UK Conservative Party has developed political roles for women that jar with feminist and progressive agendas. Conservative women have tended to be more concerned about the fulfilment of women’s duties than the realisation of women’s rights.

This book tackles the ambivalences between women’s politicisation and women’s emancipation in the history of Britain’s most electorally successful and hegemonic political party.

Table des matières

Introduction: Clarisse Berthezène & Julie Gottlieb

1. ‘Open the eyes of England’: female unionism and conservatism, 1886-1914 – Diane Urquhart

2. Christabel Pankhurst – A Conservative suffragette? – June Purvis

3. At the heart of the party? The women’s Conservative organisation in the age of partial suffrage, 1914-1928 – David Thackeray

4. Conservative women and the Primrose League’s struggle for survival, 1914-1932 – Matthew Hendley

5. Modes and models of Conservative women’s leadership in the 1930s – Julie Gottlieb

6. The middlebrow and the making of a ‘new common sense’: Women’s voluntarism, Conservative politics and representations of womanhood – Clarisse Berthezène

7. Churchill, women, and the politics of gender – Richard Toye

8. ‘The Statutory Woman whose Main Task was to Explore what Women were Likely to Think.’ Margaret Thatcher and Women’s Politics in the 1950s and 1960s – Krista Cowman

9. Conservatism, gender and the politics of everyday life, 1950s-1980s – Adrian Bingham

10. Feminist responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism – Laura Beers

11. The (feminised) contemporary Conservative party – Rosie Campbell and Sarah Childs

12. Conserving Conservative women: A view from the archives – Jeremy McIlwaine

13. Women2Win and the feminization of the UK Conservative party – Baroness Ann Jenkin with an introduction by Sarah Childs

Critiques

  • “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
    – Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK
  • “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
    – Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course