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In the 50 years since equal rights for women were enshrined in UK law, the campaigners have been reduced to caricatures, or forgotten. But their struggle is worth remembering.
Along with Conran, Brayfield also joined Women in Media, a pressure group set up in 1970 to challenge sexism in the industry and beyond. Its activities have been largely forgotten, and many of those involved have died. But it played a key role in the campaign to outlaw sex discrimination and enforce equal pay – as well as lobbying bosses for equal opportunities at work. One policy that especially riled them, and became a focus, was the broadcasters’ refusal to let women read the news. The public would find this “unnatural”, the BBC executive Robin Scott told the Daily Mirror in 1972. “There’s always bad news about and it’s much easier for a man to deal with that.”
There had been a women’s movement pressing for employment rights since the 19th century, when pioneering female trade unionists campaigned for safer conditions and higher wages in shops and factories, and middle-class women fought for access to the professions. But even after the second world war, during which millions of women took on roles previously reserved for men, sexism was baked into workplaces. It was standard practice for women to be paid around four-fifths of what men earned for the same job, and sexist attitudes meant that women were routinely refused promotion. Senior and leadership positions were largely off-limits. Powerful politicians, employers and some trade unionists were determined that it should stay that way. When the House of Commons supported an amendment calling for equal pay for female teachers in 1944, Winston Churchill, the prime minister, was so determined to block it that he made the next vote on the issue a vote of confidence in the wartime government – effectively threatening to resign if it became law.
On 7 March 1968, the Labour backbencher Joyce Butler challenged the prime minister, Harold Wilson, directly in the House of Commons: “Is my right honourable friend aware that women are fed up with being exploited as pretty birds when they are young, and as silly moos when they get older?” She wanted to know if he planned to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1918 women’s suffrage bill with a law against sex discrimination.
Between 1968 and 1971, Butler tried four times to introduce an anti-discrimination bill that would make it illegal for employers to treat male and female workers differently.
But Women in Media – which drew in young journalists like Brayfield and Mary Kenny, as well as an older generation including Mary Stott, who was Guardian women’s editor from 1957-72 – was determined to push a bill through.
Not everyone was enamoured of Women in Media’s self-appointed role. There was a cross exchange of letters with WLM organisers, and in 1974 Dodie Wheppler wrote to the Guardian on behalf of the Socialist Woman journal to complain about “the Women in Media group going from bad to unbelievable.
In March 1974, Women in Media wrote to the prime minister, Harold Wilson, to say that a sex discrimination bill “must, in justice, be considered an urgent priority in any socialist programme”.
In the summer of 1974, Women in Media decided to increase the pressure on Wilson by putting up its own candidate in the next election – expected to be soon as Labour did not have a majority. The woman chosen was Una Kroll, a 48-year-old deaconess and GP in south London, with a remarkable family history which included growing up partly in the Soviet Union where both her parents were spies. A campaigner for the ordination of women, she described herself as having been radicalised by a patient who had died from cervical cancer, aged 29, after doctors refused to take her symptoms seriously.
Since Women in Media was not a suitable name for a political party, the Women’s Rights Campaign was established on 6 September. In a bizarre coincidence – or what some feminists hoped was a panicked reaction to their bold move – the Home Office launched a white paper, Equality for Women, on the same day.
Christabel Pankhurst had been the sole candidate for a Women’s party in 1918, and lost by 775 votes. But while this disappointing coda to the suffrage movement was forgotten, Kroll’s supporters decked themselves in the suffragette colours of purple, white and green, and celebrity supporters including the actor Glenda Jackson donned sashes for photos. The manifesto was a checklist of issues including contraception, childcare and pensions as well as pay.
In electoral terms, the Woman’s Rights Campaign was a flop. Kroll won just 298 votes. Records of the campaign in the Women’s Library suggest that its activists fell down on canvassing. Most volunteers worked full-time and evening door-knocking sessions turned into chaotic late nights. In obituaries of Kroll, who died in 2017, her candidacy is referred to only briefly.
But while the campaign did not succeed, it was an audacious stunt. It would be more than 40 years before the Women’s Equality party would try something similar on a larger scale. And in publicity terms, it had an effect. Newspapers reported on the Women’s Rights Campaign with interest and when Labour won a majority, it quickly announced that sex discrimination would be outlawed.
Feminists did not win all the arguments. The equal opportunities commission (as the board was named) gained the power to investigate but only “with the agreement of the secretary of state”. Women in Media described the bill as “timid tinkering with a problem that needs all-out assault” and criticised the exemption for small employers and partnerships including solicitors: “We notice that the law, as usual, has protected its own bastions.” But the inclusion of indirect as well as direct discrimination was a victory. And members were happy enough that when the bill passed one of its stages in October, they threw a party.
The Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts both came into force on 29 December 1975, on the same day that the equal opportunities commission (EOC) was established in Manchester.
In 2006, New Labour legislated to dissolve the EOC. Its replacement, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, came into existence the following year, fulfilling the ambition first voiced in the 1970s for one body monitoring discrimination across different characteristics. In 2010, earlier anti-discrimination laws were combined in the Equality Act.
“These things are always a compromise,” says Patricia Hewitt. “By 1980 we were saying ‘there’s not enough in this act’, but I think in 1975 we felt we’d done pretty well.”
Source: ‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act | Feminism | The Guardian