Introduction

The Labour Party’s landslide at the 1997 general election saw 120 women Members of Parliament elected to the House of Commons, doubling the number of women MPs overnight. Women now constituted 18 per cent of all MPs. This was unprecedented: for most of the twentieth century women MPs had accounted for less than 5 per cent, and less than 10 per cent even at the previous general election in 1992. So 1997 was the ‘year of the woman MP’. Yet it was, in truth, the ‘year of the Labour woman MP’. For 101 of the 120 women MPs in the 1997 Parliament were Labour, only 13 were Conservative, three were Liberal Democrat and two were Scottish Nationalists.1