ABSTRACT
It was in Westminster and Whitehall that central government’s welfare policies were framed. (Westminster is shorthand for the Houses of Parliament with elected MPs in the House of Commons and unelected members in the House of Lords. Whitehall refers to the geographical area where departments of state with civil servants and government ministers were located.) Here it will be argued that the legislative changes, mainly in family law, usually identified as marking a temporary increase in women’s political power in the 1920s, owed little to women’s direct role in policy making. Women MPs supported, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the welfare campaigns of women outside Parliament for family allowances, birth control and nursery schools (discussed in Chapter Four). Women MPs, however, suffered from the twin constraints of their limited numbers, which reflected the difficulties women faced (and still face) in entering Parliament, and the barriers erected by their male colleagues against women’s advancement once in Parliament. If there had been more women MPs, especially in senior positions, they might have been able to move women’s issues from the realm of pressure group politics to party and thence government policy. Instead, men continued to monopolise government posts and take policy decisions. Westminster politics divided along male-dominated party lines, and women’s political advancement depended on their assimilation into the existing structures, which required abandoning exclusively feminist projects. It cannot be assumed, moreover, that all women in Westminster or Whitehall were interested in furthering any of the variously nuanced feminist policies of the period.
