Considering Conservative Women in the Gendering of Modern British Politics

Clarisse Berthezène is Professor of Modern History at the University of Paris, France, and she has published widely on conservatism in Britain and abroad in the 20th century, including Training minds for ideas. Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the cultural politics of Britain, 1929-54 (2015). Julie V. Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield, UK, and she has published extensively in the field of women and politics in the first half of the 20th century, including ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Interwar Britain (2015). Together the co-editors of this volume organised the Rethinking Right-Wing Women conference in Oxford in 2015.

Introduction: Considering conservative women in the gendering of modern British politics

Clarisse Berthezène and Julie V. Gottlieb

1. ‘Does the right hon. Gentleman mean equal votes at 21?’ Conservative women and equal franchise, 1919–1928

Mari Takayanagi

2. The Elusive Lady Apsley

Madge Dresser

3. Women in the organisation of the Conservative Party in Wales, 1945–1979

Sam Blaxland

4. Diana Spearman's role within the post-war Conservative Party and in the ‘battle of ideas’ (1945–1965)

Stéphane Porion

5. Housewives having a go: Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and the appeal of the Right Wing Woman in late twentieth-century Britain

Jessica Prestidge

6. Free markets and feminism: the neo-liberal defence of the male breadwinner model in Britain, c. 1980–1997

Ben Jackson

7. From ‘I’m not a feminist, but … ’ to ‘Call me an old-fashioned feminist … ’: conservative women in parliament and feminism, 1979–2017

David Swift

8. The Iron Ladies revisited: Julie Gottlieb interview with journalist, writer and political activist Beatrix Campbell

Julie V. Gottlieb and Beatrix Campbell