In a Minority in Male Spaces: The Networks, Relationships and Collaborations between Women MPs and Women Civil Servants, 1919–1955

This article outlines the relationships developed between women civil servants and women MPs between 1919 and 1955. It demonstrates the various ways in which a considerable number of women MPs supported efforts by women civil servants to achieve equal employment conditions with men. Arguing for the importance of networks and organisations embedded in the women’s movement, this article contributes new dimensions to our understanding of both the work of women MPs and the operation of interwar feminist campaigning.


Introduction
Although women could enter the Civil Service for several decades before they were granted the right to sit in the House of Commons, their prospects -with only a few exceptions -were confined to the lowest rungs of the service until the post-First World War period. Women clerks in the General Post Office, which employed the most women out of any Civil Service department, had begun a campaign in 1901 to highlight the inequalities in their employment compared to men, and the campaign expanded as women were employed in other departments. There was a small cohort of male MPs who acted as allies and raised issues in Parliament before 1918. However, it was in the interwar years, following the postwar restructuring of the Civil Service, that the unequal position of women became more widely known. After Nancy Astor took her seat in 1919, this article will argue, it was the growing alliance between women civil servants and women MPs -supported by feminist organisations which aimed to make strategic use of women's votes and representation in Parliamentwhich more widely publicised the issues that women civil servants faced. A solidarity developed between female civil servants and MPs: each formed a minority and were marginalised in their chosen occupations and there was a particular salience, of course, because both were employees of the state and, at their heart, each of their roles was about improving the lives of the public. The article demonstrates that whilst a significant effect of the collaboration was raising awareness of the disadvantages that women civil servants faced, there were tangible effects, most notably around equal pay.

Women MPs, women civil servants, and women's work
Mari Takayanagi (2017) has observed that 'the experience of an MP or government minister was far removed from that of women workers generally. Women Members fought for equal pay for others but never had to for themselves, and although their marital status may have been the subject of discussion, nobody ever suggested that they should resign their job on marriage' (609), as was required of women civil servants. However, due to the desire of women civil servants to work with them and the mutual networks of which they were part, many of the women MPs soon became Glew: In a Minority in Male Spaces 3 familiar with women civil servants' employment conditions, which were starkly defined by gender.
Whilst some male MPs continued their demonstrable support for women civil servants' endeavours after 1919 -and indeed such aid was needed for attempted legislative changes in Parliament -it was women MPs who prominently supported these campaigns precisely because of what their gendered presence could add. This was largely true for women MPs across the three main parties, although the form of support differed at times. In a significant number of instances, female MPs were willing to support the claims of women civil servants for equality, in defiance of their own party line. Crucially, women MPs supported these issues out of all proportion to their numbers. Until 1945, only 38 women were elected (Beers, 2013)  The article also draws on the personal papers and autobiographies of several women MPs, though as has been documented (see Beers 2016, for example), papers for a number of women MPs have not survived. National and local newspapers are also used, both to offer a different insight into the campaigning and to garner a sense of Glew: In a Minority in Male Spaces 4 the extent to which women MPs' work on behalf of civil servants came into public view.
There is a body of work on women civil servants in this period (Zimmeck, 1984; Jones, 2000; Glew, 2016) which examines the ways that they were systemically Service should be a model employer for private businesses, which also meant that by discussing pay and working conditions for women civil servants, such Parliamentary debates were in effect discussions about women workers more widely. This helps to explain the amount of time that these debates took up, the intractability of successive governments, and the reason that these issues became such a long-term battleground. The fact that government was, in effect, the employer of civil servants also encouraged the women's movement to focus their efforts on the plight of women civil servants, believing this would in turn yield change elsewhere (Glew, 2016).
The three significant issues on which women civil servants campaigned in the interwar years were equal employment and promotion opportunities with men, equal pay, and the end to the marriage bar. In theory, women had been given increased opportunities in the Civil Service as a result of the 1919 reorganisation of staffing grades, but it would not be until 1925 that women were allowed to compete in examinations for the executive and administrative grades, and even then, the numbers of women admitted through this route amounted to only a handful during the interwar years (Zimmeck, 1984;Glew, 2016). Furthermore, the Sex Disqualification Removal Act (SDRA) of 1919 had no real effect on women's opportunities in the Civil Glew: In a Minority in Male Spaces 5 Service. Not only was the Act enabling rather than prescriptive, as Mari Takayanagi Servants, which represented women on the higher (executive and administrative) grades. Each organisation was formed specifically on a gender equality platform.
Other mixed-sex organisations did engage with these issues, particularly equal pay, though their commitment was at times more theoretical than a demonstrable, active campaign, and their focus on issues which particularly affected women was sometimes trumped by other policy campaigns. The Civil Service Clerical Association, which became the mixed-sex rival to the FWCS/NAWCS, did not admit women to membership until 1921, and it was not until the late 1930s that the organisation changed its policy on the marriage bar from support to opposition (Glew, 2016).
The networks with women MPs also became particularly important to the women-only organisations because of their position within Civil Service industrial politics. The FWCS/NAWCS and the CWCS were non-party political, both in the tradition of many women's organisations in Britain in this period and because Civil Service guidelines and the strictures of the 1927 Trades Disputes Act prevented them from overtly political activity. The FWCS and the NAWCS had also decided not to amalgamate or affiliate with any mixed-sex (and therefore male-dominated) organisations in the Civil Service after feeling that their interests were not sufficiently represented, and this decision also meant that they had no representation on the overarching Civil Service Whitley Council -the Civil Service employer-employee negotiation body -though they did have representation on the Councils at the level Glew: In a Minority in Male Spaces 6 of individual departments (Glew, forthcoming). This situation meant that the FWCS' and NAWCS' natural tendency to align with women's organisations and to seek outside support became an indelible part of their strategy.
Although all three campaigning issues mentioned above were taken up by women MPs in the first half of the twentieth century, it was equal pay which was addressed most consistently. This was in part because it carried the most salience beyond the Civil Service: unequal pay was the norm in many other sectors and equal pay could be sold as an important issue to trade unions who might be worried about the possibility of women otherwise undercutting men's wages and being employed in preference to men. In addition, successive governments ruled that the issue could not be resolved by the Whitley Council. In the end, the marriage bar was abolished in 1946, equal pay was granted in 1955 with a six-year implementation period, and although there was some progress on the issue of women's opportunities in the Civil Service by the late 1930s, the issues of unequal opportunities and the 'glass ceiling' facing female employees continues in the Civil Service, arguably, to this day.
Although all the victories and milestones were clearly a combination of efforts, the public support and championing of these issues by women MPs was crucial. This article traces the particular shape of this support, and the evolution of the networks and alliances between women MPs and civil servants. It argues that the continued and consistent pressure from the majority of the women MPs to improve the lot of women civil servants made a significant difference in highlighting the unequal conditions that women civil servants faced, keeping these issues in the public eye and pushing for change.

The years after 1919: building and extending networks
In the years immediately after the First World War, when the Civil Service and the place of women within it were being reorganised, there were of course hardly any women MPs. Nancy Astor's 1919 election for the Conservative party allowed her to join forces with male colleagues to push for improvements to women's positions. In August 1921, she spoke in favour of Major John Hills' motion for equal admission regulations for male and female civil servants, telling the House that: Glew: In a Minority in Male Spaces 7 we do not want selection. We want competition and we want a fair chance.
I want the Government to carry out their promises on this question, and I do not want them to wait until they are forced to carry them out… I hope hon. Members will realise that they are sent to this House by the votes of thousands of women throughout the country, who ask for no favours, but simply for justice and equal opportunities with men. 1 Her pointed comment about women civil servants as voters highlighted the new era for voters and politicians alike.
The passing of this motion, which seemed to guarantee equality of entry and appointment with men, was at first greeted optimistically with a celebration dinner. It was also deemed symbolically important, as noted by the newspaper The Woman's Leader, because '[w]e can now, when a grievance presses hard upon us, turn to Parliament for redress… It is a thing to note and to remember, for what could we have done in this matter before we had votes?' 2 It was thus seen more widely by the women's movement as a symbol of what could be achieved postpartial enfranchisement. As the 1920s wore on, however, it became clearer that the spirit of these admission regulations was not being adhered to and that the initial optimism had been misplaced. However, the existence of these regulations and the original spirit of the SDRA (and particularly its Labour predecessor, the Women's Emancipation Bill) remained significant parliamentary moments for MPs -women and men alike -to refer to in debate over the intervening years.
As the celebratory dinner and its coverage in a former suffrage paper attests, a fundamental part of the relationship between women civil servants and women MPs was the wider backdrop of the women's movement. As Jessica Thurlow (2014) has remarked, a number of prominent women MPs in the early-mid twentieth century held leadership positions in organisations which declared themselves feminist. In the early years, alliances and connections from the suffrage movement and women's earlier activism helped to form circles of support that included women MPs and civil servants. Given the status of women civil servants and the very small number of women MPs, they were highly unlikely to meet each other in the normal course of Glew: In a Minority in Male Spaces 8 their daily work and so introductions and connection via wider activist networks were all the more important. Significantly, all of the organisations which connected women civil servants and women MPs were also non-party, although in practice some Labour women MPs remained reluctant to join, as discussed below. The multiplicity of such organisations and networks strengthened alliances and ensured that issues could often be approached from more than one angle, or by more than one organisation at the same time, and also ensured increased publicity on a particular issue. the Joint Committee in terms of its activism for equal pay in the mid-1930s, though this remains the only historical assessment of the committee whose focus was much broader than equal pay and whose existence spanned multiple decades. where member organisations could bring motions for debate to determine policy. 11 The Committee wound up in October 1928, instigated by Astor's announcement that her commitments prevented her from continuing as President and her feeling that the committee had achieved its aims. 12 Notably, the FWCS, who wholeheartedly felt that many more changes were needed to equalise women's careers and experiences as civil servants (Glew 2016

Politicising members: the FWCS and NAWCS, women voters, and women candidates
The FWCS joined in the general excitement over the election of Nancy Astor in late 1919. For several months in the early 1920s the FWCS also secured the services of Dorothy Elizabeth Evans, the formerly imprisoned suffragette and WSPU paid organiser. 15 She was paid to assist with FWCS recruiting and branch engagement and brought with her a range of skills honed in the suffrage movement. 16

The later 1920s and the Royal Commission on the Civil Service
Throughout the mid-to-late 1920s, women civil servants were trying to gain traction with a number of campaigns to improve their working conditions relative to men's. Bondfield and Lawrence were therefore supporting what was considered to be the official stance of the Labour women's movement, they were at odds with other (male) members of the party and at least elements of the trades union movement more widely. This was emblematic of the handling of many women's issues within the Labour party. As Graves (1994) has shown, there was an ongoing tussle between the feminist movement and the trade union movement over the best way to represent working-class women. This also had implications for female Labour MPs in terms of who they worked with and the rhetorical positions that they adopted when discussing issues such as equal pay, as we shall see below.
The Royal Commission on the Civil Service, which was called in 1929 and reported in 1931, was formative in determining the direction of Civil Service employment policy for women for more than a decade. Its judgements were hugely influential.  (Atholl, 1958: 138-139). Her BBC broadcast before the 1929 general election mentioned women largely in the context of being wives and mothers and spoke of her party's achievements on that score; there was no outward support of equal rights causes (Atholl, 1929). By her own admission, she did not find the Royal Commission work interesting because 'the questions we had to consider largely concerned salaries' (Atholl, 1958: 178), though the Commission's remit was in fact much wider than pay. It is clear, too, from her subsequent position on the issue that she was one of the Commissioners who opposed equal pay for women. 21 Writing in 1958, Atholl noted that she was willing to work with women MPs of all parties ' on non-party questions of special interest to women' (138), but evidently she must have perceived the issues that women civil servants faced as party political. Her questioning of witnesses throughout the Royal Commission process also revealed her Conservative and anti-feminist views, which, along with the questioning of similarly-minded colleagues, did serve the purpose of getting women civil servants' views into the press when the testy and confrontational exchanges were reported in day-by-day snippets.

Rhetoric in the House and elsewhere: consolidating the equal pay campaign, 1931-1939
When the Royal Commission reported in 1931, it recommended making more posts and types of work available to women on the same terms as men and some minor amendments to the marriage bar to allow the state to retain experienced women on the higher grades if they chose to marry. Both of these recommendations were put into practice through the Whitley negotiation machinery. In contrast, the Commission was equivocal about the need for equal pay. Although members were on both sides of the argument, their disagreements had not been so stark as to force a Minority report as had been the case with the 1912-1914 Royal Commission, but nonetheless gave proponents of equal pay little new support for their arguments.
Moreover, Commission findings made it clear once again that the only way to achieve equal pay was to get the government to agree to it via Parliamentary legislation (Glew, 2016). This was a bold articulation of many of the attitudes that the FWCS and CWCS had been trying to highlight and change for years. 22 Eleanor Rathbone (Independent) was well-connected with women's organisations as leader of the NUSEC from 1918 to 1929, and was broadly supportive of women civil servants' equality campaigns, but was against equal pay unless also accompanied by family allowances, her flagship policy after 1917. 23  Cullis. The International Women's News reported that the crowd was so large that an overflow space had to be found before the meeting could begin. The meeting notably largely steered clear of arguments about justice and equality and instead focused on arguments that might appeal to other audiences. Major Hills introduced the motion and Wilkinson seconded, noting that, contrary to popular belief, many women as well as men had dependents that they needed to support. Astor's contribution focused on the bad example being set by government to industry and she argued that paying women less than men meant that women became the preferable employees -a point that worked on an emotional and symbolic level to press home the need for equal pay, but which actually ignored the vast levels of gendered occupational segregation.
She also harked back to the Treaty of Versailles which had included an equal pay clause, but which had been ignored by many governments (International Women's News, April 1936: 55). Referring more widely to women's equality issues, Astor pointed out that: This question always seems to cause some amusement in the House. Some hon. Members seem to regard any question affecting women as a good joke, just as mothers-in-law used to be regarded as a joke. But I ask them to remember that this question is very far from being a joke. 26 Here, Astor was making a plea for marginalised voices -that is, women in all capacities who served the state that was still widely believed to belong to, and primarily serve, men. She drew also on a running thread in the debate -Stanley Baldwin's recent praise of women civil servants as possessing a high level of discretion, and the contradiction that he was not willing to support equal pay -by asserting that ' Such rhetoric, and her argument that the continuation of unequal pay would make the postwar adjustment more complicated, was a further example of billing equal pay as something that would help everyone, not just women. This was, of course, a core strand of feminism -that improving women's lives helped society as a wholebut it was calculated to work in a public sphere that tended to perceive discourses of feminism and 'women's rights' as old-fashioned, unnecessary and, at worst, anti-men Although the Royal Commission was instructed to not make a specific recommendation, the contents of the report made it clear that arguments against equal pay were diminishing (Ellis and Mortimer, 1980; Glew, 2016), and indeed in the decade between the delivery of the report and the eventual passage of equal pay for women civil servants, the refusal of successive governments to implement equal pay was on the grounds of cost rather than principle. The eventual passage of equal pay was, as has been noted, the culmination of years of pressure and efforts from a range of different sources (Glew, 2016). In the years following the war -and in part because of the numbers of women employed on work previously done by men and the wartime discourse on equal pay -there was increased campaigning from the NAWCS. Fittingly, perhaps, the piece of footage selected included Summerskill telling a crowd that although, politically, she and Nancy Astor were 'poles apart… on these questions of women, we presented a united front.' 33 Arguably, though, the film did women MPs' work a disservice -one that was probably unintentional on the part of the constituent associations. At the end, as the camera pans across the Houses of Parliament, the narrator asks pointedly if some of the 'women in there' have forgotten their fellow women. 34 Anyone following the campaigns surely would have known the baselessness of this question, given the intensity of women MPs' involvement.

Conclusion
Women civil servants were able to find considerable support from women MPs following the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Naturally, women MPs who had a longer tenure tended to be able to offer more support, having had more time to learn about the issues, establish relationships and work on longer-term elements of the campaigns. There were twenty-seven years between the entry of women MPs into the Commons and the end of the marriage bar, and over thirty-five years until the declaration of equal pay for women civil servants, so the commitment of women MPs was considerable and often in opposition to their party frontbenches. The fact that there were so few women MPs, yet they remained so prominent in these campaigns, attests to their levels of support, and how the issue of equality for women civil servants became a rallying cry for women politicians across parties.
As has been noted elsewhere, there is still much work for historians to do on women MPs, both in terms of writing their life histories but also in terms of thinking about them as politicians, public servants and women in the public sphere. This article contributes to this endeavour by examining how they worked with one specific group of women workers and on a range of issues which ultimately had salience and relevance for society well beyond the group. What emerges, too, is the significance and multiplicity of women's networks, and the embeddedness of several women MPs within these networks, in promoting and furthering the interests. As the minority gender in their respective professions, women MPs and civil servants both relied on such networks to differing extents and were able to use them to their advantage.