‘It’s the party that counts’? The rise of Labour and the image of the woman politician at English elections, c.1929-50

Abstract

This article uses election addresses to consider how the early women parliamentary candidates sought to make their case to English voters. It then explores the insights that Mass Observation’s election surveys offer into public attitudes to women politicians, and gender and political leadership more broadly, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. While the pioneer female candidates argued that they should have more representatives at Westminster to better uphold the ‘woman’s point of view’ this approach was gradually undermined from the 1920s onwards with the growth of programmatic politics led by Labour. Mass Observation found that voters claimed to focus more on which party had the best programme rather than the personalities of candidates. However, their findings also indicate that women candidates continued to face many additional prejudices which their male opponents did not.