Putting Women in the House: The Foundation and Development of the 300 Group to get more Women into British Politics

Abstract

Very occasionally a movement is born which is so timely and relevant it is clear that it will make an enduring impression on our attitudes and institutions. In the autumn of 1980, just over a year after the General Election which brought to power the first British woman Prime Minister, the 300 Group was formed to encourage, in all possible ways, the increased participation of women in electoral politics. The name was intended to suggest that since there are 635 M.P.s in the British House of Commons and women are half the electorate, there should in justice be roughly 300 women in the House. The election in 1979 of Mrs. Thatcher and a Cabinet bereft but for herself of women ministers, served to high‐light the position of women at Westminster. Figures which hitherto had apparently only interested a few academics — on the numbers of women candidates and of women representatives over time — suddenly became common knowledge and no newspaper or magazine at the time was complete without its piece on the women — or lack of women — in politics. The figures are indeed compelling. In spite of the woman at the top, the General Election of 1979 in Britain produced only nineteen women out of the 635 members of Parliament — that is, slightly under 3%. This was in fact the worst result for women for nearly thirty years, but in the intervening time, the heights they had reached were hardly giddy. Never had a 5% representation been achieved and during the whole of the 50's, 60's and early 70's the figure stayed mainly around 3–4%. This grim situation was compounded by the fact that for the last five elections, the number of women standing as candidates had gone up each time, yet with no equivalent increase in the numbers of women elected but rather a clear fall in the 1979 total (2.9%) over that of October, 1974 (4.3%).