Society
Women of the House
Published 19 June 2008
Observations on the ladies' chamber
If the members of the House of Lords had actively been looking for a way to highlight the second chamber's shortcomings, they could have done worse than an exhibition which opened on 12 June (until 26 September) at Westminster. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Life Peerages Act, which introduced non-hereditary peers - and, among them, the first women to sit in the House - "A Changing House" is intended to "illustrate the history and achievements of life peers and women in parliament". It's worth a visit just to see what's been left out.
The vast, gilded walls of the Royal Gallery, which is hosting the exhibition, are hung with an impressive selection of portraits of past monarchs, as well as two enormous frescos depicting the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar. By contrast, the exhibition itself is a modest, local-library-style affair, huddled in one corner of the room. It is a fitting tribute to what Clement Attlee described, at the time of its creation, as "a wholly insufficient bill", and what Lord Moran called a tranquilliser that "puts off the future of this House".
The exhibition consists of a series of wall panels describing a chronology of the Lords since 1958, plus a number of related documents. Of these, the highlights are the bill itself and a protest banner that suffragettes hung from the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons (a mere 50 years before the act permitted them to sit in the Lords).
Indeed, the exhibition focuses on the introduction of women peers. Busts of significant examples - Barbara Castle, one of the earliest female cabinet ministers, and Nancy Astor, the first female MP - stand at either end of the exhibition, while Barbara Wootton, one of the four women to be made a peer in the year the act was passed, gets particular attention. So it is a little unfortunate that the curator has chosen to illustrate the wall panel devoted to the changing world of the 1950s with, among other images, the 1958 cover for Ian Fleming's Dr No, which features a naked woman in silhouette.
A few notable men get a mention, too, such as Lord Pitt, one of the first black peers, and Lord Geddes (no relation to his latter-day namesake), a trade unionist who would have been unwilling, as well as unable, to sit in a hereditary House of Lords.
For all the act's insufficiencies, the move towards a more representative upper chamber was a positive one. But the peers' mere presence is the only achievement that "A Changing House" records. Any groundbreaking, modernising political decisions the life peers may have made once they got there are conspicuous by their absence from the exhibition.
However, there is a heftier elephant lurking in the gallery: the complete dearth of 21st-century politics. The final wall panel ends with the House of Lords Act 1999, which finally abolished the right of peers to inherit their seats. There is nothing about the Labour Party's 2001 manifesto promise of a "more democratic" House of Lords, or the current wranglings of Jack Straw's select committee over replacing the present members with elected, waged "senators". Asked about the latest proposals, the Lord Speaker Baroness Hayman, who opened the exhibition, was coy: "I can't say. My job is to describe the House as it is today."
Why she feels that the politics of the past decade is not equally relevant was unclear.
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