Wave of Women Washes Over Venerable Boys Club

LONDON — The Eagles have landed with more than 100 allies in a friendly but resolute women’s invasion of the Mother of Parliaments. Already it is clear that the venerable, fusty House of Commons, famed for generations as the world’s greatest boys club, will never be the same. Daunting times ahead, old boy.

“This will be the most rapid change the institution has ever undergone--a great reform of content and of spirit. It is one of the ultimate modernizations of our political system,” said Angela Eagle, 36, who now represents voters along the River Mersey near Liverpool. Her identical twin, Maria Eagle, is the new member of Parliament, or MP, from the other side of the river.

The Eagle sisters--childhood chess prodigies, youthful cricket stars and alumnae of Oxford University who, admirers say, retain their student idealism--are emblematic of a historic high tide for women in British public life that crested with the landslide election victory by Tony Blair’s Labor Party on May 1.

The face, the pace, the texture, the societal concerns, the demeanor, even the amenities of Parliament are due for transformation because there are suddenly more women around the House than ever in history.

“In the last parliaments, there were more members named John than there were women,” said Philip Diltz, a Labor Party organizer in northern England.

The new numbers are as staggering as their political and social implications. In the Parliament that will be formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II this week, 120 of the 659 MPs will be women--101 of them among the 419 MPs representing new Labor.

The all-party total of 120 is five times the typical postwar figure, 101 more than came to Parliament when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979, and twice the number elected in 1992.

Among the female Labor MPs, five are members of Blair’s Cabinet and 14 more are ministers in Cabinet departments, the equivalent of under- and assistant secretaries in the U.S. The outgoing Conservative government had two female Cabinet members and eight ministers.

“A line has been drawn in history, and we’ll never go back,” said Dawn Primarolo, a sharp-witted, 43-year-old former fiery leftist (once known as Red Dawn) who is the new minister-ranked financial secretary to the treasury.

The House of Commons, more than 500 years old, has seldom taken lightly to women in its precincts. The sergeant-at-arms turned reporter Julia Blain of the Women’s Penny Paper away from the press gallery in 1890 because the speaker feared her presence could lead “to consequences which at present it is difficult to conceive.”

Nothing but trouble, what what? The House didn’t get its first female member until Nov. 28, 1919, when doughty Lady Astor, born in Virginia as Nancy Langhorne, was elected from Plymouth. Voters sent their lady back until 1945.

Between the pioneering Lady Astor and this month’s election, exactly 166 women, by Angela Eagle’s careful count, had served as MPs amid uncounted thousands of mostly aging men in a gray, pompous and polysyllabic procession.

Returning Welsh MP Ann Clwyd is delighted at her new company in the House. “Till now I felt isolated. MPs used to barrack [jeer at] women; they got personal. I hated the throwaway comments we’d get after 10:30 at night when they’d been in the bars,” she said.

Blair’s first encounter with Labor’s 101 women MPs could not have been a clearer signal of new times. As a group, they turned out to be colorful power dressers. In a House where pinstripes have been in since frock coats went out, the women came in suits of new Labor red and mauve, in pastels and citrus colors, in pantsuits and a floral jacket.

The new MPs who were photographed around Blair looked, in short, like what they are: women of all sorts from all over the British Isles demonstrating, consciously or not, against political drab.

Most are married with children. Well-educated and articulate, most became candidates after long membership in the party, often as elected members of local governments.

Among them, 28-year-old Ruth Kelly, an economist at the Bank of England, is eight months pregnant. Claire Ward, at 25 the youngest female MP, warned she might be mistaken as a secretary at first. There are also Yvette Cooper, an under-30 newspaper reporter representing a tough mining district in northern England, and Barbara Follett, one of 42 former teachers and college professors in Parliament. She’s married to novelist Ken Follett. Oscar-winning actress and returning MP Glenda Jackson is a new minister in the Transport Department and, at 60, one of the oldest of Blair’s appointments.

“What we will do is to make politics more relevant to people’s lives. Democracy is about consensus rather than imposing will,” said MP Gisela Stuart, a 41-year-old law professor and pensions expert from Birmingham.

Many of the new female MPs traveled the same road as Laura Moffatt, for 23 years an isolation and hematology nurse at the hospital in Crawley, a new town about 30 miles south of London near Gatwick Airport. She joined Labor the day after it lost power in 1979 because “I thought if more people had tried, things might have turned out differently.”

After she had spent 18 years in the political wilderness, lightning struck on May 1. At 43, the mother of three teenage boys, the wife of an aircraft engineer, Laura Moffatt, RN, is now the Honorable Laura Moffatt, MP.

“It was the most wonderful feeling to emerge from the underground [subway] and see the Parliament,” Moffatt said after her first postelection visit to the Victorian Gothic monument to democracy that will be her office for the next five years.

“Inside, what struck me is how many other new members, perfectly ordinary people like me, were walking around looking awe-struck too. There were not professional politicians either, but people with a gut feeling they want to do something,” Moffatt said. “Parliament is going to be a very different place. And particularly nice for women, because we have a voice that is likely to be listened to.”

The House, always a macho place in a frumpy British way, never spared much thought for disabled members, but it will listen, you may be sure, to the MP friends of Ann Begg, a 41-year-old former teacher and parliamentary rookie from Aberdeen, Scotland, who is confined to a wheelchair. There’s no wheelchair access at Westminster now. But wait and see.

A lot of Labor’s new female look was planned. Under party leader John Smith, who died in 1994 and was succeeded by Blair, the party began to push actively for more female candidates, a trend continued under Blair.

Under an unabashed quota system, in some constituencies party leaders were asked to pick their parliamentary candidate from an all-woman short list. A court ruled against the practice after some local parties complained, but others went out of their way to choose female nominees, according to organizer Diltz.

The big difference this year was that more women were named to run in winnable seats--and more seats proved winnable. Blair and his brain trust thought they would bring Labor to power for the first time since 1979 with a parliamentary majority of between 50 and 70.

Blair himself privately scoffed at early projections of a landslide, but he wound up with a historic 179-seat majority. That meant about 100 more MPs than Labor expected, a representative sampling of women among them.

The five female members of Blair’s Cabinet, by contrast, are veteran political heavyweights who cast long national shadows: tough, competent Margaret Beckett, president of the Board of Trade, 54, a former member of the party’s hard left who was defeated by Blair for party leader in 1994; Ann Taylor, 49, who first went to the House in 1974 and now becomes its leader; Harriet Harman, 46, the social security minister who is a mother of three and wife of a senior officer in the transport workers union; Marjorie Mowlam, 47, the Northern Ireland minister, a former party spokesman for the arts and women’s affairs; and Clare Short, 51, the minister of international development, who was reunited this year with the son she gave up for adoption 31 years ago.

There’s one more key figure in the ascendancy of Labor women who does not appear on the government payroll. She is Cherie Booth, a creme de la creme, $300,000-a-year London lawyer. She dutifully appeared as Mrs. Tony Blair for the campaign, as gawky and ill at ease in public gaze as she is comfortable and persuasive standing bewigged in a courtroom. Booth, whose clients include a charity for battered wives, went back to work last week.

In assaying the sudden and dramatic shift in the public role of women, some commentators warn against premature cheers. Men still constitute 98% of judges and 93% of company directors in Britain, notes Marcelle d’Argy Smith, a former editor of Britain’s Cosmopolitan magazine.

Still, in the hallowed halls of Parliament, which is the heart of British democracy, the hands have spun faster toward change in the past few weeks than in the previous five centuries. “We now have a critical mass. There are enough women in the institution to change the way it operates,” said Angela Eagle, named by Blair as a minister in the department of environment.

“There will be less ‘Yeah! Boo!’ [rock ‘em, sock ‘em] politics, much more serious consideration of social justice issues with respect to women, like child care and part-time work,” Eagle said. “There will be more sensible debates on family issues. This is never going to be a 9-to-5 job, but there is no reason we cannot begin to accommodate the workload in a more sensible way.”