Gender and the Labour Party in Historical Perspective: Review of Alice in Westminster by Rachel Reeves.
| Author | Riley, Charlotte Lydia |
| Position | Labour's Internal Politics - Book review |
Rachel Reeves with Richard Carr, Alice in Westminster: The Political Life of Alice Bacon (IB Tauris: London, 2017).
In Attlee's landslide victory of 1945, 24 women were elected as MPs. Of these, 21 were Labour Party MPs; fifteen of the women were new to the House of Commons. One of these newcomers was Alice Bacon, elected to Leeds North East with a swing of 22 per cent from the incumbent Conservative. Leeds underwent various boundary changes after 1945, but until 2010, when Rachel Reeves was elected to Leeds West, Alice Bacon was the only woman ever to represent a Leeds constituency. In introducing this biography, Reeves describes her interest in her predecessor, and poses some questions about Alice's political and personal life: what did her family, her constituents, and the Labour Party think about Alice's political aspirations and her long and successful career? How did she juggle political life with her personal life, and how did her gender affect her political approach and experience?
The first chapter deals with Alice's home life, her upbringing in West Yorkshire and her road to political life. Reeves clearly sees Alice's politics as rooted within her background, her family and her schooling. Born in 1909, Alice grew up in a mining community, daughter of a politically-active miner (her father was a Labour County Councillor), and attended a grammar school before training as a teacher. Remembered in her constituency as 'our Alice' (80), it is clear that her connection to Yorkshire remained important throughout her career. The next three sections deal with the period from 1945 to the 1960s, exploring Alice as a 'political operator', her role in maintaining party unity, her position on the NEC and her alliances within the party, especially with Hugh Gaitskell. Reeves then moves on to discuss Alice's role as a constituency MP and the way in which the local informed her understanding of the national and international, before turning to examine Alice's appointment as Minister of State at the Home Office, and her work there, for example, her efforts to support the abolition of the death penalty (eight years after she had attempted to introduce a bill hoping to do just that).
The final years of Alice's parliamentary career were largely given to her work as an education reformer. She took a significant role in the establishment of the comprehensive school system. Alice had been a staunch supporter of a more egalitarian educational system since...
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