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>>Baroness Anita Gale: Well, good evening everyone. Can I welcome you to the House of Lords
and to this talk which we are delighted to hold, to celebrate the life of an extraordinary
woman, Margaret Haig Thomas, the Viscountess Rhondda.
I am Anita Gale, and I am a member of the Works of Art Committee in the House of Lords.
The Works of Art Committee are delighted to have been able to acquire a rare portrait
of Lady Rhondda by Alice Burton, and I think we will be showing it soon. We were delighted
to have this portrait because I know the House of Lords had been looking for some time to
get a portrait of Lady Rhondda, and I was pleased that my colleague, Jessica Morden,
a Member of Parliament for Newport East, told me about this, and we eventually, the Works
of Art Committee, approved the purchase of it, and it is now hanging in the dining room
of the House of Lords. So we are very pleased to hold this event in the River Room, and
I would like to thank The Lord Speaker for making it available to us.
I am now delighted to be able to introduce our speaker, Angela V. John. Angela is the
Honorary Professor in the Department of History and Welsh History of Aberystwyth University.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Learned Society of Wales, and a
Vice President and a former Chair of Llafur, the Welsh People's History Society. She has
published widely on women and gender history in the 19th and early 20th century in Wales
and England. ' When we acquired the portrait of Viscountess
Rhondda in 2011, we were very pleased that Angela agreed to come and give a talk about
Viscountess Rhondda's attempt to take her seat in the House of Lords in 1922, which,
had she succeeded, would have made her the first woman to sit in the House of Lords,
but in fact we had to wait until 1958 before a woman sat in the House of Lords. Unfortunately,
she was unsuccessful, but continued to campaign through. As I said earlier, it took until
1958 for the first woman to sit in the House of Lords. Angela's talk was so inspirational
that we were anxious for her to come back and tell us more about this extraordinary
woman. She has now finished her research and has indeed published a book, and here is the
book. It is called 'Turning the Tide', and it is a great book. I am about half way through
it at the moment, Angela. Now, Christmas is coming, and it only cost 20 pounds. I know
the publishers are here in the back, but it is a very good read, so I hope you will take
advantage; you cannot buy it here, though, unfortunately. We are not allowed to sell
books in the House of Lords, but it is in the Parliamentary bookshop I believe.
Angela has now, as I say, finished her research, and we are delighted that she has agreed to
come back and give us a further instalment, particularly as we are in the middle of Parliamentary
Week, with the theme this year of 'Woman and Democracy'. There will be an opportunity later
for questions at the end of her talk, and we are filming Angela's talk for the Parliamentary
YouTube channel, so you will be able to look at it again. I am now going to ask Angela
to come up and give her talk. We are looking forward to it very much.
>>Angela V. John: My lords, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed Baroness Gale of
Blaenrhondda for that very generous introduction. I am delighted to be able to return here to
talk about the second Viscountess Rhondda now that my biography is out, and I am extremely
grateful to everybody who has been involved in organising this event, and in particular
I want to thank Melanie Unwin, the Deputy Curator of Works of Art, for her sterling
work, and I want to thank Jessica Morden MP as well, and Baroness Gale, who seems an extremely
appropriate person to be introducing this evening's talk. It is great to see all of
you here this evening as well, and I am especially delighted that members of my family are present,
including my niece Katie, who is studying history in Cardiff University and whose birthday
it is today, as well as friends from London and beyond, from Wales, and even from Germany
and California. In 2011 I spoke about Lady Rhondda's protracted
struggle to gain a seat for women in the House of Lords. This evening what I want to do is
to cast my net rather more widely, and since this is Parliament Week and there is a focus
on women in democracy, it seems appropriate that I should talk about the various means,
often ingenious, and certainly prescient, by which Lady Rhondda helped to secure equal
rights for women in the first half of the last century.
But first I think I need to point out that we are dealing with a woman of many names.
In Wales she is best remembered as Margaret Haig Thomas, reflecting both of her parents'
surnames. She was born in London in 1883, but grew up in the rarefied atmosphere of
Llanwern Park, near Newport, Monmouthshire. Margaret, as I shall call her for consistency,
was the only child of Sybil Haig, from a highly respectable old established family of Scots
decent, but settled in Radnorshire, and her more arriviste husband was D.A. Thomas, known
as D.A., the immensely wealthy Welsh and international industrialist and Liberal politician. At a
progressive girl's boarding school, St Leonards in Scotland, she was simply called Margaret
Thomas. By 1908 she had become Mrs Mackworth after marrying in to the Monmouthshire gentry,
and a few years later she became Lady Mackworth. In 1923 Margaret and Humphrey Mackworth divorced,
and then thanks to her father, five years earlier, she had actually become the second
Viscountess Rhondda, so there are a whole number of names, which means it is actually
quite difficult at times tracking her. The First World War had seen the making, politically,
and the breaking of D.A., her father. He had belatedly received the recognition he previously
lacked by serving as a minister under Lloyd George. He was rewarded with the title of
Lord Rhondda, and in 1918, largely due to the pressure of work - and it was he who introduced
the nation to food rationing - he died, having just become Viscount Rhondda.
He had obtained permission from the King by special remainder, for his daughter to take his title. His widow
became the Dowager Viscountess Rhondda, and that is her mother. Then, and since,
the existence of two Viscountess Rhonddas - and Sybil did not die until 1941 - has of course produced
considerable confusion. Margaret, easily the more progressive of the two, kept her title
until she died, childless, in 1958. As well as having all these different names,
Margaret's life also straddled Wales and England, and although it appears to be neatly divided
in to Wales pre-First World War, and London and South East England - Kent and then Surrey
- from the 1920s, even that was not so simple. Throughout her childhood her parents had a
flat in London's Victoria, and she attended Notting Hill High School for a while. In the
last years of her life, she spent more and more time back in Wales, particularly in Radnorshire,
where she had enjoyed childhood holidays with her extended family. Her ashes are buried
in the village where she grew up, Llanwern. To these many names and places we can add
multiple images. Margaret has been labelled in a number of ways. She was a suffragette.
She was a survivor of the RMS Lusitania disaster, and that story alone is a piece of high drama.
She was a major figure in international business in the 1920s. In fact, one newspaper rather
unfortunately dubbed her 'Britain's biggest businesswoman'. She held more directorships
than any other woman in the UK after the First World War, and in 1926 she became the first,
and to date sole, female President of the Institute of Directors. She was a highly influential
editor and journalist. She has also been seen as an equalitarian feminist. Identifying and
sometimes questioning these descriptions of such a protean character has been a challenge.
The various facets of Margaret's life suggest the many identities that an individual can
hold in tension, and that a biographer needs to tease out but not simplify.
Biographical subjects are, like all of us, mightily inconsistent both over time and even at the same time.
Margaret's catholicity of interests sometimes overlapped rather than just existing sequentially.
This evening I want to follow one thread that I believe cuts across her apparently discrete
interests: her commitment to equal rights unifies much of Margaret's adult life, though
I shall argue that this was not quite sustained in the manner that has been presupposed. So
let us start with votes for women. June of this year marked the centenary of the dramatic
death of the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, at the Derby. That same month was also the
centenary of what one Welsh suffragette called 'Margaret's little bit of arson'. It too has
been recognised this year. The letterbox that Margaret set alight in Newport was draped
in the suffragette colours of purple, white and green, and a short film, staring an eight
year old girl from a Gwent school was released online by a documentary film company to mark
the event on the exact day, 25 June. In that summer of 1913, Margaret had travelled to
London to obtain her incendiary materials from the suffragette headquarters of the Women's
Social and Political Union (WSPU). Sympathetic pharmacists worked with suffragettes in devising
combustible concoctions. There was an anxious moment as Margaret travelled home in a crowded
third class compartment on the train when the woman sitting next to her casually lent
her elbow on her flimsily covered baskets containing the chemicals, but she did get
back safely, and they were buried in a vegetable garden at her home, near Caerleon, under the
blackcurrant bushes. Margaret's conversion to suffrage had come just two and a half weeks
after her wedding, which was five years earlier. In fact, it was probably what kept her marriage
going. She and her husband might have been socially compatible, but their interests diverged
greatly. Hunting was his great love. Margaret neatly summed up their outlooks: 'Humphrey
held that no one else should ever read in a room where anyone else wanted to talk. I,
brought up in a home in which a father's study was sacred, held on the contrary that no one
should ever talk in a room where anyone else wanted to read.'
Unlike many involved in women's suffrage, Margaret was not rebelling against a narrow
Victorian upbringing, or reactionary parents. Her father was a forward-looking man in certain
respects, and although more sympathetic to constitutional means of support than militant
action, he stood by his daughter and was also a Vice President of the Men's League for Women's
Suffrage. Margaret's mother became President of Newport WSPU, and in 1914, she spent her
57th birthday in a London police cell after holding an illegal protest meeting by the
statue of Richard the Lionheart - open-air meetings being unlawful within a mile of Westminster.
A number of Sybil's relatives went to prison for militant suffrage, including one of her
sisters, and it was after her cousin, the Chelsea artist Florence Haig, recuperated
at Llanwern from incarceration in Holloway jail that Margaret was inspired to attend
her first suffrage demonstration in Hyde Park. There was no looking back, and unlike many
who graduated from the peaceful suffragists to the suffragettes, Margaret enrolled straight
in to the militant WSPU. In compelling prose she described the women's suffrage movement
as 'the very salt of life', claiming that it, 'gave us release of energy. It gave us
that sense of being of some use in the scheme of things, without which no human being can
live at peace. It made us feel that we were part of life, not just outside watching it.'
Setting that letterbox alight in 1913, led to her arrest, imprisonment, and hunger strike.
However, whilst the action that Margaret took can be seen as brave - braver than we can
perhaps appreciate today within a society that takes our vital voting rights too much
for granted - I believe there are problems in focusing unduly on this one action and
phase of her life. For a start, Margaret was only one amongst many women who were prepared
to take militant action. Indeed, letterboxes and their contents became the preferred target
for suffragettes. In the Metropolitan Police District alone, from June 1913 to July 1914,
damage was done to more than 500 letterboxes. There were anyway always many more women who
opted for passive resistance, or put their faith instead in arguments and entirely peaceful
persuasion, and of course Margaret was from a much more privileged as well as supportive
background than many. Returning very late at night from meetings in London, she would
even be met at Newport Railway Station, by Humphrey, armed with a flask of hot soup.
Margaret was imprisoned in Usk Jail after her 'little bit of arson'. Usk Jail was hardly
Holloway, and at a time when the authorities had become alert to the bad publicity that
could be garnered from such ill-treatment of prisoners, she was not forcibly fed, and
she was incarcerated for a considerably shorter period than most suffragettes - a mere six
days - though that of course was a horrendously long time for any individual to endure a hunger
strike, and she paid for it. Margaret had also hoped to be returned to prison, having
been released under the notorious 'Cat and Mouse Act' that enabled the authorities to
let out ailing prisoners in danger of becoming martyrs and rearrested them subsequently without
further trial. She insisted that her fine had been paid against her will. Humphrey,
or her parents, might have paid, we do not know for sure, though it is also likely that
the Home Office, well aware of the high profile prisoner and anxious to circumvent further
trouble, might also have paid. Margaret continued to be Secretary of the
Newport WSPU. Indeed, she held this position for the whole of its existence, for five and
a half years, though for about six months in 1912 she shared the post with Olive Fontaine.
It involved commitment and stamina, facing rotten eggs, live mice, herrings, rotten cabbages,
hair pulling and much more at meetings. Speaking in public meetings was an ordeal for young
ladies in Edwardian Britain, and Margaret and her aunt Lottie even took to parading
the streets of Newport - it is not a very good picture; it is from a newspaper and you
can see them advertising meetings with sandwich boards. Margaret wrote about the cause for
Welsh newspapers. She provided weekly reports for the British suffrage press as well, and
she orchestrated meetings and fundraising activities across the region until the war
broke out. This side of suffrage understandably received less attention in her 1933
autobiography, 'This Was My Life', than the more dramatic exploits, yet this commitment I think should
not be underestimated. Women's suffrage was clearly a vital formative
experience in Margaret's life story and in British political history, but I think we
also need to recognise that she played a key role in the winning of the vote for all women
in 1928, and this is something that has received far less attention. Between 1926 and 1928,
Margaret was one of the leading figures in the final push to enfranchise those who had
been excluded from the vote in 1918 - most notably all women between the ages of 21 and 30.
In 1926 she presided over a dinner to welcome back the ageing Mrs Pankhurst from
France, where she had been running a teashop. Margaret chaired the committee that organised
a mass march and demonstration to Hyde Park in July 1926. This brought together 40 different
women's organisations, and it had a few daring modern flourishes. Mrs Elliott-Lynn, for example,
flew over the marches in an aeroplane. Margaret chaired the Equal Political Rights Campaign
Committee, and she and Viscountess Astor, the first woman to take a seat in the House
of Commons, headed a deputation to the Prime Minister Baldwin the following year, and they
orchestrated a series of open-air meetings, poster parades with umbrellas in theatre land,
and the lobbying of MPs. She chaired one of the three platforms on the central plinth
at a huge Trafalgar Square rally in June. One of the square's lions sported a placard
declaring 'Gentlemen prefer blondes, but blondes prefer the vote'. Songs included 'We Want
the Vote' sung to the tune of 'Three Blind Mice', and the following spring the Equal
Franchise Bill was finally introduced and was passed in the summer. Margaret also chaired
a carefully worded celebration called a 'Victory and After Luncheon' that October at a London hotel.
In her speech she described the vote as merely one concrete symbol of equality
and not an end in itself. Having paid tribute to the pioneers of the last 60 years, she
posed a vital question: 'I wonder how many more generations are going to use up their
lives before we can put the whole thing behind us and forget that there was ever any difference
of status, freedom, or opportunity based on the difference in sex?'
Margaret had held several important posts in women's national service during the First
World War, and at its end she had sat on reconstruction committees focusing on women's employment
opportunities. She spoke in favour of the creation of the Ministry of Health, with proper
representation for women, and she founded the Women's Industrial Council to support
equal employment opportunities for working class women. In the 1920s, she also forged
links with American feminists, working closely with equal rights lawyer, Alice Paul
and helped to form a British committee of the United States National Woman's Party. She was one
of the founders of the Open Door Council, and that opposed what it saw as restrictive
legislation that limited women's employment opportunities by arguing that they were in
need of special protection. Such a perspective differed from those sometimes called new feminists,
like Eleanor Rathbone in the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. Margaret
was in what was called the 'old feminist' camp, and she subscribed to the slogan 'equality first'.
She was also one of the founders of Equal
Rights International, the only organisation to urge that the League of Nations adopt an
equal rights treaty. This work grew out of the organisation that Margaret had founded
in 1921 - the Six Point Group. Like the Chartists of the 1830s, it too had its six-point charter.
This one made gender equality paramount. It sought to make women's new voting rights effective
through what Margaret called a 'social betterment programme' that demanded effective legislation
on issues such as child assault, equal pay for teachers, and equal guardianship rights
for men and women. Far-sighted in its aims and imaginative in its methods, it was a powerful
non-party pressure group. It even devised a way of naming and shaming those MPs whose
record was not good, by publishing black and white lists before elections. Opponents of
women's causes were exposed; supporters were praised and treated to an annual luncheon.
The latter included the Tory, Viscountess Astor, the Liberal Margaret Wintringham, Captain
Wedgwood Benn, and Isaac Foot - they were the goodies. A drab list covered those who
had not lived up to their promises. The young Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby,
both of whom knew Margaret very well, cut their political teeth giving speeches on the
Six Point Group platform at Hyde Park, and as I discussed in my previous talk here, Margaret
was the person responsible for exerting sustained pressure for peeresses in their own right
to take their seats in the House of Lords, arguing that the Sex Disqualification (Removal)
Act of 1919 encompassed this. She almost succeeded in 1922, but a rear-guard action by the erudite
but somewhat antediluvian Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Birkenhead, put the clock back.
For 40 years she played a game of political snakes and ladders with the House of Lords,
finding along the way some doughty champions, such as Viscount Astor, but also encountering
reactionary, wary figures. As late as 1957, the Earl of Glasgow remarked that, 'This is
about the only place in the kingdom where men can meet without women. For heaven's sake,
let us keep it that way.' Only in 1958, just after the death of Margaret, known as 'the
persistent peeress', were the first women announced who would take their seats under
the new Life Peerages Act. Not until 1963 could hereditary women peers join them.
Only then was Britain permitted to sign up to the United Nations Convention on the Political
Rights of Women. Now, 50 years later, there is a female Presiding Officer in the House
of Lords, Lord Speaker Baroness D'Souza, and Alice Burton's portrait of Lady Rhondda hangs
in the Lord's dining room. Acquired for the Parliamentary Collection and recently carefully
restored, it means that Margaret has, in a sense, joined her father in the Palace of
Westminster, though his portrait is in the Commons tearoom. She is in interesting company,
amidst former Lord Chancellors, including her bĂȘte noir, the Earl of Birkenhead, whose
portrait is also in the same room. This portrait of Margaret had once hung in
the offices of Time and Tide, the weekly paper that she founded in 1920, edited from 1926,
and oversaw until her death in 1958. It is this paper that provides, I believe, a key
to understanding her influence and significance. Margaret declared that 'publicity is power'.
Such a statement may not be remarkable today, but it was far-sighted then. She had learned
from the publicity conscious suffragettes, who knew how to attract attention. She recognised
the power of advertising, addressing at Wembley the international advertising convention that
brought together the leading publicity experts in the English-speaking world. She declared,
'We have been pioneers in industry, but in publicity we have been laggards. Markets are
never assured. They have to be found or created by publicity campaigns.'
Margaret's paper brought together her different worlds. It advertised a range of products for the modern
woman and man, and it carried advertisements for a number of companies that she was directly
associated with, such as the Salutaris Water Company, and the British Fire Insurance Company.
It also provided details about, for example, Gwaun Cae Gurwen Colliery, and the Welsh Navigation
Steam Coal Company Ltd. Bloomsbury at times must have been slightly bemused to read all
these accounts of the AGMs for colliery companies. Here is a Time and Tide advert for Formamint,
the germ killing throat tablet that was part of the Sanatogen company that Margaret actually
owned as well; the South Wales Printing Company would be responsible for printing these adverts,
so all her worlds came together. The slightly bohemian world of the literati did not usually
mix quite so closely in page and person with coal-mining and big business as did Margaret
Rhondda. In fact, she made the most of her connections, for example getting financial
support for Oxford women's colleges from Lady Mond, wife of the founder of the largest nickel
works in the world, situated in South Wales. Most importantly, her paper provided a platform
for advertising the work of organisations like the Six Point Group, and many of the
causes and campaigns that she believed in so fervently. Indeed, it was here that the
ideas of the Six Point Group were first explored, then expanded. This outlet gave Margaret far
more scope for promoting her causes than most organisations. Having your own paper does
have a distinct advantage. From the outset, it was a weekly review with a difference.
It had a pioneering, all-female board - remember this is 1920 that it was set up - and it became
one of the most innovative, imaginative, and adaptable weekly papers ever produced in Britain.
In its early days, its journalism and high standards gave newly enfranchised women in
particular a voice and a confidence, but it was never like the low-brow women's magazines,
seeing itself rather as a paper for the thinking woman and man, and it took a much broader
approach than papers advocating causes like votes for women.
Time and Tide began life in Fleet Street, and it then moved to Bloomsbury. It covered
politics, but it was emphatically non-party. It covered literature, sport, drama, and Margaret
penned many a theatre review under the pseudonym of Anne Doubleday. It always included articles
with views not shared by the editor, and she wrote hundreds of pieces for it: editorials,
features, anonymous diary comments, pseudonymous articles by Candida, as she called herself,
literary criticism of the writings of H.G. Wells, and signed think-pieces for the popular
'Notes on the Way' column in the 1930s. Those columns were also turned in to a book which
she edited. After the full enfranchisement of women in 1928, Time and Tide then morphed
in to a flagship paper for the arts, showcasing the work of upcoming and leading writers of
the day, from Virginia Woolf to D. H. Lawrence. It was one of the first UK periodicals to
publish the work of black writers such as the African American poet Countee Cullen.
Margaret's good friend George Bernard Shaw helped to boost its sales. Another close friend,
Winifred Holtby, was on its staff, as was, somewhat later, John Betjeman. E. M. Delafield's
wonderfully witty 'Diary of a Provincial Lady', in which Margaret is caricatured, first saw
the light of day in serial form in Time and Tide.
By the 1940s, the paper had transmuted again, and it was now really, largely, an international
politics journal. In the early days of the Second World War, it was selling a staggering
40,000 copies weekly, and this is at a time when there were all kinds of other forms of
competing media, and it was read, of course, by many more. The cost of producing this high
quality paper, week after week, was beginning to take a serious toll on Margaret's fortunes,
which had already been hit by the Depression. She had withdrawn from her industrial interests,
and her energies were almost entirely devoted to her paper in this period. Having said this,
she also had something of a reputation for enjoying the good life. Her parties were legendary,
she was known to be generous, and she travelled extensively, but she also worked hard at home
and abroad, and her health suffered as a consequence. After the Second World War, her politics shifted
and this daughter of a Liberal minister, who had never forgiven Asquith for not supporting
women's suffrage, finally became a Tory voter. She had, of course, only gained the vote in
1918, in her mid 30s, when she was slightly left-leaning. Then, and later, she refused
to join a political party, but the 1930s saw her libertarian streak come to the fore, when
she was a Vice President of the National Council for Civil Liberties - or the Council for Civil
Liberties, as it was originally known - from its inception. She seems to have been at her
most progressive in the mid to late 1930s, when it came to international politics.
It s, I think, no coincidence that she was close to Ellen Wilkinson in these years.
From 1941, Margaret lived during the week at Dolphin Square, as did 'Red Ellen', as
Wilkinson was known. Margaret supported Ellen Wilkinson's stance on the Spanish Civil War,
and the two women, along with Aneurin Bevin and Edith Summerskill were delegates at a
vast congress in Paris to protest against the bombing of Spanish towns and urge peace.
Both women also became fervently anti-appeasement. Having until fairly recently been highly critical
of Churchill, Margaret then revised her views and, after the Second World War, he really
became the politician she was prepared to support. Wary of the concept of a planned
state, she became critical of the domestic policy of Atlee's Labour government. By the
time of the 1951 general election, her paper's independent, non-party tag
had been replaced by the words, 'The Independent Weekly' and I think it was far more difficult to actually
claim that the paper really was independent in those final years.
Where in all of this was Margaret's much vaunted commitment to equal rights? What happened
to this commitment in her last years? I think it is interesting to note that historical
analysis has tended to focus on her earlier life and her feminism, and I think this can
in part be attributed to her autobiography. A compelling read, it was published in 1933
when she was in her 50th year. Although she could not have known it, of course, she still
had another 25 years ahead of her. Most of the spotlight of This Was My World, as it
was called, is on the society that came to an end in 1914, and although revealing about
what used to be called 'the spirit of the age', it actually says little about the First
World War years as they affected Margaret personally. As for what was undoubtedly the
most productive period of her life, the 1920s, they are conspicuous by their absence from
her autobiography. Now, 80 years after the publication of this book, it is important
to consider also the neglected views of the older Margaret, and it looks in many ways
as though in those later years she simply moved on to a broader agenda after the protracted
struggle for the vote. Gradually, the gender balance of contributors to the paper shifted,
despite continuity in the form of a small number of women stalwarts, such as Rose Macaulay
and Rebecca West. Margaret even told Virginia Woolf in 1938 that, 'I go through the paper
every week, taking out women's names and references to matters especially concerning women, because
if I left them in, it would soon kill the paper'; however, she added an important rider
'but it's maddening'. She was adopting, I think, a survival strategy, and she was realistic
to know that she had to reflect on what was wanted, as well as being in a position to
influence, directly or indirectly, how people thought on an issue.
She was still painfully aware of how vulnerable she was as a female editor and proprietor.
She told Woolf that, 'No woman who tried to run a weekly review could remain unaware of
how much she was an outsider'. In October 1937, Monica Whately, of the Six Point Group,
which Margaret had founded and chaired, wrote to Time and Tide, expressing her disappointment
that it hadn't given even the briefest mention of the work of the 18th Assembly of the League
of Nations on the status of women. Margaret's response I think was revealing. She agreed
that such an event was important and deserved notice, yet using an excuse that she would
have scorned in the early 1920s, she argued that a weekly review did not enjoy the luxury
of a daily paper, and had to prioritise. Her paper's events of the week had included the
arrival of Mussolini in Munich. Margaret stated unequivocally that in the present state of
world tension, this had been the most momentous event of the week. History, of course, proved
her to be correct. International relations were now recognised as paramount for the paper,
in the context of insidious threats to liberty within Europe. In 1936, Margaret told Elizabeth
Robins, writer, former suffragette and erstwhile Director of Time and Tide, that the priority
was simply, 'Whether Europe explodes before we have got a real grip.' If that happened,
it would, she feared, spell, 'The end of feminism and Western civilisation for generations to
come'. Margaret argued that rather than acting as
a class apart, women should use the powers they had, and the powers that they had won,
to work together with men. Although equality of status was still needed, she believed that
in the present climate better results could be obtained if women used the power they possessed
to do good in the world and to familiarise the general public with the idea of men and
women working side by side, 'regardless of sex, and on equal terms for the general good'.
Yet in many parts of the world, women had acquired neither power nor influence, and
working side by side with equal rights was far from being a common experience for the
majority of women workers in particular within Britain. Indeed Margaret's plans for the emancipated
woman had been and remained essentially that of the educated professional woman.
During the war, however, there were some echoes of her earlier activities, which were reflected
in the paper itself. Back in 1917-18, she had organised women's recruitment for national
service. Now she warned that publicity asking women to take subordinate jobs so that men
could be set free for something better was outmoded and 'far from inspiring', and in
1943 on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act that
had granted limited women's suffrage in 1918, she commented on her transformative experience
of militant suffrage, saying, 'That is where I got my training, and I could not have wished
for better.' In this year, women journalists, who were barred from the Press Club, formed
a women's press club. Margaret was their first president, and she played an active role in
it, and, as we know, her pressure on the House of Lords was sustained.
She remained a public figure to the last. Seriously ill, and with a high temperature,
a few months before she died in 1958 in her mid-70s, Margaret took part in a BBC Television
programme about women in the House of Lords. She had now waged her campaign for 40 years.
Her obituary in the times was headed 'Champion of her Sex'. Women's equality was, I think,
hard-wired in to Margaret Rhondda's thinking, even though it was no longer to the forefront
in her later years, yet she was hardly alone here. In fact, from 1930 onwards, she decided
to channel her energies primarily in to Time and Tide, arguing that, 'If I can make the
paper go in a big way, I shall have done as big a thing for feminism as I am capable of,'
and she succeeded in this. For Margaret, the 1950s were increasingly dominated by failing
health and a desperate attempt to keep the paper going against the odds. Finally, the
fact that she did so, and that it collapsed soon after her death, showed both the price
that she paid - literally and symbolically - and demonstrated that she had indeed done
a big thing for women in democracy by palpably demonstrating
in person what a woman in the media could achieve. Thank you.