The fiftieth anniversary of girls’s suffrage in 1968 prompted a second of soul looking for many ladies pissed off at how little progress appeared to have been made in direction of equality. Considered one of these was Joyce Butler, the backbench Labour and Co-operative MP for Wooden Inexperienced. Having had a longstanding curiosity in ladies’s rights, she had been instrumental in campaigning to make cervical most cancers screening accessible nationwide. In autobiographical notes later in life she spoke of a way of ‘unfinished enterprise’.
At some point she discovered of a lady bus conductor who wished to turn out to be a bus inspector, however couldn’t get the required expertise to take this step as a result of her employer didn’t rent ladies to drive buses. Butler mirrored:
Like the sunshine on the Street to Damascus, I realised that this job-and-training discrimination was the important thing to ladies’s failure to advance. We already had laws in opposition to race discrimination – what was wanted was an analogous regulation for girls.
This was the start of the marketing campaign for what finally turned the Intercourse Discrimination Act of 1975. Initially, the Labour authorities underneath Harold Wilson was against the concept. Wilson said: ‘This case might undoubtedly be improved to a big extent by ladies themselves, by the acceptance of accountability by extra ladies when it’s supplied to them.’ Butler disagreed. The Race Relations Act 1965 had established a Board to which individuals topic to unfair remedy might deliver their complaints. Why ought to this not work for girls, too?
With out authorities help Butler might solely introduce a Invoice underneath the ‘Ten Minute Rule’. Since this solely provides MPs ten minutes to make their case, the Invoice had little hope of turning into regulation. However Butler was capable of safe cross-party help from feminine MPs and her efforts had been reported within the press. Quickly she was receiving letters from ladies throughout the nation. ‘I say three cheers for you and all ladies such as you, I actually assume it’s about time that each one ladies joined with you within the battle for equal pay & rights’, wrote one correspondent, ‘Once I consider Mrs Pankhurst & the suffragettes & all they went via, I believe the ladies of in the present day are letting the workforce down.’
Many ladies noticed the Invoice as a method to make equal pay a actuality. An 85-year-old lady, who had labored as a bathroom attendant since 1933, wrote to Butler that ‘the ladies attendants do 4 instances the quantity of labor that the boys [do], and naturally take about 8 instances in money … I believe it’s about time Ladies obtained equal rights’. Others centered on the shortage of alternatives, and complained about being instructed ‘that as I’m sure to get married within the close to future and begin a household it will be a waste of time coaching me’. One lady, writing ‘on behalf of postwomen, bus conductresses, underground “gals” and many others’, argued that ladies’s jobs had been all the time seen as short-term.
Different inequalities had been highlighted, too: ladies deserted by their husbands had been unable to assert upkeep from them, had been underpaid at work, and had been unable to assert state help. Older ladies, who had been affected by marriage bars in sectors such because the civil service and educating earlier within the century, couldn’t help themselves in widowhood. Intercourse discrimination united ladies throughout lessons and generations: grievances had been held by current graduates and aged widows alike.
Butler launched the laws yearly, gaining widespread help from established organisations together with the Nationwide Council of Ladies and the Ladies’s Worldwide League for Peace and Freedom. She additionally investigated discrimination within the civil service, displaying that ladies remained barred from work thought of unsuitable – within the immigration service, agriculture, even museums.
By 1971 – the fourth time Butler introduced her Invoice – the marketing campaign had been taken up by the ladies’s liberation motion. Feminist stress group Ladies in Media championed the laws within the press, and teams across the nation, from Bristol to Fife, wrote to specific their help.
However the Invoice fell once more. In 1972 Butler requested her colleague, MP for West Fife Willie Hamilton, to take it ahead: having gained high place within the poll for personal members payments, his proposals could be given time for critical consideration. Related proposals to sort out discrimination in training and employment had been then launched into the Home of Lords by Baroness Seear, who thought they could get a extra sympathetic listening to there. With rising political, press, and public stress, the political events started to behave and in 1974 all three pledged motion to finish discrimination in opposition to ladies of their manifestos. Within the election that October Una Kroll, a health care provider and feminist activist, stood unsuccessfully as an impartial anti-sex discrimination candidate, backed by Ladies in Media.
The Labour government-led Intercourse Discrimination Invoice was launched by the house secretary Roy Jenkins early in 1975. It turned regulation on the finish of the yr, on the identical time that the Equal Pay Act – handed in 1970, however with 5 years allowed for employers to arrange – lastly got here into power. The Employment Safety Act, handed in November, additionally introduced new advantages, guaranteeing maternity go away and stopping ladies from being dismissed in the event that they turned pregnant.
The Intercourse Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination on the grounds of marriage or intercourse in employment and training and the supply of products and providers, ‘with the operate of working in direction of the elimination of such discrimination and selling equality of alternative between women and men’. It additionally arrange the Equal Alternatives Fee to implement the regulation. However its limitations had been clear from the outset. It left pensions and taxation untouched and a few our bodies – such because the armed forces and the Church of England – had been exempt. (Una Kroll went on to marketing campaign for girls’s ordination: an effort which didn’t succeed till 1994.) Additionally, in establishing that ladies must be handled the identical as males, the Invoice ignored variations of their lives – notably being pregnant and the expertise of harassment. The Fee was criticised for its cautious strategy, nevertheless it did show an vital device. It was utilized by feminist activists to pursue prolonged authorized instances all through the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, comparable to Gill and Coote v El Vino Co Ltd, which challenged a bar’s coverage of not serving ladies except seated within the again, thus establishing that discrimination couldn’t be justified by concepts of ‘chivalry’.
Joyce Butler, in the meantime, served on the advisory committee for the Division of Employment and pursued equality in taxation and pensions. She continued to advertise equality in political illustration after stepping down from the Commons in 1979. On her retirement, many ladies’s organisations wrote to thank her for her years of service to ladies: the veteran chair of the feminist marketing campaign group Six Level Group, Hazel Hunkins Hallinan, described her because the ‘Nationwide Lady’s MP’.
Lyndsey Jenkins is Affiliate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Historical past at Mansfield Faculty, Oxford. An exhibition marking Joyce Butler’s political profession is open till June 2026 at Bruce Fort Museum and Archive, in Haringey, North London.
