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The Politician, The Wife, The Citizen, and her Newspaper
Rethinking women, democracy, and media(ted) representation Charlotte Adcock
To cite this article: Charlotte Adcock (2010) The Politician, The Wife, The Citizen, and her Newspaper, Feminist Media Studies, 10:2, 135-159, DOI: 10.1080/14680771003672254 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680771003672254
Published online: 06 May 2010.
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AND HER NEWSPAPER
Rethinking women, democracy, and media(ted) representation
Charlotte Adcock
Recent dramatic rises in the number of women elected to British parliaments have renewed critical interest in the significance of gender, and ways of theorising and researching women’s political representation. However, the central role played by the media in contemporary politics is often neglected in feminist political scholarship. At the same time, the spaces occupied by women in political news journalism and the body politic remain under-explored by media theorists. This article argues that if we are to fully understand the politics of representation and what fairer representation for women might mean, we need to address these neglected dimensions. To make the case, I present an analysis of press coverage of the 1997 British General Election campaign. This seeks to draw together conventionally disparate strands of feminist, political and media theorising in order to highlight the gendered politics of newspaper imag(in)ing, storytelling, and commentary.
Improving women’s presence in media(ted) political discourse, I conclude, might be one means of strengthening women’s symbolic and substantive representation.
KEYWORDS representation; women; newspapers; politics; democracy; media
Our understanding of the problems of “real” women cannot lie outside the “imagined”
constructs in and through which “women” emerge as subjects. (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 1993, p. 10)
Introduction
On May 8, 1997, Britain’s New Labour party chose to celebrate its first day in government by staging a photocall of its female MPs gathered around the new Prime Minister, Tony Blair. This image of a record number of 120 women elected to Westminster was initially widely interpreted as a fitting symbol of Labour’s modernisation and commitment to a new, inclusive style of representative politics. In contrast to a Conservative Party many regarded as incompetent, sleazy or out-of-touch, these women appeared to embody a new political force. May 1997, declared one commentator,
“promised the dawn of a new era in gender relations” (Wilkinson 1998, p. 58). “Blair’s got a huge ‘girl power’ boost,” proclaimedThe Sunnewspaper, whileThe Guardiandescribed the
Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010
ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/10/020135-159 q2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680771003672254
doubling of women in the House of Commons as an “irreversible trend” in the “slipstream”
of the larger electoral revolution that “transforms absolutely every possibility on the political landscape.”1“At the heart of this new Britain,” theMirror’sWomanpage predicted,
“will be the issues that affect women: child care, health and education. And reforming parliament.”2 This dramatic rise in women elected to Westminster (and to the United Kingdom’s newly devolved institutions) also renewed scholarly interest in women’s presence in parliamentary politics.3 Heralded as a critical breakthrough, their arrival has raised new questions about the significance of gender and the dynamics of change, and prompted reconsideration of the conceptual and methodological frameworks necessary for researching women’s representation.4
However, one key aspect of women’s representation is often absent from this work—
the role played by the media “as a dominant space of politics today” (Dahlgren 2000, p. 313).
Regrettably, consideration of women’s media(ted) representation—as well as feminist work on democracy and citizenship—also remains marginal to much political communication scholarship. This article aims to widen understandings of political representation in a way that both takes account of the media’s contribution to processes of governance and draws on feminist critiques of contemporary “representative” political practices. By way of developing my argument, I present an analysis of women’s media(ted) representation in the press campaign coverage of the 1997 British General Election. This highlights the ways in which the gendered politics of newspaper imag(in)ing, storytelling, and commentary constrained women’s visibility and self-representation. It also reveals the extent to which stereotypical and idealised images of “Womanhood” underpinned journalistic narration of politicians’ bids for political and cultural legitimation. Additionally, it seeks to underline the importance of attending to the varying textual characteristics of political coverage within and across specific news formats and market sectors. I conclude by suggesting that improving women’s presence in media(ted) political discourse might be one means of strengthening women’s symbolic and substantive representation. My account opens with a brief review of recent research on gender, parliamentary politics, and media(ted) representation.
Politics, Parliamentary Presence, and the Press
Some feminist scholars have sought to explain the conflicted experiences of, and attitudes towards, women in British politics by setting them within the specific context of British representative democracy. This is a system, Squires (1999, p. 178) observes, historically riven with “representative muddles” about who or what our parliamentarians should be representing. This lack of clarity is seen to coexist with complacency about women’s position in society and a deep ambiguity about why parliament might need more women (Phillips 2000). Namely, are women representatives required for our political institutions to reflect fairly (descriptively or numerically) the composition of civil society? Or, does their election introduce stronger expectations that they substantively act “for” and
“like” women, representing not only a political party but the different experiences, perspectives, knowledges, and skills of a previously under-represented group?
At the same time, a considerable body of work points to the barriers that obstruct women’s equal and effective participation in formal politics. These include an array of constitutional/electoral systemic factors, party political factors, masculinist institutional discourse and procedure, and social constraints (Lovenduski 2005; Mackay 2004; Squires &
Wickham-Jones 2001; Thomson 1999). Other analysts have drawn attention to New
Labour’s problematic relationship with feminism. Women’s issues, with their “old left” and feminist associations, McRobbie (2000) has argued, were sidelined as party strategists attempted to forge a politics for “ordinary” women (especially those floating voters of affluent middle England). Franklin (2000a, 2000b) suggests this “Third Way” politics of
“inclusion,” with its stress on consensus, responsibilities, family, and community rather than on rights and structural inequalities, tends to lack a critical gender and power analysis, and obstructs a focus on women’s issues. A closed political culture of elite male insiders evolved, Coote (2000) argues, who believed “the gender issue” sorted.
A new strand of empirical research has also sought to determine whether women’s presence has made any substantive difference.5Early assessments suggest that numerical improvements in women’s representation did not deliver a consistently gender-sensitive social policy programme, responsive to women’s employment and care-giving realities6 (Bashevkin 2002; Lewis 2001; Rake 2001), and the impact of the Women’s Unit and the mainstreaming of gender issues into policy-making was limited (Squires & Wickham-Jones 2001, 2004).7Successive attitudinal analyses, however, conclude that women in all major parties are consistently more positive than men towards “liberal” gender equality values and affirmative action, and thus have the capacity to make a substantive difference to party culture and policy outcome (Lovenduski & Norris 2003; Norris 2002). Interview-based research indicates that many of the new women MPs believed their gender values were shaping their professional practice (Childs 2004). Subsequent research has established that women MPs were more likely to refer to “women” and “gender” in parliamentary questions; Labour women were more likely to sign “women’s” Early Day Motions; and on some issues women’s actions did lead to “feminised” decision-making (Bird 2005; Childs & Withey 2004, 2006).
One important theoretical influence informing much of this work is Phillips’ rationale for a “politics of presence.” In Phillips’ (1995) view, women have at least some interests that are distinct from and, at times, in conflict with men’s, given the structural inequalities of contemporary social relations. Since needs and interests often lack transparency, or are in the process of being formulated, or are excluded from the political agenda, women need to participate in order that women’s interests might be adequately interpreted and represented. Her second key contention is that women may, though not necessarily, approach politics differently from men on account of their different social experiences and responsibilities, and may engage in a radical reworking of political agendas. Much of the latest research underwrites Phillips’ refusal of a necessary or simplistic linkage between women’s descriptive and substantive representation, while lending weight to the contention that women legislators should be present in greater numbers. It highlights the importance of understanding (further) the interconnections between representatives’
gender, class, ethnic, feminist and party identities.8It also indicates that certain institutional spaces and role perceptions may enable a freer articulation of gendered analysis or challenge to political culture than others. At the same time, the research underscores the complexities involved in researching women’s representation. The challenge is, Mackay (2004) suggests, matching sophisticated theorising of gender as a relational concept and structuring ideology rather than an unchanging attribute fixed to a sexed body, with operationalisable research methods. Approaches are required, it is argued, that can produce gender-sensitive theories of political institutions and institutionally sensitive theories of gender politics (Lovenduski 1998, 2005). Account must be taken, then, of the kindsof masculinities and femininities prevailing in a given culture at a particular point in history and the multiple determinants involved in effecting feminist policy change.
This mapping of research requirements has much to recommend it. Yet the media’s role in facilitating or hindering democratic politics and the substantive representation of women hardly figures. This is troubling, for the media are deeply implicated, not only as core intermediary communicators between government and governed and as a principal space in which citizens engage in politics, but also as integral participants in the very shaping and interpreting of the political process. Acknowledgement of the media’s central presence entails inquiry, then, beyond formal institutional processes and professional politicians to the discursive, media(ted) dimensions of representative politics: the stories journalists tell (or fail to tell) citizen consumers, the “truths” and symbolic images they offer us about political and social reality, the claims media make in our “common” name, and the relations journalists forge with publicity-seeking interest groups.
At issue here are fundamental, highly contested questions about the democratic performance and potential of media(ted) representation. Moreover, the configurations of the complex interplay between media, democracy, and civic society are undergoing significant change. Five conflictual trends, Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) argue, may be serving to reshape media-political relations: intensified professionalisation and expansion of political advocacy; increased competitive pressures; the popularisation of politics and media formats; diversification of communication forms and technologies; and shifts in audience reception (see also Blumer & Gurevitch 2000). These developments offer some potentially positive openings for greater popular political engagement, interest group mobilisation, and access to information and debate. But in recent years, it has been more often journalism’s failings as a resource for western democracies that has preoccupied media researchers. Critics have argued that a drift towards sensationalism, trivialisation, cynicism, partisanship, and entertaining human interest is undercutting political engagement and informed debate (see, for instance, Barnett & Gaber 2001; Franklin 1997; Golding 1994;
Sparks & Tulloch 2000). Indeed, it is now more than a decade ago that Blumler and Gurevitch suggested that western forms of journalism were facing a “crisis of communication for citizenship” (1995, p. 1). Symptoms include exclusion of lay voices from the electoral arena, increased timidity and cynicism among news professionals fixated on process and personalities rather than policy substance, and widespread projection of public disenchantment with the political process. Concerns, Corner and Pels (2003, p. 4) contend, often centre on notions of imbalance, positing either a politicised media, whose independence is entirely circumscribed by the controls of the political system, or a thoroughly mediatised political culture, in which politics has become colonised by media and show business logics and imperatives.
Central to much of this critique are assumptions or discussions about principles that should ideally ground the regulation, organisation, and output of communication systems.
Very often, commentary has been influenced by Habermas’ (1989) early concept of the public sphere as an “undistorted” social and communicative space in which information may flow freely, and rational-critical citizens may impartially debate matters of common concern independently of state power and private, corporate influence. Critics, including Habermas, have also moved to reconceptualise the public sphere less as a single public of reasoning private individuals holding government to account, and more as a differentiated, pluralistic network that branches out into overlapping international, national, regional, local and subcultural arenas. This broader conception of politics acknowledges the collective, institutional and mediated nature of modern representative politics (see, for instance, Curran 2000; Dahlgren 1995; Garnham 1992).
This “public knowledge” scholarship makes some persuasive arguments about the media’s role in democracy. However, the research rarely engages fully with the gendered dynamics of political communication practices or with the differential ways in which men and women have been included in formal and informal processes of citizenship. It is here that feminist political theory offers some valuable resources for formulating a more gender- sensitive critical approach to the politics of media(ted) representation, in particular the work of Phillips (1995, 1999) and Young (1997, 1998, 2001). Central to their thinking are conceptions of more participatory, deliberative or “communicative” forms of democracy that incorporate a political engagement with social differences and group identities.
Deliberative models of democracy propose that political principles and decisions emerge from unconstrained, informed deliberation, representative of all those likely to be affected, and based on dialogue about what is right or just. Crucially, deliberative democracy works from the premise that preferences and interests are neither pre-given nor unchanging, and may be (re)formulated through discussion. What the work of Young and Phillips offers, in addition, is attention to the deeper conditions required to achieve full inclusion and equity in the democratic process. They argue persuasively that greater institutional presence for women and other disadvantaged social groups, deliberation that openly engages with social identities, and alternative styles and sites of reasoning and communicating may better promote just decision-making and holding power accountable.9 Such theorising can help point up the gendered nature of certain conceptions of
“quality” political communication, rational deliberation, and equitable representation. Too often, such understandings turn on distinctions that equate “serious,” informative media genres and political “consensus” with men’s public roles, spheres of interest, and modes of thinking and discourse, on the one hand, and popular culture with “the feminine,” the subjective, the private, the sentimental, and the trivial on the other. They thus overlook how understandings of “the public” and “the political” have historically operated to the exclusion or disadvantage of women, and ignore the potential value of emotional, embodied, particularistic ways of knowing and communicating. A gender-sensitive deliberative model is especially pertinent, moreover, if by “deliberation” we envisage not only dialogic forms of face-to-face political debate but also a media-stimulated process of individual reflection and judgement formation (Thompson 1995, p. 256).
With these issues in mind, I now turn to a study of the 1997 British General Election press coverage to illustrate how research on women’s media(ted) representation might complement (and complicate) work on political communication, and on women and electoral politics. My analysis draws on both media “public knowledge” approaches and feminist political and cultural theory in order to assess how images of womanhood are constructed in political press discourse and how much access is given to the voices of “real”
women to address material inequalities. It is based on three overlapping sets of evaluative criteria. First, I have considered the quality of information provision and agenda-setting. It is here that I suggest that we retain an ideal of social “impartiality” that both recognises the contingent, contestable nature of truth claims and holds that we can “weigh evidence and make judgements about the proximity to the truth” (Dahlgren 1995, p. 34). As Haraway (1988, p. 586) argues, “feminist objectivity” or “better accounts of the world” lie in situated, accountable critical positioning, and on the knowing self being “able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.” Second, I have considered the extent to which press coverage publicises diverse debate and connects with everyday lives, promoting critical reflection and respect for unshared perspectives. Third, I have reflected
on the cultural contribution political press discourse makes to civil society, such as fostering a sense of social belonging, self-understanding, democratic values, and a capacity to make
“imaginatively informed choices and responses to other people” (Mepham 1991, p. 22).
My research also seeks to contribute to feminist media analysis that has begun to work across the conventionally disparate strands of gender, political and media theorising.
Studies on women’s political representation in North America, Australia, South Africa, India, and elsewhere indicate some significant similarities in patterns of mediation (albeit inflected by cultural differences). Findings suggest female politicians often receive less coverage and are more likely to be described in gendered, sexualised, sex-stereotyped or negative terms than male counterparts. Gendered distinctions between public and private spheres, moreover, dominate the framing of women’s political activities and concerns, aligning women with domestic life and men with the social world of rational politics and work (see Norris 1997; Ross 2002a, 2002b; Sreberny & Van Zoonen 2000). In Britain, until recently, qualitative research on the gendered dimensions of news discourse, journalistic practices, and institutional media production has been somewhat neglected.10Even less critical attention has been directed specifically to women’s representation in the formal political reporting of the British press. Studies by Walsh and by Ross and Sreberny of Margaret Beckett’s 1994 campaign for the Labour Party leadership are two suggestive exceptions. Newspaper content analysis, Ross and Sreberny argue, “reveals rather repetitive motifs of media coverage of women politicians—sexualised, over-personalised gaze; the use of different criteria to assess women in comparison to men, and the marginalisation of women from core political issues” (2000, p. 84). Walsh (2001, p. 93) found that the coverage tended to focus on Beckett’s gender as her most distinctive feature. It was indicative both of the “hidden power of media discourse to reinforce women’s segregation and subordination in the public sphere,” and of “media bias against . . . feminist strategies aimed at challenging masculinist practices in party politics.”
However, no body of work on British women’s political representation has yet developed that pays full attention to the distinguishing textual specifics of coverage within or between different media forms and reporting formats. Moreover, there is a lack of systematic analysis tracing women’s media(ted) representation—quantitatively or qualitatively—in parliamentary politics over historical time. Critical attention has also tended to centre rather narrowly on representations of women as politicians. For these reasons, my own study was designed to map women’s political representation in a broader sense, delineating how women figured in coverage as “ordinary” citizens, readers, and policy subjects, as well as institutional political players. It also attended closely to the complex presentational contexts of story formattingwithinandacrossdifferent newspaper titles, and considered narrative conventions, layout, visual imagery, headline structures, vocabulary, modes of address, and political editorial affiliations. Such in-depth analysis of one significant election’s press coverage offers one historically situated gauge for further mapping and comparative analysis of women’s representation in previous and successive political terms, and across different media forms.
The Politician, the Wife, the Citizen, and her Newspaper
After 18 years of Conservative rule, New Labour’s 1997 election victory, with its unprecedented Commons majority and ideological shift to the political centre-ground, can be “regarded as marking a critical watershed in Britishparliamentarypolitics,” if not in
party-voter alignment (Norris & Evans 1999, p. 260). This election also constituted an historic moment when issues around women’s political representation might have figured in campaign discourse. The significant increase in women MPs was widely predicted. Party strategists had made a sustained effort to appeal to women, conscious of gendered voting trends and the high proportion of female “floaters” (Lovenduski 1997; Short 1996).11 Feminist advocacy organisations also bid to highlight women’s concerns, advising that there was a clear set of neglected issues of importance to certain groups of women (Adcock 1997;
Fawcett Society 1997; Wilkinson & Diplock 1996; Women’s National Commission 1996). This election offered a key opportunity, then, for assessing how well newspapers served women—how were women (re)configured, addressed, and judged across the national press as target voters, political candidates, policy subjects, and citizen-readers?
In the media analysis that followed the election, such issues went largely unaddressed.
Critical assessments focused instead on traditional questions of reporting bias, thematic content, and media influence, as well as the unprecedented political realignment of the right-wing press.12Commentators note the widespread lament over the length, tedium, negativity, and controlled nature of party campaigns. Despite the sophistication of party news management, they conclude, the national media largely set its own narrow editorial agendas. While politicians attempted to talk primarily about substantive policy issues, and the public’s priorities centred on health and education, news media focused over- whelmingly on party and campaign conduct, followed by Europe, and then sleaze, with discussions of leadership cutting across several topics (Computer Aided Media Analysis/Echo Research 1997; Norris, Curtice, Sanders, Scammell & Semetko 1999; Scammell
& Harrop 1997; Seymour-Ure 1997).13Press endorsements of Blair were judged to be highly qualified—more often a case of “de-alignment,” “disorientation,” and “loathing” for a divided, directionless Tory party than firm belief in New Labour (Deacon, Golding & Billig 1997).14Overall, it is argued, coverage may have helped set the agenda, certainly saw more prominent political punditry, and probably made little difference to the outcome. Figures published inThe Guardian, meanwhile, indicated that male politicians, led by the main party leaders, dominated as the top ten most visible players in print and broadcast coverage.15
Taking this analysis as a thematic reference point, I sought to evaluate how women, specifically, figured within the election narratives of five national daily newspapers on each publication day of the seven-week campaign.16The titles analysed have historically served different market sectors and political allegiances. They were as follows:The Guardian, a liberal broadsheet which advocated tactical voting to depose the Conservatives but was enthused by New Labour;The Times, a broadsheet which refused to endorse any single party and urged readers to vote for Euro-sceptic candidates; theDaily Mail, the leading mid-market tabloid, which endorsed the Conservatives but pursued a relentless anti-Europe agenda; the best selling mass market tabloidThe Sun, which ostentatiously backed Blair rather than Labour on the grounds of his leadership, public appeal, and acceptance of some Thatcherite tenets (Deacon, Golding & Billig 1997); and the traditionally left-wingMirror, whose tabloid reporting was boldly partisan and coordinated with Labour’s campaign.17
My analysis combined a quantitative coding of women’s appearances in all election- related coverage, commentary, and visual imagery, with a qualitative interpretative textual reading. This enabled me to introduce systematicity in the mapping of women’s representation that a qualitative reading alone would not have delivered across such a large sample. My coding schedule categorised women in three groups: female politicians;
women defined primarily by their personal relations with a male politician (“relatives”); and
“ordinary women” who were subdivided into public figures or professional experts, voters/policy subjects, and celebrities. I noted whether women featured as “main,” “key” or
“secondary” news actors in a story;18the narrative context; the editorial format in which they appeared (news story, “news-in-brief” (nib), leader article, feature or columns, which encompassed star, diary, gossip, “humorous,” analytic and commentary columns); if they appeared in pictures, mugshots or cartoons; and whether they were quoted directly. I also coded all coverage for reference to the gendered dimensions of policy-making and campaigning (see Table 1).
Overall, content analysis revealed a structural marginalisation of women. Individual women only featured in just over a third (1,437) of the reports, nibs, and columns that totalled in excess of 3,400, and only figured as main or key actors in just over half of their appearances.
Their voices were heard even less—women were directly quoted on a third of appearances—
and their “newsworthiness” related closely to the key themes dominating titles’ reportage.
While women were represented in 900 visual images, “women’s issues” and women’s perspectives on themes foregrounded by politicians and the press attracted scant attention, including the broadsheets, which published up to ten pages of reporting and comment daily.
Female journalists’ names, meanwhile, appeared in just 402 of more than 2,200 by-lined articles. Within this broad patterning, there were marked variations between titles that did not necessarily map on to tabloid/broadsheet divisions. Most strikingly, different groups of women occupied different positions in each title’s hierarchy of female news subjects. In the broadsheets, female politicians featured most prominently but “ordinary” women were not far behind and were quoted on more occasions than their political representatives. In the tabloids, politicians’ relatives were accorded far more attention. InThe Mirror, “ordinary”
women also figured on twice as many occasions as politicians.19There were other significant differences, too, principally the individuals judged newsworthy by each paper within the coded “types” and the reporting formats in which they figured.20
Qualitative textual analysis revealed the degree to which representations of women serviced titles’ own overarching narrative and political agendas, and figured as “condensing symbols” (Cottle 1998) for the worth of male politicians and their parties. Furthermore, much reporting was implicitly premised on unmarked masculinist or androcentric perspectives, and worked to align women’s public personae with private sphere servicing roles and feminised or sexualised attributes. The following sections explore these findings to illustrate how women’s representation was shaped by a complex configuration of factors.
“(Dis)honourable” Women: “Speaking Out” and “Shutting Up”
Two thematic contexts framed the key appearances of most female politicians:
Europe (principally Britain’s European Union membership) and campaign process (encompassing discussion of party fortunes, leadership, and strategy). Stories of Conservative MPs dissenting from their leader’s “negotiate and decide” policy on monetary union came to dominate when 200 “rebels” publicly declared their opposition to a single currency. Three Tory female MPs figured in this reporting: Vice-Party Chairman (sic) Angela Rumbold, Minister Angela Browning, and high-profile, pro-European backbencher Edwina Currie.21Their characterisation, however, varied significantly across titles. In the view of the EuroscepticTimes, Rumbold and Browning were reluctant rebels and national heroines, risking their careers to speak out “on the most important decision this country has confronted for decades.”22In the Eurosceptic but conservativeDaily Mailtheir defiance was
Table1 Womenfeaturedinthe1997electionpresscoverage IndividualsAppearancesMain:Key:Minorfigure*TimesquotedStorytotalVisualimages TheGuardian Politicians10030140:93:1687117383 Politicians’relatives371094:32:73139239 Ordinarywomen25530622:132:15219615251 TheTimes Politicians9930129:120:15281164103 Politicians’relatives521445:44:952210256 Ordinarywomen2042362:68:16611212957 DailyMail Politicians6316921:112:36539759 Politicians’relatives3111022:57:31188173 Ordinarywomen49513:22:26244117 TheMirror Politicians219512:70:13237864 Politicians’relatives391258:54:63208099 Ordinarywomen16318045:76:599110091 TheSun Politicians337211:41:20135014 Politicians’relatives15869:41:36176571 Ordinarywomen616210:41:11453323 *Seenote18forexplanationofterms
“saluted” but neither figured prominently and their actions were portrayed less as a rebellion and more as a dutiful service, pushing leader John Major to adopt a tougher stance.The Sun, in keeping with its precarious endorsement of Blair, assigned the women little copy, applauded Eurosceptic courage, and characterised the “revolt” as a further sign of weak leadership. In the pro-European The Guardian, the “Battle for Britain” became a narrative of Tory civil war and the calculated manoeuvrings of a doomed party. ForThe Mirror, Europe was a side-issue. Currie’s criticisms of Major, meanwhile, were coded in The Timesas a self-serving publicity bid from a woman about to lose her seat, and in the Daily Mailas the views of an egotistical “big mouth,” “loose cannon,” and “sex novelist.”
If the newsworthiness of all three rested on their willingness to “speak out,” direct citation of their views was extremely limited. Reference was frequently made, however, to their appearance, and their performances were often characterised as excessive or out of place. Rumbold was found “slightly intimidating in a pistachio-coloured suit” and Browning was judged a “ferociously hard worker . . . with a streak of steel.”23Currie was depicted in one Times sketch as a “lilac tornado,” who “terrified” ladies and “interrogate[d] . . . bewildered youth,” while aGuardiancampaign report suggested she was a “femme fatale,”
flirtatious with voters, and “a force of nature.”24Overtly gendered evaluation of Currie was most marked in theDaily Mail. Here, she was the second most featured female politician, and opinion columns and judgmental feature writing contributed significantly to her representation as a reprobate mother and wife, frequently absent from home and perversely proud of her daughter’s “sexual exploits.”
The most frequently featured female politician, however, was former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and her leadership style, and views on Europe, Major, and Blair framed almost two thirds of 104 appearances. As Prime Minister, Thatcher articulated a feminine sartorial style with grand images of Britishness and a combative, intransigent rhetorical style. In the 1997 election, the “Iron Lady” was brought back for burnishing by titles loyal to Thatcherite values, if not to the Tory party. WhileThe Timespaid homage to the “warrior queen,” resplendent in “white pearls and a golden helmet of lacquered hair,” The Sun pronounced her “the finest leader since Churchill,” and the Daily Maillauded her as a conviction politician.25If Thatcher was one marker against which Major and Blair were to be judged, this seriously limited their ability to reinflect—if they had wanted—traditional definitions of “strong” leadership. Her mode of inhabiting the masculinised culture of politics also constituted a problematic legacy for other female politicians. She had succeeded as an exceptional individual, offering “feminine endorsement to patriarchal power and principles” and avoiding a direct address to other women (Campbell 1987, p. 246).
Press portrayal of Labour’s female politicians contributed to a very different meta-narrative of party and leadership. Across all titles, representations of “Old” and “New”
Labour women serviced politically inflected evaluations of the party’s ideological integrity and campaign strategy. The most unfavourable representations occurred in theDaily Mail.
As the faces of “Old Labour,” politicians like Clare Short and Margaret Beckett featured in stories designed to revive fears about trade union power, taxation, and “permissive,”
“anti-family” social policies. Highly interpretative reporting verbs framed their appearances in the context of policy “rows” and “gaffes”—they were “accused,” they “conceded,” they
“admitted”—and they were offered little space to counter with their own agenda. TheDaily Mail’s coverage was also distinctive for columnists’ disparagement of Labour women and their reductive, personalised, and, on occasion, aggressively misogynistic style of argument.
Richard Littlejohn complained, for instance, that most Labour women were “curiously sexless.” “Glenda Jackson,” he declared, “. . . has the kind of face that can turn beer sour from 50 paces. And somehow I can’t see Margaret Beckett in an angora boob tube and ra-ra skirt.”26
By contrast, The Mirror presented most Labour women positively as part of the
“team for change.” Here it was Mo Mowlam who featured most prominently, in the context of an “exclusive,” “human interest” drama. Framed ostensibly as a triumph-over-tragedy story, emotive narration of Mowlam’s recovery from a brain tumour afforded the paper a means of concretising the leadership potential it believed New Labour possessed: the qualities lauded were her courage, combativeness, and calm commitment to public service.
At the same time, this portrayal pointedly referred to her “feminine” charm, “touchy feely”
nature, and tearful despair at her “more meaty” appearance.27 Significantly, this story carried the most direct quotation from a female politician.
In the broadsheets, depictions of “Old” Labour women as the “true” face of the party appeared alongside characterisations of “New Labour” women as the embodiment of an inexperienced, ruthlessly disciplined or slavishly loyal type of politician. These were narratives told primarily via on-the-stump reports and sketches. InThe Times, for instance, Beckett’s main appearance was as a cartoon butterfly, captioned: “Painted Lady (Becketta oldlabora) . . . It uses its top profile to. . . disguise the true colouring beneath.”28 Representations of New Labour politicians, meanwhile, ranged from feminised images of an
“on-message,” “colour-me-beautiful set” of clones with “manicured nails and lobotomised opinions” to their depiction as political innocents “doing battle for Tony Blair’s babes’
army.”29 The construction of young women as the emblematic faces of New Labour persisted despite reports that 80 per cent of all candidates under the age of 30 were men and the Commons would remain a stronghold of white, middle-class, middle-aged men.
The Guardiancommentators were concerned less about the authenticity of Labour’s
“modernisation” and more about its over-disciplined, “image-obsessed” campaign.
Tellingly, caricatures illustrating “key player” profiles depicted a red-suited Short displayed but muffled in a glass box, and Harriet Harman as a dog, with a collar inscribed “Blair Islington.”30Reports featuring new candidates, meanwhile, repeatedly characterised them as feminised Blairites—“pretty, professional, well dressed and on-message”31—and/or marginalised their views in favour of male incumbents, whose noisy eccentricities and prejudices were coded as characterful and signs of a vibrant democracy. One virtually silent figure featured prominently in this meta-critique. Typified as “the very essence of New Labour” yet scarcely quoted, Barbara Follett was primarily framed by analogies to private sphere roles. She was dubbed “headmistress of Blairite charm school and doyenne of the party’s makeover,” “leading friend of Blair,” and “wife of millionaire thriller writer and image consultant.”32Key to this characterisation were three satirical columns by Bel Littlejohn, the female persona of columnist Craig Brown, which affected the tone of inconsequential
“girly” chat.33
Three themes emerge from this analysis. First, the textual presences and absences of individual female politicians varied markedly across titles and their portrayals were significantly shaped by newspapers’ and commentators’ issue agendas and ideological allegiances. Women’s newsworthiness and characterisation as politicians were adjudged not only according to values traditionally governing “hard” news—personalisation, immediacy, drama, and conflict—but on the narrative contributions they could make to favoured storylines, as well as by the roles journalists perceived themselves playing in the
political process.34Significantly, the marginalisation of women’s voices was exacerbated by the prolific use of mostly male columnists and sketch writers, whose interpretive discourse does not rest on “impartiality” conventions and right of reply, and in some titles purported to fulfil a public watchdog function by deploying overtly gendered, chauvinistic rhetoric.
Second, the gendered nature of the language routinely used to characterise political conduct betrayed the masculinist elements of both parliamentary and journalistic cultures.
Pointed references to female MPs’ voices, appearances, first names, and private sphere identities, and the inflection of military metaphors to suggest either unfeminine, unnatural deportment or a distinctively feminised style worked to present them as atypical politicians intruding into implicitly male territory or as “outsiders within.” Routine use of metaphors relating to institutions traditionally associated with men (sport, public school, and the pub), many reporters’ apparent ease in campaign venues, and reluctance to consider the consequences of women’s political under-representation imparted a sense of complacent acceptance of the masculinised (and classed) norms of media(ted) politics.35
Third, the reporting appears to reflect fears about the threat women posed to the fraternal culture of male politicians and journalists. Puwar (2004) has suggested that the socio-spatial presence of previously excluded groups at Westminster can trigger a sense of disorientation, exaggerated perceptions of the number of “invaders,” underestimation of their competencies, and super-surveillance. In the textual spaces of political reporting, the representation of Labour’s politicians was seemingly inflected by these responses.
Additionally, the coverage bore the traces of impossibly conflicted expectations of women MPs, as they sought to perform a role scripted historically by men but were judged according to narrow codes of traditional or “acceptable” femininity. The representation of Labour women as the face of a commodified, emasculated form of modern politics also, arguably, reflects the perceived threat their party’s media management strategies constituted to journalists’ practice.
“You can Judge a Man by his Wife”36
A second key “type” of woman shaping the representation of women’s relation to political culture was “the political wife.” Four individuals dominated this category: party leaders’ wives Cherie Blair and Norma Major; Christine Hamilton, wife of the Tatton Tory MP accused of financial corruption; and Anna Cox, 17 year-old “mistress” of Tory MP Piers Merchant. Once again, the characterisation of each was inflected by newspapers’ differing political, moral and commercial agendas, production values, and roles allotted by party strategists. But common to much coverage was the deployment of these women as cultural reference points for the promotion or judging of political parties and their leaders. These women thus constituted sites for the playing out of a wider cultural and sexual politics.
In the broadsheets, Cherie Blair and Norma Major were chiefly presented as silent, secondary figures, loyally accompanying their husbands on the campaign trail. In the tabloids, these women were allotted a more central role.37At times they served as visual metaphors for affective, partisan narration of party fortunes. The Mirror, for instance, marked Major’s exit from Downing Street with a picture story foregrounding his “shattered and vulnerable” wife. More significantly, Cherie Blair was also deployed as a narrative vehicle for evaluating her husband’s leadership qualities. In the Daily Mail, a series of
“Cherie Watches” ostensibly monitored her couture but covertly underwrote theMail’s own view of New Labour as cynically expedient. “The common touch? Hardly,” pronounced one
report. “Doubtful anyone on Labour’s minimum wage would be able to afford this lot.
Verdict: The most stylish.”38 Her presence was used to different effect in the pro-Blair tabloids. In contemporary western politics, the communicative style of a party leader has become central to the projection of a political message. Furthermore, rather than drawing the line between the extraordinary public figure and the ordinary private individual, party strategists aim to constitute the former by building upon the latter (Fairclough 2000;
Marshall 1997). Blair’s identity, Fairclough (2000) contends, was anchored on a calculated, public construction of a private self as “normal, decent, likeable” person, and his ability to mix the vernacular language of the everyday with the language of politics. My reading suggests, however, that representations of his wife and family were also central to the mediation of this public personality. “Blair the normal person” was very much grounded on constructions of “normal”masculinity.
BothThe SunandMirrorcarried “intimate” pre-election profiles of Blair and deeply conventional front page images of the nation’s new “First Family” in the wake of victory. In these, Cherie Blair is visually prominent.39However, little mention is made of her legal career and she is configured primarily as devoted, attractive wife and loving mother, offering silent testimony to Blair’s qualities as decent family man and autonomous politician. In stark contrast, the pieces allow Blair to move effortlessly across the public/private divide, using his family life as a means not only to appeal to the nation but as a model for wider community values and governing over the nation. Crucially, these familial (re)presentations enabled Blair to embody both a protective paternalism and a partially “feminised” and therefore acceptable “modernised” version of authoritarian masculinity. While favourable comparisons to Thatcher worked to legitimate Blair as a “tough” leader, displays of fatherly love and emotional honesty distanced him from the ruthless, individualistic excesses of Thatcherism. Questions about the gender relations structuring Blair’s social vision and privileged family life were absent, however, and we hear nothing about working cultures that take little account of children’s needs and carers’ responsibilities.
Some space was opened to female commentators to evaluate these wives as role models for other women. Most of this discourse, however, worked to defuse the challenge a working woman posed to the traditional image of First Lady as public consort, political hostess, and object of display. In theDaily Mail, Cherie Blair largely appears as a woman removed from the life-world and values of readers—posh, professional, feminist, and intellectually snobbish. Norma Major, by contrast, is profiled approvingly as “a wife in politics”—apolitical, unambitious, cultivated, loving, and privileged to play this role.The Sun Womanpage, meanwhile, strived to style Cherie Blair as unthreatening modern woman.
A First Lady of the 1990s, concluded its editor, need not be “a Hillary Clinton figure with big hair and big political opinions. But someone who represents the fact women are now more independent and career-minded than ever. Cherie Blair fits that description.”40 This commentary refused a politicised solidarity between women and shied away from discussing the messy structural realities and costs involved in balancing work and family. In a polling day profile, a sense of commonality with readers was forged largely on the basis of personal anxieties about body image and wardrobe. It was left to The Guardian’s Aitkenhead to lament her presentation by news managers “as a silent void.”41
Representations of “the wife in politics” were also shaped by the reporting of “sleaze.”
The narrative presence of Anna Cox and Christine Hamilton varied considerably but they emerged from much of the coverage as figures that threatened the body politic and perverted the image of desirable political consort. Sexual sleaze was brought to front page
prominence byThe Sun’s “entrapment” of married MP Piers Merchant embracing Cox in a park, and his subsequent parading of his “forgiving” wife. In the ensuing news coverage, Cox was widely characterised as a “Soho hostess” and “teen temptress.”42 Accompanying commentary ranged fromDaily Mailcondemnation of Cox as a “greedy trollop well practised in the art of using. . .men,” toThe Mirror’s editorial exoneration of her as “barely more than a child”43and studied broadsheet indifference to Merchant’s sexual politics. InThe Sun, Cox was simultaneously coded as naive victim of a hypocritical, “seedy” violator of family values and erotic spectacle for readers’ pleasure. It was Cox and not Merchant who figured as the metaphoric “bad body” of Tory sleaze—vulgar, sexualised, tainted by association with prostitution, and the antithesis of the elegant (and normatively middle class) political companion. Amid the debates about blame, agency, and politicians’ accountability, women’s voices were scarcely audible. Two mocking commentaries inThe Sunexpressed weary familiarity with Merchant’s behaviour, although neither attempted to articulate a connection between readers and Cox or to push the commentary beyond simplistic, universalising conservative “family values.”44 Only The Mirror’s Riddell questioned why women were expected to “stand by their man” and play an invisible role building their career.45
Representation of “the wife” in the second strand of the sleaze narrative—the “cash- for-questions” scandal46—ranged from tireless administrator, admirably old-fashioned wife, and spirited “general leading her army of one” inThe SunandDaily Mail, to despised, culpable female aggressor, “the real terror of Tatton.”47ForThe Times, Christine Hamilton epitomised
“Tory lady rampant”—“intimidating,” influential, and “ferociously” protective. Her portrayal inThe GuardianandThe Mirrorwas even harsher, sliding into misogynistic critique, which judged her a “fearful creature,” a “wife from hell,” and one of “many reasons why Neil Hamilton is not fit to be a Member of Parliament.”48 Both negative and positive representations of Mrs Hamilton, as with Cox, worked to uphold limiting conceptions of a woman’s role in politics—loyal, subordinate, and devoted to supporting her man in government. The silent performance of precisely this role by Cherie Blair—“the real Blair babe” asThe Mirrordubbed her—embodied, in turn, the paradoxical position of women in the Labour party as a whole: central to the crafting of Blair’s “modernised” masculine image and the “feminisation” of New Labour, but simultaneously unable or unwilling to speak as/for women.
“Ordinary” Women and the Politics of Everyday Life
The proportionately high number of “ordinary women” coded and quoted was striking,49and they featured in far greater numbers as voters than as professional news sources.The Mirror aside, “ordinary women” appeared most commonly in vox pop-style discourse or on-the-stump reports, designed to provide textual “colour” or representative voter opinion. In some reports, women were configured as citizens with views worth hearing. But their comments were generally restricted to highly selective, fragmented sentences and thus detached from the wider contexts of their lives and “the informing web of rationalisation . . . upon which ‘opinions’ depend” (Cottle 1991, p. 62). In other reports, notably in the broadsheets, voters’ voices were more commonly deployed for background
“comic” effect. Much of the intended humour was integral to reporters’ critiques of party stage-management of the campaign and voters’ disengagement. Too often, however, women figured as uninformed, irrational, confused or apathetic mothers, housewives,
shoppers, workers, and patients. Positioned as reluctant participants or comic spectators, their conduct, concerns, and conversations were judged as inappropriate—literally, laughably out of place—in the world of rational, political debate. InThe Guardian, the cast of female citizens included “Sarah in Birmingham” who was voting for Major on the strength of his handshake—the “sort of thing a man could miss,” “the old dear across the way,” who complained to the Chancellor about her television junction box, and two “envelope-stuffers of [the] Conservative Association” discussing knicker elastic. Meanwhile, “angry women complaining about three yob families on their council estate” were mocked for living in
“a surreal world of micro-politics” in which “[t]he big issues. . . fail to register.”50The roll-call of ordinary women inThe Timeswas similar but was more often marked by a discursive sexualisation of relations between male candidate and female voter. Women were cast as adoring “admirers,” “fans,” and voters to be charmed rather than reasoned with.
The major exception to these patterns wasThe Mirror’s deployment of women’s lives and voices. For instance, emotive accounts of a nurse’s professional life, a young homeless woman’s rehabilitation, mothers’ experiences of mental health services, and a teenager’s despair about her future helped shape the paper’s social issue coverage. At moments, their stories graphically challenged government inaction and official rhetoric, thus making links between women’s personal subjectivity and structural socio-political circumstances textually visible.51 They also countered the traditional gendered exclusivity of news sourcing, which privileges male-dominated political elites and middle-class professionals.
However, the critical spaces opened up for further analysis were closed down by the paper’s simplistic endorsement of New Labour. Other reporting appropriated women’s bodies and voices in arguably disempowering ways. The appearance of young girls and women as vulnerable, passive “victims” of social policy was marked, and a pin-up-style series “The Blair Babes,” featuring scantily dressed young, white models “explaining beautifully” why they supported Labour, appeared regularly.
Overall, “ordinary women’s” inclusion as news actors did little to prompt reflection on the gendered realities of social lives (or their imbrication with issues of ethnicity or class). In the party campaigns, neither policies directed towards women nor the issues raised by advocacy organisations figured greatly in party agendas or manifestos (Adcock 1997;
Fawcett Society 1997).52 Newspaper coverage of substantive policy compounded the neglect—neither “women’s concerns” nor women’s perspectives on the topics covered featured significantly.53Journalists thus systematically failed to acknowledge that most policy issues, “whether gender-specific or not, have gendered effects” (Marchbanks 1998, p. 67). So, for instance, The Mirror’s social issue coverage contained little discussion of women’s pay and working conditions or differential needs as carers and pensioners. In the Daily Mail, Labour pledges to introduce a minimum wage, union reform, restricted working hours, and limited parental leave were framed as unnecessary burdens on business.
Coverage of abortion issues was restricted to a proposed Pro-Life Alliance broadcast and afforded little voice to pro-choice advocates. Titles’ coverage of party crime and family policies drew little attention to the links between violent crime and masculinity or to the family as a site of danger or disadvantage for women and children. Labour’s equation of citizenship with participation in paid work went virtually unchallenged, and childcare, if mentioned, was too often assumed to be the responsibility of mothers. Little mention was made, moreover, of the detrimental impact Thatcherism had had on many women’s lives.
The Guardianmade most reference to women’s marginalisation in campaign politics and published a few reports on issues deemed significant for women. But systematic attention
to the gendered dimensions of policy-making and the priorities, voices and expertise of women were glaringly absent in its issue analysis, as it was inThe Times. If the election of a record number of female MPs directed fleeting attention to the issue of women’s political representation, coverage generally traded in essentialist images of women even as it delineated the progressive differences their presence was expected to make. The trivialising epithet “Blair’s Babes,” meanwhile, was destined to gain currency across the press as both a casual collective noun and pointed signifier of Labour women’s supposed incompetence, sycophancy or conformist mediocrity.
Conclusion
My research indicates that newspaper representation of female politicians in the 1997 General Election varied significantly across and within titles, and was shaped by a complex configuration of elements, including individuals’ public profile, gender identity, professional rank and self-presentation, party communication strategy, journalistic news and narrative values, and newspapers’ and commentators’ ideological agendas and role conceptions. Crucially, their representation, and the portrayal of women’s position in the wider body politic, was also shaped by the media(ted) presence and absence of other
“types” of women as sources and subjects of coverage. Within this storytelling, a few women featured in ways that did not conform to the limited or sexualised patterns of representation found in other research, and some journalists commanded space to reflect on women’s place in electoral politics. More generally, however, coverage was structured by a number of problematic tendencies. Women were habitually marked out as women and marginalised as serious political speakers, the contexts within which women most often figured related closely to the themes prioritised by the newspapers themselves, and the gender aspects of policy issues were routinely overlooked. Choice of language often served to reproduce traditional, pejorative or mythical conceptions of womanhood, while much reporting implicitly presumed certain kinds of masculinity as the unmarked norm against which women were, if considered, marked as different. Women’s public personae were often framed via non-political sphere storylines and trivialising analogies. This not only aligned women with the private sphere but, as Walsh (2001) has observed, replicated a gendered hierarchical public/private distinction within the public political sphere itself.
Significantly, women were also deployed as symbolic or figurative bearers of meaning beyond themselves—feminised, often disparaged, embodiments of abstract social values facilitating narration of wider political discourses and critiques of party policy.
Representations of real women, in short, were continually caught up in reductive, ideological representational frameworks of Woman that neglected to consider how their complex positionings in the material world might require better political (self-)representation and structural change.
At one level, the case study provides further evidence of the ways in which reporting and formatting practices and news values can shape and constrain the terms on which a political campaign is fought, and provide or withhold information that impacts on what people know, as well as think, about an issue. Any analysis of women’s political representation must be situated within this broader media production context. But my research also highlights the importance of attending specifically to the gendered dimensions of these reporting practices, and to the ways in which discourses of masculinity and femininity are deployed to narrativise and evaluate British politics, and mark the
boundaries of “the political.” Three points are central. First, narrow, marginalised representations of women and their concerns do not facilitate just public evaluation of MPs’
performance and diversity, or understanding of the gender issues and gendered “ideational climates” (Bashevkin 2002, p. 14) informing policy-making and parliamentary practices.
Second, if media power is conceived in terms of its ideological role in organising, naturalising and inviting consent to certain ways of understanding, then it matters if women’s voices are absent from debate over what counts as true, normal, representative or politically significant, given men and women’s differential relations to social and political power. The structural absence of routine attention to women’s perspectives and policy concerns, and journalists’ disregard for available gender policy material and expert sources, moreover, seriously challenges the adequacy of current practices of “disinterested”
informative news reporting and more interpretive forms of commentary, eyewitness and partisan championing of “the public interest.”
Third, as journalists and politicians strive to create resonant popular political discourses, trust, and “a feeling” of being represented (Duerst-Lahti & Kelly 1995), they engage in a broader cultural politics of legitimation and representation, which can work to contain or cultivate certain understandings of gender and social identity. In the election coverage, narrative alignment of women with private sphere roles, sexualised identities or devalued, feminised social and professional qualities not only contributed to masculinised constructions of political leadership, governance, and citizenship, which limit the terms on which women may effectively represent themselves. Reductive representations of womanhood also have wider implications for what reading publics know and think about themselves and others. Certain—more entertaining, emotional, personalised or provocative—modes of reporting and commentary have the potential both to entertain and engage the reading public in ways that might disturb complacency, promote critical reflection or inspire action. Yet if the language, imagery, and sources they deploy set up narrow, prejudiced, disrespectful, combative or cynical perceptual frameworks and push women on to the defensive, we must question their democratic value. Attending to the specific constraints, characteristics, address, and potential openness of different types of news and feature formatting, storytelling and commentary is key, then, if problematic or unrepresentative narratives of women’s lives are to be identified and contested, and new images and (self-)understandings forged.
The potential significance of these findings for both political and media theorists is that they point up some of the challenges (and possibilities) that current media practices present to those seeking more equitable forms of representative democracy. Returning to Phillips’ notion of a politics of presence, I want to suggest that improving women’smedia presence—as journalists, news subjects, and sources—may be one means of improving women’s political representation. Clearly, it is not simply a question of raising the number or visibility of women, since this fails to address the qualitative terms on which women are included in news rooms and editorial coverage (as well as the wider social, economic, political and institutional contexts shaping news production and journalistic autonomy).
Full parity of presence, however, might promote recognition of women’s equal civic and political value. Crucially, it might also improve the representative diversity of newspaper staffs and the masculinist dimensions of reporting cultures. It might (though not necessarily) lead to the emergence of alternative storytelling, sourcing, deliberation and agenda-setting, to advocacy of marginalised interests, and to engagement with the diversity and contradictions of women’s lives, identities, and outlooks. Encouraging all
correspondents to routinely address the gendered dimensions of policy-making, meanwhile, might alleviate female journalists’ “burden of representation” and the risk of being ghettoised in “women’s issue reporting.” These issues matter because the media, for all its shortcomings, has the potential to contribute significantly to women’s symbolic and substantive political and cultural representation. Currently, women still constitute a minority of parliamentary representatives and progress in increasing their numbers has been disappointingly slow (Campbell & Lovenduski 2005). Under New Labour, many women voters and campaigners remain dissatisfied with policy delivery and party politics (Fawcett Society 2005;The Guardian G22004; Harman & Mattinson 2000, 2004; Squires &
Wickham-Jones 2001; Turquet 2004), and female MPs and journalists continue to complain of masculinist, hostile and outdated aspects of political and journalistic cultures (Ashley 2005; Bunting 2004; Childs 2004; Follett 2000; Ward 2000). News sourcing, commentary, and critical analysis potentially offer additional ways of including women in the political process, opening up party agendas to new issues or excluded policy perspectives, challenging hegemonic discourses, and questioning the terms on which we may speak or be spoken for as women.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank Janice Winship and Thomas Austin for their critical insight and careful reading.
NOTES
1. Bentham 1997;The Guardian, 3 May 1997, p. 22.
2. The Mirror, 5 May 1997, pp. 16 – 18.
3. In 1997, women elected to Westminster constituted 18 per cent of members. This slipped to 118 in 2001 but increased by ten in 2005. In 1999, women formed 37 per cent of the Scottish Parliament and 40 per cent of the Welsh Assembly.
4. See Mackay (2004) and Lovenduski (1998).
5. See Mackay (2004), Ross (2000a), and Squires & Wickham-Jones (2001) on other UK political institutions.
6. Johnson & Walkerdine (2004) suggest Blairism promoted the social rationalities and subjectivities of middle-class groups, especially men’s.
7. The unit was designed to have an educative and monitoring role.
8. The relative social homogeneity of New Labour women, and the perception of some that their lives are atypical of other women, adds to the complexity.
9. The work of Young and Phillips is part of a wider body of criticism that reworks Habermas’
discourse model of public interaction, challenging its universalistic and rationalistic orientation. See also Fraser (1987, 1992).
10. See Carter, Branston and Allan (1998) for scholarship that has begun to address this neglect.
11. Historically, women have tended to vote more conservatively than men but the gap closed in 1997. A gender generation gap remained, with young women more likely to vote Labour (Norris 1999).
12. Eleven of nineteen national titles endorsed Blair.
