Of course, the first female member of parliament in the UK was a revolutionary communist and armed guerilla, so she didn’t take up her seat and therefore doesn’t really count. After that there’s a couple of Conservatives and a Liberal, until in 1923 the first three Labour women were elected. One of them was a monocle-wearing, crop-headed, chain-smoking former Tory councillor who’d served time in prison and who was described, by one of her best friends, as a “somewhat wild woman of demagogic speech.”
Arabella Lawrence (1871-1947), always known by her middle name of Susan, was born in London into a well-to-do legal family. She attended university as a mathematician, where her views were the conventional ones of her class and generation: she was a Conservative and a member of the Church of England. It was being elected a Tory councillor in 1910 that seems to have turned her to the left. Understandable – seeing them up close.
Susan represented West Marylebone, a wealthy ward, on the London County Council. She believed in charity, philanthropy, and education for the poor. Her Conservative colleagues, she soon discovered, were more concerned with low rates for businessmen, low wages for council employees, and people knowing their place.
In 1912, she resigned from the council, having become fundamentally disillusioned with conservatism. Her experiences as a councillor had convinced her that poverty could only be overcome by state action. Susan Lawrence joined (and was quickly a leading member of) the Fabian Society, Labour’s original think tank, and the Women’s Trade Union League. She spent the next few years as a union organiser amongst low-paid women, which was where she first became known fondly as “Our Susan.”
She returned to London County Council in 1913 – this time as a Labour member for Poplar, one of the capital’s poorest boroughs. Six years later Labour won a huge victory in elections to Poplar Borough council, and Lawrence become a member of that body too. And that’s how she ended up in chokey.
Poplar council leader (and future Labour Party leader) George Lansbury and his comrades were firmly of the view that increased local taxation, to deal with the economic crisis, should not fall disproportionately on poor ratepayers. Rich areas should pay their fair share. The government refused to contemplate such Bolshevik madness, and so Poplar council refused to set a rate. In 1921, thirty Poplar councillors were sentenced to indefinite imprisonment for contempt of court.
When the officers tasked with arresting the female councillors arrived in Poplar they were met with large demonstrations. Some local residents wanted to form a human barrier making it impossible for the women to be jailed, but Susan Lawrence disagreed: “We want to go. I am going even if I have to walk all the way to Holloway.” The Sheriff in charge of their arrest took the female councillors for a meal at a restaurant on their way to prison, as it would be a while before they saw proper food again. What a civilized country! Yes, it jails its dissenters, but at least it treats them to a slap-up nosh first.
Rather than getting swole in the prison gym, or running her landing as a snout baron, Lawrence spent her time inside writing a pamphlet on tax reform, and complaining to the prison authorities that she wasn’t allowed to smoke.
After six weeks in which the councillors refused to change their minds, the government crumbled. To continue with the Poplar persecution would have risked spreading the rebellion throughout the working-class areas of London, and so – not for the first or last time – a legal loophole was conveniently discovered which allowed the prisoners to be released. Their main demand was met by hurried legislation. Lawrence attributed Poplar’s victory to “a certain fierceness of attitude.”
She believed that the labour movement advanced by facing up to the enemy, not by being respectable and moderate. This was the exact opposite of the view taken by the people who then ran the London Labour Party which meant that post-prison, Our Susan was seen as a leader of the left. She was elected to parliament in 1923 and served in the first Labour government, before losing her seat at the 1924 general election. She returned to the Commons at a by-election on 29th April 1926, and held a junior position at the health ministry during the second Labour government.
Lawrence’s ministerial work was very well-regarded – especially her forensic dissections of Conservative policy - but when she lost her seat again at the 1931 election her parliamentary career was over. She continued to be an important figure in the party, serving on the National Executive until 1941, but spent much of the time in her later years translating books into Braille.
Although she was a pioneering female MP, you’d have been well advised not to mention that fact to Susan Lawrence’s face. She was an MP, not a “woman MP,” she insisted – unless everyone wanted to start referring to men who were MPs as “men MPs.”
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Sources:
Guilty and proud of it! by Janine Booth (Merlin Press, 2009)
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06652/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_East_Ham_North_by-election
https://labourlist.org/2010/12/susan-lawrence-the-monocled-maverick
https://turbulentlondon.com/2020/03/26/turbulent-londoners-susan-lawrence-1871-1947/
www.mernick.org.uk/elhs/Newsletter/Series%201/1997%201-13.pdf
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-rebel-councillors-1921-poplar-rates-rebellion/