Twenty-five years ago, when I was a junior reporter, The Times sent me to cover the House of Lords. My job on the red side of the palace entailed a great many lunches learning to fillet Dover sole with eccentric earls. Occasionally their hands would wander on to my knee so when I had tea with Baroness Williams of Crosby, I asked her advice.
As a young Labour MP, she said, she would often find that when she went into the division lobby she would be pinched on the bottom. Other female MPs, she discovered, were also suffering in silence. So they all decided to wear vertiginous pairs of heels and stamp on any miscreant. “The next day this male MP hobbled into the tearooms,” she explained, merrily. “Of course, we women all rushed up to commiserate.” It never happened again.
I thought of Shirl the Pearl tottering around in killer heels when I heard that she had died at 90; it seems incongruous as she preferred a good pair of flats. But she was a towering figure in so many ways.
Her career was just as astonishing and almost as influential as Thatcher’s. They both went to Oxford University and set their sights on politics very young. The Financial Times writer could have had a shot at leading the Labour Party or the newly formed SDP; she had a fiercer intellect than Thatcher, becoming a professor at Harvard, a sharper sense of humour and with her warm voice and informal manner was more popular with voters than the three men she joined in the Gang of Four.
Williams operated by being kind or, as Boris Johnson said, “reasonable”. But she could also fight back, once punching a racist several times in the stomach at a rally in support of independence for Malawi, which she found “rather exciting”. Another time, she got locked up in Holloway prison on a pretend prostitution charge so she could see for herself the appalling conditions of women prisoners.
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But she lacked one attribute. She didn’t have support at home. At the crucial time there was no Denis Thatcher or Duke of Edinburgh. She always went out with high-flying men such as Peter Parker, the future British Rail chairman, or the miler Roger Bannister, and needed someone who was her equal. But when she married Professor Bernard Williams, he struggled to reconcile himself with her career.
In her book The Women Who Shaped Politics, Sophy Ridge
explains that Williams deserted his wife when she became a minister. “With the benefit of hindsight I realise how difficult it was for an ambitious and brilliant young man to have a wife equally strongly committed to a career,” Shirley reflected, amazingly blaming his infidelities on herself, before adding: “Few people write about the partners of political leaders but they are indispensable.”
Shirley had no one to confide in or share chores with as she took on some of the greatest roles in government in the 1970s while bringing up her daughter. She was so unpunctual she was nicknamed “the late Shirley Williams” by male contemporaries. She retorted: “My colleagues pull my leg about being late and seeming to be in a hurry but who stocks their fridge, cooks their supper and solves their adolescents’ thorny problems?”
She didn’t have time to shop for clothes as a single mother or get a “hairdo”. But she cared more about her appearance than the present prime minister. I remember listening to her delivering her final speech in the House of Lords wearing pearls and a blue silk dress.
Her grandmother was a leading suffragette but had the same problem, eventually separating from her husband, a vicar, because he couldn’t stand her charity work. Her mother, Vera Brittain, the author, pacifist and feminist, also had to balance home life, rising early to deal with the “day’s bills”. She had, according to Williams, “drive and ambition and blazing honesty” — like her daughter. But, unlike her, Brittain had a husband, the philosopher Sir George Catlin, who adored her and encouraged her to write.
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Astonishingly, the lack of a supportive spouse is still a huge drawback for women this century, in a way it doesn’t seem to be for men. Female politicians continue to struggle without a sympathetic partner in a macho environment. The same is true in business, where only 6.3 per cent of leading British companies are run by women.
Covid has made it far worse because most women, particularly mothers, have taken on the majority of domestic duties and childcare during the lockdowns.
Like Williams, these women aren’t being held back because they aren’t tough or clever enough, or are too embarrassed to ask for a promotion or pay rise; they don’t need to go on assertiveness courses or lower their voices. Few have impostor syndrome; instead they’re frustrated that their talents can’t be put to better use and are tired of working “twice as hard to prove themselves”, as Thatcher admitted to her rival once while they were ironing their blouses at Westminster.
Like Williams, women may prefer to negotiate, compromise and be supportive but this shouldn’t be seen as a sign of weakness. They know they can match the men. They just can’t do it alone — partners need to step up with domestic work.
The baroness eventually found a man, the American political scientist Professor Richard Neustadt, who was prepared to share their lives equally and, miraculously, Williams started being almost on time. She once told me that “society, while willing to make room for women, is not willing to make changes for them”. We need to start now.
