Negotiating Gendered Institutions: Women’s Parliamentary Friendships at Westminster

Abstract

In 1997, an unprecedented number of female MPs -120 — were elected to the UK House of Commons, doubling the numbers of female representatives overnight. Of these, 101 came from a single party: Labour. They entered a political institution that had hitherto been massively male-dominated (even in 1997, their number counted less than 20 per cent) and famed for its historic traditions dominated by masculinised structures and norms (Lovenduski, 2005, 2010). Many of the newly elected Labour women were known to each other, having already shared experiences of passing through their party’s internal selection processes over the preceding years. Many broadly shared the same views of what the Labour party should stand for, ideologically speaking, and most were attitudinally feminist (Childs, 2004). The mass media at the time of the general election, and thereafter, routinely constituted them as a collective entity — Blair’s Babes — and the specifically right-wing media regularly subjected them to highly gendered criticism (Childs, 2008: 140–165).