My name's David Beamish and I'm the Clerk of the Parliaments, a rather uninformative
title, in effect I'm the chief executive of the House of Lords and responsible for over
500 staff supporting it
I'm the chief adviser to the House and at the start of every sitting I'm at the table
of the House wearing wig and gown, a fancy eighteenth century costume, where I'm providing
procedural advice to the House.
In this short video I'm going to be talking a little bit about women in the House of Lords
I'm sorry to say the House came rather late to having women in its membership, women were
first admitted to the House of Commons in 1918 and the first woman MP took her seat
in 1919, it was nearly forty years before any woman was able to sit in the House of
Lords. There were attempts earlier and the first was that of Viscountess Rhonda. She
had inherited a title from her father but in those days very few hereditary titles could
pass through the female line, and even when they could women weren't allowed to sit. But
she relied on the Sex Disqualification Removal Act 1919 to invite the House to agree that
she could take a seat, and sadly the committee for privileges which looked into her case,
on the whole it's believed swayed by the then Lord Chancellor Lord Birkenhead, decided she
couldn't.
After that there were a number of attempts to allow women who had hereditary titles to
sit in the House but none of them was successful and it was only in 1958 when the Macmillan
government passed the Life Peerages Act that that Act provided that women could sit as
life peers in the House of Lords, and in the first list of peers appointed under that act
out of 40 nominees, four of them were women, so in late 1958 we had the first examples
of women taking their seat and indeed speaking in the House of Lords.
The next small step in the history of women in the House of Lords came in 1963, almost
by accident the Peerage Act of that year was primarily intended to enable Anthony Wedgewood
Benn, later known as Tony Benn, to disclaim his peerage which he'd inherited and which
had stopped him sitting in the House of Commons, but several other reforms were made in the
same act, and one of those was to allow women who had inherited their titles to take their
seat in the House of Lords. Sadly by then Viscountess Rhonda had died so she wasn't
able to take her seat but several hereditary women were members after that.
In the years after 1958 women came to hold a number of significant offices in the House
and perhaps the first of note was when Baroness Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe became government
chief whip in 1974, with the rather quaint title for a female holder of captain of the
gentleman at arms.
Then in 1981 Baroness Young became the first female leader in either House and she's been
followed by no fewer than four other female leaders over the years. Finally it's perhaps
worth mentioning that in 2007 Baroness Scotland of Asthal became the first ever female Attorney
General sitting in the House of Lords.
It seems surprising nowadays that you only have to go back to 1958 to have a House composed
entirely of men, because although we only have 22 percent of women in membership they
certainly pull their weight disproportionately and play a very full part in all aspects of
the work of the House, and I suppose the most striking illustration of that is that the
Lord Speaker, which has been an elected office since 2006, has been held by two holders,
both of them female. The first elected Lord Speaker in 2006 was Baroness Hayman and in
2011 she was succeeded by the present Lord Speaker, Baroness D'Souza.