Who says feminists can only be leftwing? An influential group of Conservative women MPs are increasingly vocal about the need to tackle gender equality. With radical views on parenting and work, can free-market feminism leave its mark?
The woman in the photograph is smiling a fixed, red-lipsticked smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. Snapped against a wall, she wears a black T-shirt with the words "This is what a feminist looks like" in defiant white letters across her chest. She was part of a campaign four years ago to challenge assumptions about feminism, and she encapsulates both why it was needed and how fast things can change. For the model is Theresa May, and, as her expression suggests, at the time this was a decidedly risky stunt for her.
Until very recently, the F word was rarely heard in Tory circles: even as late as the last election campaign, the media barrister and unsuccessful 2010 parliamentary candidate Joanne Cash recalls a glossy magazine shoot for aspiring MPs where several of her colleagues balked at being labelled with it.
As Louise Mensch, the Conservative MP for Corby and a self-professed feminist since her teens, says: "It's easy to get up there and be the reverse of Spartacus – 'No, I'm really not Spartacus! She's over there!' It's like Room 101: 'Take the other guy!'"
Well, not any more. May is not only in cabinet now, but serves as unofficial patron to a formidable phalanx of women backbenchers among whom feminism is "almost in vogue", in the words of Anastasia de Waal, deputy director of the rightwing think-tank Civitas. "I think that most of the women who came in with me in 2010 would describe themselves as feminists," says Amber Rudd, MP for Hastings and Rye. "They have thought it through: they know why they're here." It's a far cry from Margaret Thatcher's bald declaration that "I owe nothing to women's lib".
For veterans of the women's movement there may be something unnerving about hearing the familiar slogans from Tory mouths – a sense that, as a female columnist lamented recently of Mensch, these late converts are "the wrong kind" of feminists. They certainly raise difficult questions about whether one can really be a feminist and pro-marriage, or anti-abortion, or hawkish on a deficit reduction from which women in particular are suffering. But the distinct phenomenon of Tory feminism has too much potential influence over ordinary women's lives to be summarily dismissed. Why has there been so little serious effort to pin down this new creed?
From the Dagenham workers' equal pay strike to the Greenham Common peace camps, the pedigree of modern feminism is closely entwined with that of the left. But jump back a couple of generations, and it's a different story. Just over a century ago, it was Labour that rebuffed the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst's membership application because she was a woman (she later stood for parliament as a Conservative instead). Trade unions of the time, meanwhile, championed the case for a "family wage" for men, with wives staying at home.
"There's nothing inherently leftwing or rightwing about feminism as we would define it: it's about women having equal power and influence over the course of their lives," says Anna Bird, acting chief executive of the pressure group the Fawcett Society, which organised the T-shirt campaign. "But there is a question about priorities."
Women in opposite parties may pursue similar ends, but by very different means. One 28-year-old civil servant started a blog, Feminism for Tories (run anonymously because her job requires political neutrality), after feeling like an outsider in conventional women's groups. "I'm normally the most rightwing person in the room, and I wondered why that was," she says.
What she sees emerging at Westminster is a mix of "free market feminism" – the belief that with the bare minimum of rules to ensure free competition, men and women will naturally find their own balance – and what she calls "a pragmatic 'let's just see what has an effect without creating a backlash' approach".
In a nutshell, it's these two ideas – a flat refusal to see women as "victims" needing systematic protection, and a desire not to alienate men – that distinguish British rightwing feminism from its leftwing sister. What distinguishes it in turn from the suspiciously flimsy "girl power" rhetoric embraced by Sarah Palin in the US is its deep historical roots.
A conservative strand of feminism can be traced at least as far back as the 17th century writer Mary Astell, who argued – almost a century before Mary Wollstonecraft's call to arms, A Vindication of the Rights of Women – for female education as a means of empowerment. Describing marriage as "too often a trap for wives", since women felt they had little choice but to jump at any husband, Astell argued in her essay "Some Reflections upon Marriage" that education would ensure women were "guided by reason, not only in choosing a mate but in deciding whether to marry at all".
But what distinguishes Astell from the Enlightenment feminists who followed is an emphasis on individual women empowering themselves – through education or religious faith – rather than mass social change. It's not about exploding the nuclear family but shifting power within it.
Fast-forward three centuries, and Tory feminists still carefully endorse their leader's proposed tax break for married couples where one is a stay-at-home parent (which for Anna Bird is a "knowing attack on women, a knowing incentive for a certain kind of family structure"). But their prevailing view of family life bears little resemblance to the traditional right's 50s-style nostalgia.
Louise Mensch, who is divorced and remarried, says that, for couples who can stay together, "marriage or an equivalent situation is an ideal way to bring children up". But asked what she means by "equivalent", she cites civil partnerships and "even a truly committed non-married partnership: I know one couple that have remained unmarried for 20 years… It doesn't have to be traditional marriage."
Anyway, it's not marriage she thinks is problematic for feminists but economic inequality, and the way earning power affects relationships: "I think most people on the left are not opposed to marriage and happy relationships. They're opposed to what they perceive as the historical imbalance of power in relationships, in which the man does whatever he wants and the woman is economically dependent and tied to the man, which I think is another reason for looking at how women earn more money."
As for her much-quoted remarks last year about dressing up to please one's husband, Mensch says she was misquoted: "What I said is it's nice if partners make an effort for each other, but it suits a leftwing agenda to say I said a woman should make herself look pretty for a man with no reciprocity."
Indeed, for rightwing feminists the right not to be a sex object – and not to be judged on one's looks – is key. Claire Perry, the Devizes MP and a ministerial aide to the defence secretary Philip Hammond, recently tried unsuccessfully to persuade female colleagues to stop dyeing their hair for a month, letting their grey roots show in a statement of defiance against the pressure on women to look artificially young. "You could have a whole House full of women with a badger stripe, you could raise money for ovarian cancer or something, and say – 'this is what 47 looks like'," she says, wistfully.
The new Conservative women are also "much more prepared to have the fight" with business over issues like inappropriately sexy clothes for young girls, according to Katherine Rake, director of the parenting charity the Family and Parenting Institute. But then in the curious Venn diagram of the new politics, sex is where traditional rightwing thinking – with its emphasis on public decency – and radical feminism overlap.
Ever since Clare Short's valiant but doomed battle to ban topless women from the Sun, it has been conventional political wisdom that Page Three was essentially untouchable. Yet the new Tory women are surprisingly fearless on the subject. "One of my fellow MPs said to me, 'What do you think about Page Three, what are we going to do about that?'," says Amber Rudd. "The whole issue of porn and sexuality, that's where feminism meets Conservatism."
Claire Perry, who last year led a campaign for internet service providers to filter out porn unless customers specifically request it, also recently met a pressure group opposed to Page Three. "I find it so distasteful now – just women with their tits out!" she cries. "I hate even more this ridiculous little 'Here's Kelly, wondering about Britain's position in the euro' bubble. They are obviously made out to look stupid."
Taking on millions of Sun readers isn't easy, she concedes, but it's an issue that "we should have a think about".
Where things get stickier for Tory feminists, however, is on the bigger questions of sovereignty over a woman's body. The Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorries's emotive bid last summer to strip abortion providers of their role in counselling women left many voters with the clear impression of a party hostile to the right to choose.
Voting records, however, suggest things are less clear-cut: more than two-thirds of female Conservative MPs who voted sided with the pro-choice camp against Dorries. (Even Mensch, who is pro-life, didn't support her amendment because she believes abortion clinics operate in good faith.)
And whatever their individual positions, there is a palpable reluctance among the new intake to let Dorries's campaign become their defining image. Amber Rudd, who is pro-choice, is now studying ways to reduce unwanted teenage pregnancies precisely because "I don't want to have the abortion debate again. I just don't think the House of Commons has any business debating women's bodies any more."
What Tory women would far rather debate is work, for it's here that feminism fuses very comfortably with the legacy of that trickiest icon of female power, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher casts a long shadow over Conservative women, having managed to make it both easier and harder for them to rise to the top. The importance of proving that women can lead cannot be overstated, but her success became a stick with which to beat her successors, a convenient excuse not to tackle blatant sexism in the selection process on the grounds that if she could get through, surely others could. (It wasn't until David Cameron introduced the A-list selection process, effectively bumping female and ethnic minority candidates up the list, that this spell was broken.)
The biggest problem with Thatcher as a feminist icon, however, is that she seems to have regarded the movement as irrelevant at best and suspiciously socialist at worst. The cautionary lesson the grocer's daughter drew from her own life was not about gender but class, creating a fierce but gender-neutral belief in the importance of being able to haul oneself up by one's bootstraps.
Three decades later, her echo is most clearly heard in the new generation's positively evangelical enthusiasm for liberating women through entrepreneurship. Perry, a mother of three who started her own financial advice company, wants to see childcare made tax-deductible for anyone starting a business to send "a really strong signal" backing entrepreneurship, especially as a way back from redundancy or a career break. "The idea of building something, starting it from scratch, is a very Tory thing," she says. "One of the best ways to get off benefits is not to be a victim, to start something."
Mensch, who describes self-made women as "the essence of feminism" so long as they don't deny similar opportunities to others, wants women to be encouraged to chase money rather than career satisfaction at work, since that's where she believes power lies: "A feminism that stigmatises the profit motive stigmatises women's ability to get on and break the glass ceiling."
It's this emphasis on freeing women to work, together with a characteristic desire to make men part of the solution, which arguably sees Tory feminists at their boldest. All three parties now support Scandinavian-style transferable maternity leave, under which a new mother could be allowed to split her time off with her partner so that each spent some months at home with the baby. But it was May who embraced the shared parenting idea before her Labour counterparts, arguing that employers might discriminate less against mothers if it wasn't just women taking time off with a baby.
As Katherine Rake points out, on some issues it may be actually easier for a Tory-led administration to take on their old allies in business than for Labour: "It's like Labour taking on the NHS – it knows it can count on their support long-term."
And while employers are now lobbying to get the shared parenting proposals shelved, for many of the new women MPs it's a crucial step – and perhaps never more symbolically important than when there is so little other good news for working mothers.
The glaring gap in rightwing feminism, of course, is in what it offers poor and low-skilled women. Bold and imaginative when it comes to getting more high-flyers into boardrooms, it has rather less to say to women clinging to humbler jobs by their fingernails (whose childcare subsidy under the Working Tax Credit is being cut). Perhaps that's why Tory support has risen among professional women since the election, but plummeted among the "squeezed middle".
Katherine Rake worries that the coalition hasn't grasped "the very crunchy reality of modern parenthood" for low-paid parents, working alternate shifts and passing the kids between them in the factory car park. And while starting your own business may well be liberating for those with marketable skills and bags of confidence, how realistic is it for the average female librarian made redundant under spending cuts? The flipside of not wanting to see women as victims is a certain blindness to structural causes of disadvantage: as the civil servant blogger says, Tory feminists "can have difficulty recognising the collective nature of discrimination". And nowhere is that more obvious than in the bitter battle over spending cuts.
The expectation that female politicians will always champion fellow women is perhaps unfair, an extra moral burden not asked of men. But if they really believe, as Mensch puts it, that "a feminist is a woman who goes out there, achieves things and makes things easier for other women", some may wonder why Tory MPs aren't now manning barricades outside the Treasury.
It's not for lack of nerve: compared with the 1997 intake of Labour women at the same stage, they seem bolder and bolshier, less fussed about promotion. Within days of being elected, several of the new intake were on the warpath against their government's plans to render rape defendants anonymous, and a handful are now serial rebels. As Joanne Cash says, this is a different generation, raised to assert themselves: "The generation before had to be more cautious because they might have been stymied. I think we owe a lot to Labour women for the way they held senior posts, did the job."
And for some, power itself seems to have been a radicalising experience. Amber Rudd never went into politics expecting to focus on women's issues, but as she puts it: "Somebody has to, and sure as eggs are eggs the men aren't going to. I have been surprised there is such a live battle going on."
Yet on the biggest issue in contemporary politics, female guns are mostly silent. For some on the right, even asking how a feminist could support cutting women's jobs and services betrays leftwing bias. Charlotte Vere campaigns for gender equality through the centre-right thinktank she founded, Women On, but won't call herself a feminist, partly because she thinks the word has been hijacked by the opposition. "The people who claim to be feminists now are very leftwing; they are anti-cuts in any shape or form," she says.
A more common complaint is that efforts to shield poorer women from cuts – exempting low-paid public sector workers from pay freezes and extra pension contributions, or offering free nursery places for some two-year-olds – go ignored. "They talk about the money we are taking away: they never talk about the effort we are putting in on the other side," says Rudd. (Bird, however, says the Fawcett Society considered these elements when analysing how austerity affects women, and they don't compensate for the cuts.)
But their main defence is ideological. If you believe slashing back the state is the only road to prosperity, the greater cost to women (who depend more heavily on the state for benefits and jobs) becomes a sad but unavoidable consequence of doing the right thing. "The money for everything, for social programmes, depends on a sound economy, says Mensch. "Women are not somehow a special species that exists in a bubble supported by the rest of the economy."
A vigorous defence of austerity in principle, however, doesn't preclude discreet intervention in its practice. When it comes to the nitty-gritty, Tory women aren't always quite so relaxed. Deborah Dunleavy has some idea of how it feels to lose your livelihood overnight, having sold her stake in her own business to go for a seat that she didn't win. As co-founder of the Peel Policy Forum, a new rightwing thinktank based in the north-west, she is now exploring ideas for a new Conservative feminist agenda.
She too rejects the charge of cuts unfairly punishing women, pointing out that "nobody stopped to say, 'We have to protect the men'" when male unemployment outstripped female at the beginning of the banking crisis. But then she adds: "It should be about protecting the workforce: if it's going to affect women more than the men, how can we ease that a little bit?" And that's where the Conservative Women's Forum comes in.
The backbench grouping created as a "critical friend" for Downing Street marks the beginning of female Tory MPs organising among themselves. Together with a new special adviser on women's issues inside No 10 (another idea from female MPs), the plan is "to scrutinise every policy, understand if there's a gender issue, and if there is, we need to know about it", says Perry. It's a tacit acceptance that the coalition must not cause unnecessary hardship by swinging the axe without understanding the consequences.
But with its own research function, the forum could eventually become an incubator for more female-friendly ideas and a powerbase for promoting them. (Perry, for example, is currently hatching plans to replace a women's prison with community programmes, funded on a payment-by-results basis, to reduce the number of women locked up for minor offences.) There's no shortage of new ideas fizzing around Tory women: the question is whether they have time to make something of them.
For if austerity fails to bring recovery, and their female constituents endure lengthy pain for no gain, the Tory feminist resurgence may be over brutally quickly. Several leading lights of the new intake hold marginal seats, vulnerable to any backlash at the next election, and as time goes on, some may feel they have little to lose. Perhaps then we'll see how bold they really are.