Female MPs are too often written out of political history, according to Rachel Reeves, the former Labour frontbencher, who has written a new biography of the pioneering parliamentarian Alice Bacon.

Reeves, a former shadow work and pensions secretary, said the book was her contribution to redressing the balance, after she followed in the footsteps of Bacon in 2010 to become the second female MP elected in Leeds.



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The biography, Alice in Westminster, due to be published this week, charts the political life of Bacon, who was an MP for 25 years from 1945 and campaigned strongly in favour of a comprehensive education system.



However, Bacon is little known outside Yorkshire, where she was born the daughter of a miner and lived for her whole career as an MP, Home Office minister in Harold Wilson’s government and later a peer.

“One of the reasons I started writing the book is that women MPs of that era tend to get written out of history,” Reeves said. “Even someone like Margaret Bondfield, who was the first woman cabinet minister, has never had a biography of her.

“Barbara Castle and Jennie Lee are really the only exceptions to that. This is a small step in trying to put that right and write them back in. Apart from the Pankhursts, who do people think about when think about women’s suffrage? I think the first women MPs have been written out of history for one reason or another.

“A lot of these women, like Alice, really made things happen. You needed Roy Jenkins in the 1960s to make social liberal reforms, but Alice also had a key role. At a time in the Labour movement when there was a lot of disquiet about homosexuality and abortion, in the Catholic part of the party and conservative trade union element, Alice by being steady and calm and lowering the temperature made reform ever more certain.”

Reeves said Bacon’s arguments for comprehensive education still have relevance today, as Labour fights against Theresa May’s plan to lift the ban on new grammar schools.

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“[Anthony] Crosland got all the credit for comprehensive education, but it was Alice, plodding away in the 1940s and 50s when comprehensive education was not fashionable even in the Labour party, where there was a sort of feeling the tripartite Butler system, as long as properly implemented, was the right thing to do and children would get the education suitable for them. Alice did not believe that and was not willing to sit on the sidelines,” she said.



“In debate after debate, she talked about comprehensive education and helped changed Labour party policy on it. Unlike a lot of her colleagues, she had taught at an interwar secondary modern and had gone to a grammar. She said she knew lots of boys and girls who deserved a grammar school quality of education who were denied it.”



Reeves said the lives of female MPs have changed considerably since Bacon’s time, when few had children or wanted to be described as feminists.

However, she said female MPs still faced some inequalities, recalling the time one male Tory MP suggested she would not be able to do a frontbench cabinet job properly as a new mother.



“There are still different expectations of what women can do. And look at the online abuse that women get today. I think women suffer more from that than men do – the strongest examples would be Luciana Berger and Jess Phillips,” Reeves said. “Alice was also told to concentrate on women’s issues, rather than the economy or defence. That has changed, although still I think women are expected to champion the causes of women like childcare and the tampon tax and equal pay.”