How I wish I’d read Barbara Castle’s diaries when I was starting out in parliament. But I was too overwhelmed by the struggle to combine work and family life to read anything. We feminists don’t go in for heroes much. Male heroes abound and receive plenty of adulation already, and the women’s movement has always been about sisterhood and women supporting each other on equal terms. Its been about backing each other up rather than singling out one woman and putting her on a pedestal, so we’ve never gone in much for heroines, either. But Barbara Castle was an exception – what she did was truly trailblazing. She had a dogged and persistent determination to stand up for working women. She was Labour through and through, but never let her party loyalty blunt her demands for women’s advance. Her achievements towered over us, reinforcing my fear that I was making a hash of everything. It was only when I read her 1993 memoir, Fighting All the Way, that I discovered her painful struggles with self doubt; how often she’d climb into bed with her husband, pronouncing herself a failure.
It’s more than 40 years ago but I remember how, as I started out on my working life, I burned with resentment when I saw job advertisements that called for “the right man for the job” or that offered lower pay for women. We didn’t regard ourselves as inferior to men, so why should we be subordinate to them? And then there, in government, was a woman who felt the same as us. Castle not only declared it unacceptable, she made the government pass laws against it – the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act.
Excluding women from employment and paying them less was the established order of things then. Men were the breadwinners, heads of the household. Castle’s challenge to that seems just like common sense now, but at the time it was regarded as audacious, even subversive. And her colleagues in the Labour government were certainly not going to wave it through. She once told me how she became exasperated at being unable to get agreement for the bill to proceed. And so, as the government teetered on the brink, and an important vote was called with a Labour majority of only one, she leaned over and told the chief whip she wouldn’t vote for it, it would be lost and the government would fall unless he promised she’d get her Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts. He had no choice but to concede. She told me this as a cautionary tale: that sometimes if your government won’t do the right thing you have to be prepared to force them.
She was instinctively supportive of working-class women struggling for equality. In those days women were seen as being rivalrous, and unable to work together. Castle challenged that in the most public way, showing that wherever there were women protesting, she would be on their side, and she justifiably became their heroine. The female Ford sewing machinists who went on strike for equal pay were, like many others, welcomed into her grand ministerial office and put thoroughly at their ease. They told me that they saw her as their uncompromising champion in the corridors of power.
She urged me to be strong and ensure we had a “fighting Labour government”. But she was encouraging when I was sacked from the cabinet by Tony Blair. It was an experience she understood from her own ejection from government by Jim Callaghan. “Harriet, you just have to remember,” she said, “All prime ministers are bastards.”
• A Woman’s Work by Harriet Harman is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £15 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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