Lady Young, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure to be here at this lunch of “Women of our Time” and to find you most concerned to give even greater opportunities to women in future time. I know the work of ORT. I have visited here and overseas. It is a marvellous training organisation which has a way of motivating young people and really enabling them to get the very best out of their training. I know that we have here the women who go right across the whole spectrum of work in life. In Industry, in Commerce, in the Arts, in Public Service, the great Charitable Organisations—an enormous variety. Each one of you will know how somehow you managed to have the opportunity which enabled you to get where you are and most of us can identify something in our lives or some meeting with someone which either spurred us to go in the direction we eventually took or which enabled us to go to have a training which otherwise we could never have profited from. In my case it was University and I know that we met at University people from all over the world including those who had had very special scholarships—the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford—they came from all over the Commonwealth and the United States—and we still know one another and that gave each of us the opportunity. But more than that, as well as, perhaps is better to say, the network of contacts right across the world which these days has become so important. You have called your lunch “Women of our Time” and you have chosen to name after me a scholarship and I am very thrilled to have it named in my own name. Even more thrilled that it is a scholarship which if I might [end p1] say so is of a generosity which had been unknown to us in our younger days. The person who gets this scholarship isn't going to be short of cash as we sometimes were really short. You know, we had to know how to get from Tuesday to Friday on about a shilling sometimes. But this is going to be a much more generous scholarship which really will enable a person to take advantage fully of all the aspects of life which you can get from a particular training or particular university.
There is perhaps just one other thing I would like to say to you. We are called “Women of our Time” and of course we are. I am thrilled that we are so diverse in occupation. But the times we are living in are really very, very exciting. And they wouldn't have been as exciting as they are unless there had been some of the democracies like us, who had stuck out firmly for the rights of men and women and the human rights of all peoples. And as you see the exciting things happen in East-West—Poland—we could never have thought when I went to Poland last year that Solidarity would now not be a great opposition movement but actually in Government. Poland, Hungary—the changes that are taking place in Moscow, East-West,—the hopes that we are having in South Africa: as you look at all of those you might think of it just in political terms. It actually has a much deeper manifestation than that. It is that more and more, across the world, countries' governments are coming to realise that it is the human rights of the individual and the way in which people use their talents and develop a sense of community, that really builds the true world in which we can not only prosper but have self-esteem, self-respect and human dignity. And so it offers an enormous amount of hope and it is really just very privileged we are to be here in these times and to make our contribution towards them and quite right to take advantage of your generosity to train others for the future. For [end p2] them it should be even better but that, after all, is our task, to take what was bequeathed to us and hand it on in even better shape for the future.
I wish you all a very happy lunch: I thank Lady Young and everyone who has organised this and all the companies who have contributed so generously. It is a compliment to women. It is a compliment we richly deserve.