It is my great privilege to be asked to address you on this your 50th Anniversary.
My privilege because after all I and some of the Lady Members of the Lords here are among those who have profited so much from the work which you have done in the past. Really I think without you I wouldn't be here in this capacity. So thank you very much indeed for all your efforts.
It was a difficult time in world affairs when you were formed. To me it is something I value that the day was twenty years after the end of the First World War. The World War had demonstrated the versatility, the talents and capabilities of women as never before because they had to take over during that time many of the jobs which men had left, and twenty years later you were formed. Interesting for two reasons, first it has always seemed to me as a politician astonishing that there was another World War twenty-one years after the end of the first, and haven't we managed things very much better this time and managed to have the most precious thing of all—peace with freedom and justice—and perhaps that has something to do with the enhanced role of women. And second a very important date, because it was twenty years after Lady Astor first took her seat as the first woman member of the House of Commons. She had tremendous frankness, tremendous personality, tremendous style and I think it had always been our hope that by this time there would be more than the forty women who now represent women in the House of Commons. It really isn't enough. Forty out of six hundred and fifty—nothing like enough and you must strive as you said Madam President so ably, to get more into Public life and more in the House.
I looked through your Golden Jubilee Booklet how very impressive it is and how very much we owe to some of the early pioneers in this organisation. We are very lucky to have with us today Phyllis Deakin—she is just in front of me here—who filled the role of war correspondent with the Times, filled it so very ably and again blazed a trail so that there are now far many more women in the media than there were at that time. She filled the role with such distinction and we do indeed honour her.
Yes, Madam President, I agree with you it is a different world for women from that which it was when your organisation started in 1938. There are far many more business opportunities for women. They themselves, if I might say so, the new young generation have come to the work with far more confidence than I think we had when we started out. If I might say so, what has so often struck me is that women have far too small a proportion of confidence in relation to their talent. Men don't suffer in the same way. They never have. They often have a far bigger proportion of confidence in relation to their talent—women have [end p1] not and it has taken sometime to get it and I think in the new young generation we have got it.
The business opportunities now for women are manifold. Not only do they wait for them to be provided by others but the number of women who set up in business on their own is most encouraging and it is not what I would call in the traditional work which women do, it is all in the latest technology all in the latest financial developments all in the very latest of industries that they start up and when I give the awards it makes me very happy indeed to see the way in which they are succeeding.
May I congratulate the work you do in particular on running courses for Public Speaking and to raise peoples self-esteem. It does matter because it gives them the confidence to start. It also helps me and those women who are in politics because we are constantly looking for more women to serve on public boards on health authorities, more women to serve on Universities, more women as school governors, more women to be on the few nationalised industries we have got left and more women to be on the nationalised industries which have been privatised. We have many many tasks and we do need more women and we get a few names and they get so many opportunities and I shall be in touch with your President because I am very anxious that we should fully use the talent of women in public life in this way, so not only women in business but women in the professions. Yes it was not easy to succeed in law many years ago—it is very much easier now. There are now far many more women in the professions and they are doing extremely valient work. I mention them particularly because I think these days one of the most important things in life is to have standards and ethics and the professions are particularly called professions because they live up to certain standards and they have certain professional ethics.
I think the third sphere in which I would like to say women excel is women of courage. Now you would say all women have courage—Yes indeed they do—but I have known in my work when it comes to dealing with Human Rights and people who do not have them behind the Iron Curtain, there are many many women who have been just as courageous in standing up for them as men. I think of Mrs Yelena Bonner, wife of Sakharov—who is in Washington at the moment. I think of Ratushinskaya a remarkable young woman poet who came out from behind the Iron Curtain. I think of Ida Nudal who struggled for a long time to get out—of Mrs Yovi. Many many who I know who have been quite outstanding women of courage. I think we would like to say that we had perhaps the original woman of courage in Florence Nightingale. Perhaps she was the first original member of BPW had it existed then. I went to the war fields where she worked when I was in Turkey and really she was remarkable and it was absolutely everything to which she would wish to aspire.
As you pointed out, Madam President—yes, there are massive opportunities now. It is not so much the legislation that needs changing although there are one or two more changes in legislation in the pipeline. I should perhaps mention them. By 1990 the tax position with regard to [end p2] women will have been revolutionised—You will say it is about time—It will come about then and we have been working to try to remove some of the last discriminations with regard to some work in factories and training. That has come out in a European Community Directive to promote equality of opportunity in employment and get rid of some of the older rules with regard to the Factories Acts and with regard to Mines. Now I confess that when I first saw this my reaction was “Ouch!—women down mines!” We all remember in history the fantastic efforts of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the poor man's Earl made to see that there were good conditions down there but in fact I remembered when I was Secretary of State for Education there was a bad mining accident and they refused to let a women doctor down the mines because there was a regulation which said no women could go down the mines and I said, “Well, why shouldn't a woman not be a mining engineer, why shouldn't she not be a mining doctor—ought we to stop them?” Because really, ladies and gentlemen, the technology is so different these days, the clanking dirt of mines and factories is no longer what it was and so that by agreement in Europe that is going to be removed, although I do not expect many women are going to do it. It is just some professional women may have the wish or the need to go down to do some of the professional work there sometime. The last thing which I believe is removed by that legislation is that women, as you know, retire earlier than men, which means that if you get a redundancy problem between sixty and sixty-five women were not entitled to redundancy. That too is going to be changed. Now those I think those are the last battles on the legislative front. So the battle now is to get enough women to take advantage of the opportunities and that battle still needs to be fought.
May I therefore go on to talk about the wider problems? Because I think many of the things for which you stood we have tackled and I don't believe in refighting the battles of the past when there are so many other battles of the future to be fought. I want to talk to you about the problems which will affect the whole of our society not only this country but in the wider world in the future. I choose this because we have been concentrating on opportunities for individuals to fulfil their objectives as women, but we know full well, as you said, Madam President, that we live not as individuals, we live in the fundamental building bricks of society, in families, and it is no accident that Business and Professional Women do not find it difficult to combine the role of having a career and a family. We know how to use our time, we know how to organise it—we know full well that the most important thing in the family is that we give time to our children because there is just no substitute for that as a way of expressing your affection for them, your love, the security of background and interest. But you go from the individual to the family to the wider community, to the world community and when we met last June at the Economic Summit in Toronto we had a very interesting conversation and discussion of which I would like to tell you. We were there for an Economic Summit, seven Heads of Government. The United States, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and when we have done with the great economic discussions we usually get together after dinner round a table and talk about the problems which we think we are going to have to face in the wider future. Because life isn't only about economics its about all the human things. The subject for discussion that evening was really going [end p3] to be Life in an Era of Technological Change. I [word missing] we have had lots of discussions about that and I really was thinking we are not going to get very far with that because, as I said to them, people of the last hundred years have probably coped with as much technicological change as we shall ever see and we can cope with it. Yes, of course it has problems but the last generations have shown that they can cope with it and we shall cope with this technological change as well. But I went on to say there is something much much more difficult I think to cope with and we must address our minds to it.
When I was young and first came into politics with the ideals that I still hold—the idea was very much about that then if only you could solve the problems of giving everyone good health, good education, a reasonable standard of living, reasonable housing then you really would have solved all of the world's problems and after that everything would run much more smoothly—after all, good health, good education, reasonable housing, a reasonable standard of living, then most of our problems would have been fundamentally solved, because that after all is what many many people worked for. In many of these countries, in these western countries, we have a good standard of health, we have a good standard of education and living, but we have got a lot of problems—a lot of problems. Quite different problems, but they are the behavioural problems. What will we be talking about another evening—why so many young people turn to drugs, why so many turn to alcohol, why so many turn to violence, what is the effect of television on our whole standard of values? These are the problems which we are now left with. Yes, in parts of the world we have to deal with the others, but now we are up against the most fundamental problems of all, the problems of human nature, and it had struck me very forcibly because we were in Toronto. Now I don't know if you know Toronto, I don't know it that well, but I have been there several times. As we went round Toronto that evening the streets everywhere were immensely clean. There was no graffiti to be seen anywhere and we were told there is a very low rate of crime in this City. Now and then, ladies, you want to analyse success and not only try and analyse failure. So one said “Why is it? You have got good standards of living yes, but you don't seem to have some of the associated problems.”
The answer we got was extremely interesting, as we talked to quite a number of local people—very very interesting indeed. They said that this City was built by a number of different communities from various different backgrounds and from various different geographical origins and to some extent they still live in some of those communities. Each community has its own standards, each community brings up its own children has its own standards and it teaches them you mustn't behave that way you'd let us down you'd let your school down, you'd let your group down you'd let your background down and somehow they had built a remarkable city.
Now my problem is this, these are fundamental problems, you know the ones of tackling drugs, you know the ones of taking far too much alcohol, and sometimes I think young people have a very difficult time today, and, if I might say so, although they have more opportunities to-day, their difficulties are such that we didn't have to face. [end p4]
You are many different age groups here. I was born in 1925 and don't mind saying so, but in my background and upbringing there were certain conventions and customs which were held very strongly, which I think protected us in many many ways from many many temptations. We didn't have much money, we have very little and we had really comparatively little freedom because our parents really kept us up to certain rules and so we were protected. We didn't have television coming into our sitting room. Believe you me, television is the most powerful medium ever known, ever known, and we still don't know its effect upon people's standards. It must have an effect after all people wouldn't spend vast sums of money advertising on television if it didn't have an effect—but they have all of this, and it has often seemed to me that with that extra freedom they have free of constraints, which sometimes it would be better to have more constrants with that extra money they have, they need a greater degree of responsibility to tackle those problems than ever we had—now, how are we going to provide it? How are we going to provide it? It was very interesting.
Now let me just go to another thing which is relevant. We had an Education Bill going through the House of Commons and your people here representing your Lordships were very active in it. We were trying to give greater opportunities in education, greater opportunities for parents to have an influence on it, but we came to a clause which was put in in the 1944 Education Act. It is a clause about Religious Education being compulsory. It is I think one of the few occasions when the State kind of said the moral standard is important and therefore we will see that it is actually taught in schools and, as you know, in some cases it hasn't, and there was great discussion about this and should it still be continued. The discussion was led by a woman member of the House of Lords, Caroline Cox, and they decided, yes, of course it must be, and I think the reasoning was this. Most of the standards you have you take from your parents, the standards are set in the family long before children go to school. We rely on teachers for a lot, we must never expect them to compensate for what the family should do. The duty is still fundamentally with the family, father and with mother, although the mother is probably the centre of the family life, but there are some undoubtedly who will not get that background. If they don't have the fundamental beliefs and rules taught to them when they are at school they will not have the fundamental recipe for life later.
Perhaps I can put it in a different way. You know how difficult it is in life if you are not taught anything to believe and not taught rules to live by. You will not have anything to see you through the difficult days or any basis upon which you can help others. Now these are the things which are the very basis of society. Yes, the standards of the individual. Yes, the family, we cannot do without it, and from the family the standards which you are taught to serve and go and help others, whether they be in your own village, your own town, your own country or in other countries, because the world is shrinking. These are our problems. Now of course people are going to break the rules, but you have got to have the rules and beliefs put in there to start with, because if you haven't we are not going to tackle the problems. [end p5]
Now let me tell you some of the practical problems. Not only the problem of drugs and you have got to have far more customs and excise, far more drug rehabilitation centres, far more courts and the same with alcohol. We are finding for, on a given population, we now need far more houses than we ever did before. Now we came across this when we had to look at it the other day. We have 1,700,000 more houses for roughly the same population than we had ten years ago and it's not enough. It has not a lot to do with mobility of labour, it has got to do with the fact that there is a far greater breakdown of marriage now, so you no longer have to provide one house for one family, sometimes it is far more than that. You have far far more young people just walking out of home and saying “Well, I am going to live elsewhere” . Of course you have people living longer, which is very nice, but it is not that so much which provides the problem, we can and are gradually dealing with that, but it is the breakdown on a bigger scale of some families which is causing the problem. You always have the breakdown of some families, the important thing is that it is against a fundamental background of stability and family life.
Now these are the problems of today. They are not the problems of machines and don't think machines take over, they don't. I am a great fan of Kipling. Do you know he did a marvellous poem called ‘The Secret of the Machine’? At that time of course you'd got the beginning of the telephone, the beginning of all the telecommunications, you got the beginning of the great mechanical machines, and he finishes up with the marvellous line about the secret of the machines and the machines say— “Please for all our power and size, don't forget we are but children of your brain.”
We come back every time to the human factor. It is the human factor that decides what the machines can do. It is the human factor which makes a young person who is searching for advice get it first from their family, their teacher, if not, because often children cannot talk to their own families, they've got to talk to someone elses. They have got to have what they had in my young day, someone who they can go to, someone they can trust, someone who will take an interest in them. That's why, when I go around talking to businesses, I say— “Please get involved in the schools, these young people will find that much more motivation if they think they might be going to get a job in your place of business than they would get otherwise. Please take much more interest and please take much more interest in young people who are starting up on their own.” Believe you me, because you are in this modern technological world the human interest, the enthusiasm of helping someone along the way will do far more to solve the of the problems of the future than any amount of technology that we have. So yes, the problems of the future are the opportunities and standards of each and every person, keeping the family together, doing the service to the community and in the wider world, looking after things. Yes, we have to look after the environment because we are doing things to the whole earth's atmosphere which we really must check.
I want to say this to you, Madam President, have everything to do it [sic] in this society. You have only just started your job with opportunity for women. What we now have to provide is that we tackle the problems of [end p6] the future. You have got it right within that original booklet. You have had right from the beginning the standards which are part of your fundamental beliefs, you have service to others which you have manifested right from the beginning and which I know you do so much work with the disabled. We have just outside my constituency John Grooms, we also do a great deal of work. You have standards, you have service as part of your creed, you are women who can have both careers and families, you in fact are just the very people we want to do more within the community. In your jobs in your whole conception, in your education, you are looking to the wider world because they too need help. Foreign Affairs—the only way I can put it is Foreign Affairs aren't foreign affairs any more, they're just home affair under another name because what happens elsewhere will affect us here. That is the problem now we have won the opportunities for women, we always did play a big role in life, there's an even bigger one for us to play and we need organisations like this to give a lead.
You have it—let me say it again—the standards, the service, the courage. The ultimate virtue is courage, the ultimate, the only thing you have got left sometimes, courage and fellowship.
May I thank you for the wonderful things you have done in the first fifty years and may I have great confidence and faith in all that you are going to do in the next fifty. Thank you.