They’ve been dubbed the Spouse Girls, a reference to Britain’s far more vocal “girl power” pop group, the Spice Girls. Norma and Cherie’s convent quiet is at odds with a central electoral fact in Britain: the voice of British women is thunder at the ballot box. That has been for true for decades and will be especially evident in this Thursday’s general election. Because women outnumber men and are more likely to vote, their impact at the polls is 4 percent greater. Says Mary-Ann Stephenson of the Fawcett Society, which studies women’s issues: “Whoever wins this election will win it because they’ve appealed to women voters.”
A Blair government wouldn’t be possible without a dramatic shift in the voting patterns of British women. Recent polls show Labour pulling 53 percent of the women’s vote, with the Conservatives trailing badly at 30 percent. That’s a huge turnabout from the past five elections, when women, shunning Labour as the party of working men and their unions, tilted Tory by an average 7 percent margin. Major’s come-from-behind victory in the last election, in 1992, was credited to the women’s vote. Indeed, without the support of the majority of the country’s women, Britain would not have elected a single Conservative government since World War II.
A key difference this year was Labour’s strategy. The party’s tacticians “overtly shifted their policy focus toward women, not only on issues like child care and parental leave but also on low pay, part-time work, the effects of the long-hours culture and the need to balance work and family life,” says a study by the London think tank Demos. The Conservatives, by contrast, haven’t done much courting of women at all. Labour’s party platform talks about developing a national child-care strategy to “help parents, especially women, balance family and working life.” The Tory document’s flat-footed take on the subject: “We need to make sure efforts to help struggling families do not turn into unnecessary meddling.”
Hillary problem: So if women are so important to the election’s outcome, why are the two candidates’ wives under wraps? Labour tacticians concede that Booth, who at 42 successfully juggles her career with her role as the mum of three school-age kids, could be a real asset in attracting many women voters, especially younger ones. But they also believe that they are likely to win most of those votes anyway. The spin doctors who bubble-wrapped Tony Blair’s play-it-safe campaign were terrified that Cherie would develop a “Hillary problem.” During the 1992 campaign, when she wasn’t agonizing over what to do with her maiden name, Hillary Rodham Clinton was making amends for the time she seemed to belittle stay-at-home, cookie-baking moms. Norma Major, 54, is unabashedly a cookie-baker. And Tory strategists last autumn did dispatch her to press the flesh as “Stormin’ Norma.” But she would have none of it. “That would be the American way,” she said last September, “and our people wouldn’t like it.”
So the Spouse Girls stood demurely on the sidelines. Their reticence hasn’t deterred other British female politicians. The country, of course, boasts the modern model of a tough female leader, Margaret Thatcher. There are also a record 373 women running for M.P. this year. The number of women in the next Parliament will almost certainly top 100, a huge increase from the 63 seats they held in the previous government. That’s real progress. In Britain, it seems, it’s only the role of the political wife that is frozen in time.
