Negotiating Gendered Institutions: Women's Parliamentary Friendships

In 1997, an unprecedented number of female MPs - 120 - were elected to the UK House of Commons, doubling the numbers of female representatives overnight. Of these, 101 came from a single party: Labour. They entered a political institution that had hitherto been massively male-dominated (even in 1997, their number counted less than 20%) and famed for its historic traditions dominated by masculinized structures and norms (Lovenduski 2005; 2010). Many of the newly elected Labour women were known to each other, having already shared experiences of passing through their party's internal selection processes over the preceding years. Many broadly shared the same views of what the Labour party should stand for, ideologically speaking, and most were attitudinally feminist (Childs 2004). The mass media at the time of the general election, and thereafter, routinely constituted them as a collective entity - Blair's Babes - and the specifically right-wing media regularly subjected them to highly gendered criticism (Childs 2008, 140-165). Copyright © 2013 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association.