Michael Beloff KC Commemorates Full Membership for Women

Madam President, Thank you for your words, both graceful and inspiring. For my part I must start with an apology for being so conspicuously underdressed.[1]  I had hoped that I could in respect for your office wear the full presidential white tie ensemble but I discovered alas that either I had expanded over the last decades or the suit had unaccountably shrunk.  I must continue with an admission of guilt.  I have never been a believer in the equality of sexes, my plea in mitigation is that I have always believed in the superiority of the female sex.

When I was very young, that’s 75-give or take a few- years ago, my favourite book was Louise Alcott’s famous classic ‘Little Women’. Whether this was the cause or effect of my feminism I fear I cannot remember, it is truly difficult in 2025 to imagine how the case against the admission of women to the Union could have been advanced, if that’s the right verb- with any semblance of seriousness.

I’ve looked in the archives of Isis and Cherwell, who in those days, reported in some detail union debates and- I’ll try to extract the main points as fairly as I can. Which were “We have to start from this place as we find it” and “this is essentially a boys’ club”. Which seemed to me then, and the more so now, arguments in favour of the motion I moved rather than against it.

The fight has a long history. My late father, Max Beloff, was the first member to try in the mid thirties to promote women from third to second class citizens by making them debating members. Debating membership was only finally achieved in 1962, though a year before, as you Madam President just mentioned, two women disguised as men-a reverse version of the famous 1890s farce, ‘Charley’s Aunt’-successfully gate-crashed a debate. Since one, Rose Dugdale, later became a militant member of the IRA and committed many acts of violence in support of their cause, her gate-crashing on the Union stands somewhat low in her lifetime acts of rebellion.

In Michaelmas term 1962, when I was President, the first attempt to upgrade women to full membership failed.  Now although my name is mentioned on the plaque the credit for the victory next term was shared by many, some of whom I’m happy to see here.  Karen Hewit, then Mcleod- the first women editor of Isis, Roderick and Cynthia Floud-stalwarts of the Labour Club and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  Rod has, of course, since been knighted for his services to education-in short he’s travelled from CND to KBE. Not the only person to have taken that particular journey.  And there were others, I must namecheck Laurance Reed, scion of the famous family of outfitters.  He had done national service in the Navy before coming up and has witnessed the first British thermonuclear test, later in life a Conservative MP.He had earlier resigned as Treasurer of the Union as a protest against the first unsuccessful vote, so ruling himself out for the election to the Presidency, for which he would have been a formidable candidate, truly a man of firm principle.  Yet others in the forefront of the struggle are no longer with us-Judith Okeley, the first woman full member, died only a few months ago, Garth Pratt, President Hilary 1964, became a power in local politics in Rochdale and was selected to be the Liberal candidate for that constituency only to be supplanted by Cyril Smith. With the benefit of historical hindsight, one may say that that was not the Liberal Party’s wisest Choice.  Because of that team effort, I would in this 80th anniversary of  victory in Europe borrow the famous phrase “I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar’’. were it not for the fact that to see myself in the guise of a Winston Churchill would appear excessively vain even by my own high standards… The Union had its first female officer in 1966, its first female President in 1968, number 3 was the late Benazir Bhutto, neither the first woman nor by any means the first Asian President, but the first to share both those features and she was succeeded by Victoria Schofield now chair for many years of the Union’s trustees and in that demanding role committed to the society’s success. She is also, as a distinguished historian, writing a history of the Union; the key words to remember in its title are “For King and Country” so start saving now…. 

Of course, the fight for equal rights went on.  The Union, I must remind you, got there before any of the Oxford colleges which became co-ed ‘with only a few and later exceptions’ in the 1970s.  But inequality persisted in the oddest places. I once, in my capacity as a Queen’s Counsel, had to advise no less an august institution than the Oxford and Cambridge Club that according female graduates of our two ancient universities less access to all its facilities than their male equivalents was obviously unlawful sex discrimination. I did not give the advice pro bono but did not feel it proper to charge other than a small fee since a first-year law student could have given the same advice and this was in the 1990s. Heaven knows how and more importantly why that situation persisted for so long!!  Now it is a happy coincidence Madam President that - for I believe - the first time in the Union’s history –this term all four officers are women in the Supreme Court’s sense of the word. Now, in his second stab at the issue, recognized by our Prime Minister,  I think this coincidence happily explains the date of this event which would otherwise have no obvious logic but I only realized the full significance of the change when, just as we were all leaving to enter the chamber, after a dinner to which Madam President, you kindly invited me earlier this term, we were momentarily delayed by one of the officers saying “Just wait a little I have to freshen up my lip gloss”.  Well, that wouldn’t have happened in my day, at least I don t think so. So thank you Heather Taylor, for organising this ceremony, and thank all of you for coming to it, for it is a celebration of an event, not of an individual.

https://youtu.be/23iKuUXVYgw

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[1] I was wearing a dinner jacket with black tie on the hottest day of the year in advance of an evening engagement