Brenda Hale on why the fight for equality must go on
By Lyndsey Jones
A lot went on in the 1970s – not least, the principle of equality was embedded in the law. Lady Brenda Hale told 100 guests at a dinner celebrating the NLC for being the first in London clubland to take “the momentous step of admitting women to full membership”.
But she warned that we must not be complacent. “Of course, nobody will pretend that things were perfect, and that all the problems have been solved; they still haven’t,” said Hale, who was the first woman to become president of the Supreme Court in 2017-2020.
“We are seeing many worrying threats to the principle of equality. We seem to have forgotten, as I put it in a case about gay rights, that democracy values each person equally, even if the majority do not. We must all stick firm to that principle and be prepared to defend it against all its enemies,” she said.
Despite the prohibition of discrimination, treating someone less favourably because of their sex, and now other protected characteristics, private members’ clubs have always been an exception, she said.
Women were allowed to join the NLC on June 26 1976. “The NLC is even more to be congratulated upon its commitment to equality, but that commitment is just as necessary today as it was 50 years ago,” Hale, who is an honorary member of the NLC, said.
Reflecting on the 1970s, Hale said it was probably the most significant decade for the advancement of women’s rights since the Second World War.
During her career, she delivered some heavy-hitting judgements, including squashing Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament.
But when she was starting out in the 1960s, “treating women less favourably than men in the world of work was commonplace and perfectly lawful. Routine. A woman might be paid two-thirds of what a man was paid in exactly the same job.”
Mortgage providers were allowed to refuse to lend to a woman without a male guarantor, and they insisted that she had a male guarantor when she wanted to buy a house, Hale said.
That remark particularly resonated with a fellow high-profile guest who told me that she had to have a man stand as guarantor for 50 per cent of a property she was purchasing even though she was paying for all of it. When she went to sell it years later, she had to give him half.
If that was not outrageous enough, you couldn’t even get a drink to calm your nerves. “Pubs could refuse to allow women in at lunchtime, which I experienced when I was starting off at the Bar in Manchester,” Hale said.
In most marriages the husband was the main breadwinner, and the wife, whether or not she also worked outside the home, was the homemaker and caregiver.
Family law was structured on the assumption that the husband was in charge; he had agreed to maintain his wife, but only if she “behaved herself”.
He alone had automatic rights and authority over their children. “A wife who had misbehaved stood to lose the custody of her children,” Hale said.
Worse was to come. “The husband was usually sole tenant or owner of their home, and could dispose of it over the head of his wife and their children if he wished. If they separated or divorced, the wife had no claim to property owned by her husband.”
Fortunately that was all in the 1960s, and the decade of reform started in 1971 with the implementation of three radical changes in family law, the Divorce Reform Act 1969, the National Proceedings Seven Property Act 1970 and the Law Reform Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1970, “which between them turned marriage from an instrument of the patriarchy to something more like a partnership of equals”, Hale said.
What followed was emerging concern over domestic violence, equal pay for equal work, or the value of equal work, equal rights over children and rights to challenge wills and intestacy, to name a few.
As Hale mentioned, while a lot went on in the 1970s, there is still much more to do, and the fight for equality – or threats to it – goes on.
Lyndsey Jones is chair of the joint marketing and communications committee and deputy chair of the NLC board. She is also the author of Going Digital, published by Pearson.
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