Anti-fascist female backbenchers during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

By focusing on the significant, if underexplored, role played by anti-fascist female backbench Members of Parliament during the Spanish Civil War, this thesis places the Duchess of Atholl, Eleanor Rathbone and Ellen Wilkinson at the centre of the British response to the conflict. It is contended that these three women, despite their very different ideological backgrounds, eventually came to form the nucleus of Parliamentary opposition to the Government’s divisive policy of non-intervention, revolutionising the traditionally passive role of the backbencher. However, a severely unbalanced House of Commons, coupled with an archaic perception of separately gendered political spheres, meant that the tangible policy change that they could affect was limited. From late-1936 this increasingly saw female MPs, sympathetic to the plight of the Republic, becoming heavily involved in Britain’s wide range of Spanish aid campaigns. Traditionally these have been identified as a grassroots movement from below. However, this thesis diverges from historiographical orthodoxy and frames ‘Aid Spain’ as a symbiotic collaboration between working-class activists, bringing time, energy, and enthusiasm to local and regional campaigns, and backbench MPs, lending knowledge, experience, and direction on a national level. As such, some success was achieved in disseminating an anti-fascist ethos beyond the patriarchal confines of Parliament. However, the distorted sense of unity this brought arguably made Rathbone, Wilkinson and, especially, Atholl victims of their own propaganda. This thesis concludes by calling into question the feasibility of a British popular front, arguing that such a utopian construct was incompatible with the polarisation of interwar party politics.