Joyce Butler and the Sex Discrimination Act

The 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1968 prompted a moment of soul searching for many women frustrated at how little progress seemed to have been made towards equality. One of these was Joyce Butler, the backbench Labour and Co-operative MP for Wood Green. Having had a longstanding interest in women’s rights, she had been instrumental in campaigning to make cervical cancer screening available nationwide. In autobiographical notes later in life she spoke of a sense of ‘unfinished business’.

One day she learned of a woman bus conductor who wanted to become a bus inspector, but could not get the necessary experience to take this step because her employer did not hire women to drive buses. Butler reflected:

Like the light on the Road to Damascus, I realised that this job-and-training discrimination was the key to women’s failure to advance. We already had legislation against race discrimination – what was needed was a similar law for women.

This was the beginning of the campaign for what ultimately became the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. Initially, the Labour government under Harold Wilson was opposed to the idea. Wilson stated: ‘This situation could undoubtedly be improved to a large extent by women themselves, by the acceptance of responsibility by more women when it is offered to them.’ Butler disagreed. The Race Relations Act 1965 had established a Board to which people subject to unfair treatment could bring their complaints. Why should this not work for women, too?

Without government support Butler could only introduce a Bill under the ‘Ten Minute Rule’. Since this only gives MPs ten minutes to make their case, the Bill had little hope of becoming law. But Butler was able to secure cross-party support from female MPs and her efforts were reported in the press. Soon she was receiving letters from women across the country. ‘I say three cheers for you and all women like you, I really think it’s about time that all women joined with you in the battle for equal pay & rights’, wrote one correspondent, ‘When I think of Mrs Pankhurst & the suffragettes & all they went through, I think the women of today are letting the team down.’

Many women saw the Bill as a way to make equal pay a reality. An 85-year-old woman, who had worked as a toilet attendant since 1933, wrote to Butler that ‘the women attendants do four times the amount of work that the men [do], and of course take about 8 times in cash … I think it is about time Women got equal rights’. Others focused on the lack of opportunities, and complained about being told ‘that as I am bound to get married in the near future and start a family it would be a waste of time training me’. One woman, writing ‘on behalf of postwomen, bus conductresses, underground “gals” etc’, argued that women’s jobs were always seen as temporary.

Other inequalities were highlighted, too: women abandoned by their husbands were unable to claim maintenance from them, were underpaid at work, and were unable to claim state support. Older women, who had been affected by marriage bars in sectors such as the civil service and teaching earlier in the century, could not support themselves in widowhood. Sex discrimination united women across classes and generations: grievances were held by recent graduates and elderly widows alike.

Butler introduced the legislation every year, gaining widespread support from established organisations including the National Council of Women and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She also investigated discrimination in the civil service, showing that women remained barred from work considered unsuitable – in the immigration service, agriculture, even museums.

By 1971 – the fourth time Butler presented her Bill – the campaign had been taken up by the women’s liberation movement. Feminist pressure group Women in Media championed the legislation in the press, and groups around the country, from Bristol to Fife, wrote to express their support.

But the Bill fell again. In 1972 Butler asked her colleague, MP for West Fife Willie Hamilton, to take it forward: having won top position in the ballot for private members bills, his proposals would be given time for serious consideration. Similar proposals to tackle discrimination in education and employment were then introduced into the House of Lords by Baroness Seear, who thought they might get a more sympathetic hearing there. With growing political, press, and public pressure, the political parties began to act and in 1974 all three pledged action to end discrimination against women in their manifestos. In the election that October Una Kroll, a doctor and feminist activist, stood unsuccessfully as an independent anti-sex discrimination candidate, backed by Women in Media.

The Labour government-led Sex Discrimination Bill was introduced by the home secretary Roy Jenkins early in 1975. It became law at the end of the year, at the same time that the Equal Pay Act – passed in 1970, but with five years allowed for employers to prepare – finally came into force. The Employment Protection Act, passed in November, also brought new benefits, guaranteeing maternity leave and preventing women from being dismissed if they became pregnant.

The Sex Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination on the grounds of marriage or sex in employment and education and the provision of goods and services, ‘with the function of working towards the elimination of such discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity between men and women’. It also set up the Equal Opportunities Commission to enforce the law. But its limitations were clear from the outset. It left pensions and taxation untouched and some bodies – such as the armed forces and the Church of England – were exempt. (Una Kroll went on to campaign for women’s ordination: an effort which did not succeed until 1994.) Also, in establishing that women should be treated the same as men, the Bill ignored differences in their lives – notably pregnancy and the experience of harassment. The Commission was criticised for its cautious approach, but it did prove an important tool. It was used by feminist activists to pursue lengthy legal cases throughout the 1970s and 1980s, such as Gill and Coote v El Vino Co Ltd, which challenged a bar’s policy of not serving women unless seated in the back, thus establishing that discrimination could not be justified by ideas of ‘chivalry’.

Joyce Butler, meanwhile, served on the advisory committee for the Department of Employment and pursued equality in taxation and pensions. She continued to promote equality in political representation after stepping down from the Commons in 1979. On her retirement, many women’s organisations wrote to thank her for her years of service to women: the veteran chair of the feminist campaign group Six Point Group, Hazel Hunkins Hallinan, described her as the ‘National Woman’s MP’.

Lyndsey Jenkins is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in History at Mansfield College, Oxford. An exhibition marking Joyce Butler’s political career is open until June 2026 at Bruce Castle Museum and Archive, in Haringey, North London.