By the end of the nineteenth century, the political party was an important site for women. Liberals and Conservatives alike had been forced to reconstruct their organisations’ appeal in the face of a rapidly expanding electorate. Both realised the potential of women campaigners and began to formalise female space within their ranks. Simultaneously socialist parties were forming, influenced by ideologies that radically challenged existing orders of class and gender. From the outset they gave women and men equal membership rights. In Liverpool, women found that party politics now offered accessible routes to public activity. The local Liberal and Conservative parties opened branches of their national auxiliary women's organisations. Socialist groups were also forming which actively sought women members. The generation of female activists who joined these organisations in Liverpool held strong party-political convictions. These allowed for some circumnavigation of the traditional local political boundaries of class and religion as women activists placed their party identity above these. However, being a party member also meant giving up some personal autonomy; women were placed at the mercy of the vagaries of local and national party politics. There were some deviations from national trends. Particular local circumstances restricted the success of Conservative women's organisations. Women Liberals in Liverpool fared slightly better, but were nevertheless affected by their party's local decline. Socialist women achieved slightly more within their parties, but found that a lack of socialist electoral success limited their opportunity for public work as will be shown. Ultimately, in all political groups, women members were supposed to serve the interests of their parties and not the other way around.

The Primrose League

When the Conservative Party regained control of Liverpool City Council in 1895, a number of women were among those credited with achieving this victory. They had organised through the local branches or ‘habitations’ of the Primrose League. The League, founded in 1883, was closely associated with Conservatism although it eschewed overt party politics in favour of a vague ideology of Church, Crown and Empire. From 1884, it admitted women to its ranks, thus becoming ‘the first body to recognise the usefulness of women in politics’. Women members enjoyed autonomous organisation under the direction of a Ladies’ Grand Council, but most of their actual activity was within local, mixed-sex habitations.