The Women in the Room

Labour’s Forgotten History

Nan Sloane

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350340824
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786724786
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In February 1900 a group of men representing trade unionists, socialists, Fabians and Marxists gathered in London to make another attempt at establishing an organisation capable of getting working-class men elected to Parliament. The body they set up was the Labour Representation Committee; six years later when 29 of its candidates were elected to the House of Commons it changed its name to the Labour Party.

No women took part in that first meeting, but several watched from the public gallery. Amongst them was Isabella Ford, an active socialist and trade unionist who would have been familiar to most of the men assembled below. She had been asked by her friend, Millicent Fawcett, to attend and report back on what happened. Millicent was the President of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and Isabella had been involved with the suffrage movement for a long time. A few years later she would become the first woman to speak at a Labour Party conference, moving a resolution on votes for women but, at the Party's inception in 1900, she and every other woman in the hall was silent.

Throughout Labour's history, even in its earliest years, women were present in the room, but they were not always recorded or remembered. They came from many different backgrounds and they worked for the causes they believed in as organisers, campaigners, negotiators, polemicists, public speakers and leaders. They took on the vested interests of their time; sometimes they won. Yet the vast majority of them have been forgotten by the Labour movement that they helped to found. Even Margaret Bondfield, who became Britain's first woman cabinet minister, often barely merits a footnote. Women made real and substantial contributions to Labour's earliest years and had a significant impact on the Party's ability to attract and maintain women's votes after World War I. In addition to Margaret and Isabella, in many of the rooms in which the Labour Party found its feet, remarkable women wait to be rediscovered. This book tells their story.

1

Trade Unionists

In the autumn of 1875 the Trades Union Congress (TUC) gathered in Glasgow for its annual meeting. Its rise since its inception had been meteoric; from a gathering of 34 delegates in Manchester in 1868 it had become an organisation representing over a hundred unions and local trades councils. It represented working people and their interests to government, and through its offshoot, the Labour Representation League (LRL), it had helped get two working men elected to Parliament. However, until the 150 delegates foregathered on a rather cold and damp morning in October 1875 the TUC had never been attended by a female delegate or addressed by a woman’s voice. History was about to be made.

When Emma Paterson and Edith Simcox arrived in Glasgow in 1875 they had no role models to inspire or guide them. In a world dedicated to the idea of separate spheres for women and men they were about to enter one of the most assertively male bastions possible, and not only to enter it, but to speak in it, challenge it and fight for the interests of the women they represented. Although Emma Paterson is usually credited with being the first woman to speak at the TUC it was in fact Edith Simcox who had that honour. The men gave the new delegates a very civil welcome, but there was no question of allowing them any real influence. Apart from anything else many of the men simply found the idea of women organising either themselves or anyone else faintly alarming. In a world in which working-class men were struggling to be taken seriously many thought that ‘lady trade unionists’ might make them seem ridiculous. On the other hand, some were interested and even intrigued; Mr Rolley, chairman of the Sheffield Trades Council and president of the TUC, met Emma Paterson in Glasgow and was sufficiently impressed to invite her to Sheffield to try to organise women in the silver and electroplating industry.

As both Emma and her audience at that visit would have known, Sheffield had played a particular and at times controversial part in the founding of the TUC less than a decade previously, and had long been at the forefront of the fight for the right to organise.

The Combination Act of 1825 had made it illegal for workers to combine for the purposes of trying to improve pay and conditions and severely restricted the right to strike or picket. Many other Acts of Parliament restricted the rights of workers to control their pay and conditions, and of unions to control their own funds. Since industrial action was thus a perilous undertaking, unions usually presented themselves as mutual benefit or friendly societies, taking subscriptions from members to provide assistance when they were out of work, ill or died. This left little legal recourse open to people to challenge the appalling conditions suffered in a great many industries. Over the next few decades, however, the developing middle class became increasingly interested in the condition of the working classes, and researchers and thinkers began to investigate what could be done to reduce poverty, ill health and destitution. Inevitably, this included consideration of the issue of trade unions.

In 1865 the secretary of the Sheffield Typographical Society, William Dronfield, read a paper on trade unionism at the annual Congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (commonly called the Social Science Association). The Social Science Association had been established in 1857 to bring together organisations interested in questions such as public health and education. These groups included the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, which had been set up by women involved in the Langham Place group, one of the earliest feminist organisations in Britain. The Social Science Association was, generally speaking, on what would now be described as the centre left of the political spectrum, but it was also unquestionably middle class and suffered from many of the prejudices of its time. In 1860 it had published a ‘Report on Trade Societies and Strikes’ which was favourable to the case for trade unions, and which was so thorough that Beatrice and Sidney Webb later pronounced it to be ‘the best collection of Trade Union material and the most impartial account of Trade Union action that has ever been issued’.¹ This was all very encouraging, except that when the members of the Association came up against an actual working-class person reading a paper to them they found Dronfield’s voice hard to hear, and both his presentation and the discussion which followed it were entirely omitted from the report of the Congress’s proceedings. When Dronfield complained to Samuel Nicholson, president of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council, Nicholson is reported to have said, ‘Why not have a congress of our own?’²

The following year, 1866, a series of events occurred which collectively became known as the Sheffield Outrages. The secretary of the Saw Grinders’ Union, one William Broadhead, instigated what was more or less a reign of terror in the town in order to punish employers and strikebreakers and ‘persuade’ people to join the union. A canister of gunpowder was thrown into a house, threatening letters were sent, and Broadhead himself paid a man £20 to murder an employer who was reducing his wage bill by taking on large numbers of apprentices rather than adult men. Since he admitted to all this under an amnesty while giving evidence to the subsequent Royal Commission on trade unions, Broadhead was not prosecuted. His justification was that, had unions been allowed to operate openly, and had employers not used underhand and even illegal practices, the measures he had taken would not have been necessary.

The Royal Commission (set up at least in part at the request of the Sheffield Trades Council) failed to recommend the decriminalisation of either collective bargaining or strike action. However, three members of it issued a minority report which called for the legalisation of trade union activity and, crucially, the protection of their funds. Trade union leaders were encouraged, since they knew that there was a good chance of the minority report being enacted if there was a new government. The political situation was unstable, a general election loomed and the opposition Liberal leader, William Gladstone, was broadly open to reformist ideas. The unions were also buoyed by the widening of the franchise in 1867 to a whole section of working men who were likely to vote Liberal. In 1868 the anticipated election duly took place. The Liberals secured a 100-seat majority and Gladstone was able to form his first administration. Union leaders now lobbied to persuade his government to repeal the 1825 Combination Act, but they knew that to be seen as having the authority to speak for the movement they would have to have one voice. Thus in 1868 the first meeting of the TUC took place in Manchester, and the new organisation campaigned successfully for the implementation of the minority report. The Trade Union Act of 1871 cast most of its recommendations into law, and remained one of the principal foundations of all subsequent trade union legislation until the end of the twentieth century.

Even before the TUC was formed, trade unionists had been discussing how to get working-class men elected to Parliament, and this was one of the first issues discussed at the inaugural meeting. Very few trade unionists at this point were also socialists, and although a number had been Chartists a couple of decades previously,³ their focus was on breaking into the system as it existed rather than changing the system altogether. The Liberal Party had absorbed many Chartist campaigners, and although the right wing of the Party was still effectively the old eighteenth-century Whig alliance, the left was a loose combination of Chartists, radical religious Nonconformists such as Unitarians and Quakers, and socially and economically progressive middle-class men. These groups tended to be broadly sympathetic in theory to improving the lot of the labouring classes, and even to legalising trade unions, but there was a difficulty. Mill owners, particularly in the north of England, were often Liberals and sometimes even radical – except when it came to providing adequate pay and conditions for their own employees. Thus relations between the TUC and the Liberal Party were not always easy, and became increasingly tense as labour and socialist political organisations began to proliferate and flex their muscles.

In 1869 the TUC set up the LRL. This aimed to get working men elected to Parliament, ensure that men who could vote were on the electoral register, and keep an eye on proposed industrial legislation. It allowed individual membership and had a rudimentary system of branches around the country. But it had no political programme and, since it had a large executive council composed of 32 members, there was an inherent scope for conflict. In particular, there was disagreement about whether their candidates should be independent of all parties or run as Liberals; this dilemma within the labour movement continued for decades, not being fully resolved until after World War I.

The 1871 Trade Union Act represented a degree of success for the TUC, but the Criminal Law Amendment Act passed in the same year outlawed picketing, thus making even legal strike action very difficult to undertake successfully. What Gladstone’s reforming Liberal government had given with one hand it had taken away almost immediately with the other and trade unionists across the board were furious. The need to have working men represented in Parliament was seen to be pressing. There was talk of setting up a separate political party and local men were urged by the LRL to ‘organise … not as mere consenting parties to the doings of local wirepullers, but as a great Labour party – a party which knows its own strength and is prepared to fight and win’.⁴ However, nothing came of this, at least in part because nobody was prepared to do anything to make it a reality, and the LRL soon fell back on generalised support for Liberal candidates.

At this stage a man called Henry Broadhurst became secretary of the LRL and brought to it a new level of drive and efficiency. Broadhurst was the foremost trade unionist of his generation, going on to become one of the first working-class MPs and the first working-class government minister. A stonemason by trade, he had been apprenticed at the age of 12 and in his mid-20s moved to London to work on the clock tower of the new Houses of Parliament. This brought him into contact with radical groups, and his successful leadership of industrial disputes led him to become a full-time officer of the Stonemasons’ Union. By 1873, when he became secretary of the LRL, he was 33 years old and a powerful and influential figure.

Broadhurst proposed to the TUC that they should raise an electoral fund for Labour candidates, but, like Keir Hardie 20 years later, he could not persuade them to contribute financially to make their political aspirations a reality. Instead delegates passed a motion supporting local action and effectively leaving everyone with pretty much a free hand. Most working men who stood for Parliament did so as Liberals with the support of trade unionists as well as local Liberal members. But for the 1874 general election the LRL did produce a list of Labour candidates, the first in any election, and two were successful; Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt for Stafford and Morpeth respectively. Broadhurst stood in High Wycombe but lost. In 1875 he became secretary of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee (which became the General Council in 1918) and began his long dominance of the TUC and its work.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Most trade unions excluded women from membership on the grounds that they should also be excluded from the workforce. For most men (and many women), the presence of women in the workforce not only violated the doctrine of separate spheres but also directly caused unemployment and low pay. Women were prepared to accept much lower rates than men for doing the same jobs, and as a result they were widely used by employers as cheap labour and even to break strikes. Because they were excluded from apprenticeships they were also excluded from many of the industries in which trade unions were most likely to develop, and where they were employed as semi-skilled or unskilled labour there was a continuous campaign to get them out. There were also heavy concentrations of women workers in industries such as domestic service, confectionery and laundries, but there were no unions affiliated to the TUC for any of these trades, at least in part because at this stage trade unionism was still largely dominated by the older craft unions.

As well as having principled objections to women in industry, many male trade unionists were irritated by the practical problems. Women were difficult to recruit and even harder to retain in membership, and it was years before the men came to see equal pay rather than exclusion as the answer to undercutting. Almost the only exceptions to this attitude were some of the unions which developed in the Lancashire cotton industry. They had admitted women on equal terms (though on a reduced subscription) for many years and were large and influential. In 1875 the East Lancashire Amalgamated Power Loom Weavers’ Association had been successful in achieving some measure of equal pay for its male and female members and affiliated 20,000 members to the TUC. It was one of the few unions to understand that women could not be excluded from industry altogether and that improvements in working conditions and pay for both women and men were part of the same struggle.

The cotton weavers of Lancashire were unusual, however, and most of the jobs which women could get in factories or mills were pretty grim. They were often repetitive or dangerous, with high levels of injuries, very long hours, and no compensation for the diseases caused by chemicals or industrial processes. Such working conditions were often thought to have a coarsening effect on the moral character of the women themselves and much middle-class effort was expended on trying to ‘reform’ female workers. The principal alternative to industry was domestic service, where conditions were poor and pay even worse. At least a woman working in a factory or mill had some small measure of independence, but those in service or working in the burgeoning retail industry had virtually none. Many women had no option but to work at whatever they could get, and lower-middle-class as well as working-class women lived in constant fear of destitution. A great many married women would much rather not have worked but had no option but to seek employment either outside the home or inside it as a homeworker. Homeworkers tended to earn the worst pay of all, and to be exploited to such an extent that they and their children lived permanently on the verge of starvation. Virtually all single working-class women needed employment to survive. Women generally were often subject to harassment and assault and could be hired and fired at will. They were classed with immigrant Irish, Jewish and Chinese labour as threats to working men’s wages and had little or no protection from anyone. For many the choices were stark, with the dreaded prospect of the workhouse always looming as the alternative to starvation.

The difficulties of organising women were increased by their places of work. They were more likely to be employed in small, scattered workshops, in domestic service, or in their own homes where they were difficult to reach. They were usually so poorly paid that the penny a week that men in skilled industries could afford for union membership was beyond their reach, and even if they could pay it, the ephemeral nature of their employment, the tendency for it to be short-lived, and the likelihood of their being sacked by their employers at no notice made them hard to keep track of, and their subscriptions hard to collect. This applied to millions of unskilled men too, of course, and partially accounts for their also remaining largely unorganised prior to the 1880s, but it was particularly true of women and continued to be so for decades. Moreover, any increase in women’s pay that the unions secured was often viewed with disfavour by men, since they thought that better pay would attract more women to work, and that more women would further undermine their own position.

There were also social factors. Young women entering the workforce frequently did so as children, and believed that they would leave it once they married. Working-class women married earlier than those of the middle classes, so that teenage girls were inclined to view their working lives as transitory. If they came back to work later, as widows, deserted wives, single mothers or wives with sick or disabled husbands or husbands who simply could not or did not earn enough, they still wanted to hope that employment was temporary. The trade unionist Edith Simcox said:

The fact that women only work for wages for a short part of their life, while many more hope and believe that they will not need to do so always, makes the state of her trade seem a matter of less importance to each young woman as she enters it than it would be if she intended from the first to work at it for life.⁵

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Rt Hon Harriet Harman MP
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Organisations and Acronyms
• Timeline
• Note on Text
• Introduction
• 1 Trade Unionists
• 2 Socialists
• 3 Foundations
• 4 ‘The Men’s Party’
• 5 Women’s Work
• 6 Breakthrough
• 7 Suffrage and Sweating
• 8 Changes
• 9 The Great Unrest
• 10 War and Peace
• Epilogue
• The Women in the Room
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright