Margaret Bondfield

British social reformer and politician

• Born: March 17, 1873
• Birthplace: Chard, Somerset, England
• Died: June 16, 1953
• Place of death: Sanderstead, Surrey, England

From humble shop assistant, Bondfield became assistant secretary of the Shop Assistants’ Union and chair of the Adult Suffrage Society. Elected to the British parliament from Northampton in 1923, she became the first woman chair of the Trades Union Congress in that same year. In 1929 she became the first woman in a British cabinet, serving as minister of labour.

Early Life

Margaret Bondfield was the tenth of eleven children in a family that was politically active. Her father, William, a foreman and designer for a lace firm, was a Chartist and a member of the Anti-Corn Law League. Her mother, née Ann Taylor, was the daughter of an energetic Congregationalist minister, George Taylor.

After Margaret attended the local elementary school, she served as a pupil teacher. In 1886, she left for Brighton, where a sister and brother lived with an aunt. As a shop assistant, she lived in a dormitory above her employer’s shop and worked a sixty-five-hour week, earning twenty-five pounds a year plus her room and board. In Brighton she was befriended by Hilda Martindale, a Liberal and a women’s rights advocate who furthered her education. After managing to save five pounds, in 1894 the young Bondfield moved to London to join her brother Frank, a printer and trade unionist, who introduced her to Amelia Hicks, with whom Bondfield shared living quarters. Hicks was active in the rope and box makers’ union; through her, Bondfield met Henry Mayers Hyndman, Harry Quelch, and other members of the Social Democratic Federation but was later repelled by class-war theories. Later, at the Ideal Club, she met Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw and became a member of the Fabian Society. Eventually she joined the Independent Labour Party, where she became a friend of Margaret Gladstone, soon to marry Ramsay MacDonald. Through her brother, she also met James McPherson, secretary of the Shop Assistants’ Union, and in 1897, at the age of twenty-four, she was elected to its National Executive Council.

Life’s Work

The Shop Assistants’ Union was founded in the 1890’s and admitted members irrespective of craft or gender as long as they were employed in the industry of distribution. The union was affiliated with the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), and Bondfield served on its general committee. She became a confidante to its leader, Lady Emilia Dilke, who had just engineered a shift in its policy from opposition to one that favored legislative restrictions on the conditions of labor and so got more male trade-union support.

From 1896 to 1898, Bondfield joined with Edith Hogg in surveying shop assistants’ working conditions for the Women’s Industrial Council. Its findings led to passage of the Early Closing Act of 1904, supported by Sir John Lubbock (later Lord Avebury), although Bondfield had favored Lord Dilke’s bill, which exempted local option. She lobbied for the abolition of the living-in system with the Shop Hours Act of 1906 and the inclusion of maternity benefits in the 1911 Health Insurance Act. Because of her knowledge of shop assistants’ grievances and her clear, resonant voice, she was chosen assistant secretary of the Shop Assistants’ Union from 1898 to 1908, with a salary of 124 pounds a year. She contributed articles to its journal, the Shop Assistant (founded in 1890), under the pseudonym Grace Dare. Membership in the Shop Assistants’ Union grew from 2,897 in 1898 to 20,218 in 1907.

In 1899, Bondfield was the only female delegate to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference at Plymouth and during this period traveled widely, recruiting members for the Shop Assistants’ Union. It was during one of these trips to the Glasgow area that she accomplished the conversion of Mary MacArthur to the cause of trade unions. They became inseparable friends, and when the WTUL needed a new secretary, Bondfield recommended MacArthur. In 1906, MacArthur helped found the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW), the first general union for women. Together with MacArthur and Margaret Llewellyn Davies, and through the Women’s Co-operative League, Bondfield lobbied for the passage of the Trade Boards Act of 1909. It fixed minimum wages in four of the most toilsome trades employing women.

As a feminist, Bondfield also became active in the suffrage movement. From 1906 to 1909, she served as president of the Adult Suffrage Society, a group that differed with suffragists who were willing to accept a more limited enfranchisement of both men and women. As an ardent member of both the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Labour Party, Bondfield opposed limited suffrage because it might hamper the cause of socialism. In 1907, she debated Teresa Billington-Grieg, a leading member of the Women’s Freedom League, which supported limited suffrage. Twice, in 1910 and 1913, Bondfield, as an ILP candidate, unsuccessfully contested a seat on the London County Council from Woolrich. Eventually she supported the Suffrage Act of 1918, even though it granted only heads-of-household suffrage to women over the age of thirty. Later, in 1928, Bondfield and Anne Godwin lobbied to extend the vote to women over twenty-one.

These activities took their toll, and in 1908, exhausted and depressed, she took a holiday in Switzerland. Bondfield loved travel and in 1910 spent five months studying labor and social problems in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and in Chicago. On both trips she was accompanied by Maud Ward, a cooking expert, with whom she shared a home in Hampstead for most of her life. On her return to England she resumed lecturing, and while in Lancashire, she collapsed during a speech. She subsequently resigned her position with the Shop Assistants’ Union. After two years’ total rest, she returned to social service activities in October, 1912. As a lobbyist for the Women’s Industrial Council and aided by Clementina Black, she researched the conditions of work of married women in the Yorkshire woolen industry. Between 1912 and the outbreak of World War I, she became organizing secretary of the Women’s Labour League and participated in the campaigns of the Women’s Cooperative League for minimum wage, maternity, and child welfare schemes.

In August, 1914, when war threatened, Bondfield opposed British involvement. She arrived at her pacifism through characteristic self-education after reading J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902), Norman Angell’s Europe’s Optical Illusion (1909), and Henry N. Brailsford’s The War of Steel and Gold (1915). She also joined E. D. Morrell’s Union of Democratic Control. On August 6, 1914, Bondfield, along with MacArthur, Marion Philips, and Susan Lawrence, formed the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee to protect working-class interests during hostilities. Bondfield was also a member of the Central Committee on Women’s Employment and the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the ministry of munitions. The first provided workshops for approximately nine thousand unemployed women, while the latter, established July 17, 1917, by Winston Churchill, tried to ease friction between the government and the NFWW, the Workers’ Union, and the National Union of General Workers. Bondfield’s main energies during the war, however, were devoted to the work of organizing secretary of the NFWW.

Shortly after the war began in March of 1915, Bondfield resumed her peace efforts and with Philips attended the Women’s International of Socialists and Labour Organizations, in Berne, Switzerland. It called for peace without annexation and self-determination for all minorities. Later, in 1917, as attitudes toward the war hardened, the government refused her permission to travel to the Stockholm peace conference; to an American Federation of Labor conference in the United States; and to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Conference at the Hague. This probably resulted from her close association with MacDonald’s call for a negotiated peace and opposition to consumption.

After World War I, Bondfield resumed her international travels and attended the initial conference of the International Labour Organization in Washington, D.C. In 1920, she was a member of the joint delegation of the TUC and Labour Party to the Soviet Union. While her experiences led her to oppose British intervention in the civil war there, the trip revealed to her the dictatorial nature of communism, and in 1920 she opposed the application of the British Communist Party for affiliation with the Labour Party. After 1923 she felt ideologically estranged from most of the new leaders of the Independent Labour Party.

Also after the war, the NFWW merged with the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW). When MacArthur, her closest friend, died in January, 1921, Bondfield assumed the post of chief women’s officer (a post that MacArthur had been slated to fill) and held it until 1938. The amalgamation of the NFWW saw women gradually squeezed out of most leadership positions by men. When confronted by the NUGMW’s abolition both of its separate Women’s District and its provision for a woman on the General Council (thus reducing her to figurehead status), Bondfield threatened to resign. She was dissuaded only by being given “complete control of all national women’s questions.”

Ironically, in September, 1923, by the rota system, Bondfield became the first woman chairperson of the TUC General Council, a post she relinquished when, after two previous failures to win a seat in Parliament at Northampton, she succeeded in 1923. She then served as parliamentary secretary to Thomas Shaw, minister of labour for the first Labour government. In the election of October, 1924, she was defeated. Later, as a member of the TUC General Council, she supported the General Strike of 1926 and also Ernest Bevin’s decision to call it off. In 1926, at Wallsend, she was returned to Parliament and at that time signed the Blanesburgh Committee’s report recommending the lowering of some benefits and abolition of extended benefits, but the extension of the “not genuinely seeking work” clause. This led to her censure by the NUGMW and the Shop Assistants’ Union and the greatest battle of her political life. She successfully fought off the attack of a minority of extremists before the TUC, the Labour Party, and her local constituency. In 1929, she was reelected to Parliament by defeating Wal Hannington and a Tory candidate. Ramsay MacDonald appointed her minister of labour, making her the first woman cabinet minister and privy councillor. In the face of the depression in July, 1930, and after March unemployment figures rose to 1.7 million, Bondfield called for an increase in the insurance fund’s borrowing power to sixty million pounds. With the help of the Morris Committee, she managed to eliminate the “genuinely seeking work” clause, although the “Anomalies” [Unemployment Insurance No. 3] Bill in 1931 did deprive some married persons of benefits to reduce public expenditures. When MacDonald formed the National government, Bondfield stayed with the Labour Party and lost her seat in 1931; she was defeated again in 1935. She also lost her seat on the TUC General Council and, in 1938, retired as Chief Woman Officer of the NUGMW.

Bondfield continued her interest in women’s economic and social problems, and in 1938 she helped found the Women’s Group on Public Welfare; she was its chairperson from 1938 to 1945. In 1938, she lectured in the United States, and when World War II began, she made another tour, sponsored by the British Information Services. She also organized voluntary services for civilian evacuation. She died on June 16, 1953, at age eighty.

Significance

Bondfield’s worldview was influenced by her early religious beliefs and later socialist education. Sincere and good-natured, she was a team player and was content to play second fiddle to MacArthur in the WTUL. Bondfield also had the courage of her convictions, as when she differed with the suffragists in support of adult suffrage. She also was a realist, making the best of a hopeless situation when the NFWW was amalgamated with the NUGMW. Her views as a cabinet minister were made in the light of international monetary reality, not narrow sectarian interest or the grandstand play. She received many honors, including an honorary doctor of laws degree from Bristol University in 1929 and the Freedom of Chard, her hometown, in 1930. Few women achieved as many positions of power and accomplished as much social amelioration starting from such humble beginnings.

Bibliography

Banks, Olive. Faces of Feminism: A Study of a Social Movement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. A good, balanced treatment of feminism as a movement for social justice.

Bondfield, Margaret. A Life’s Work. London: Hutchinson, 1949. A useful autobiography filled with vignettes of early trade-union personalities, but one that is reticent about flaws and silent on some subjects.

Boston, Sarah. Women Workers and the Trade Union Movement. London: Davis Poynter, 1980. A consistently sympathetic and uncritical treatment of the topic and particularly valuable for events that followed World War II.

Clegg, H. A. General Union in a Changing Society: A Short History of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, 1889-1964. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1964. Good on the consolidation of the NFWW with the NUGMW.

Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Margaret Bondfield. London: Leonard Parsons, 1924. Written by a friend and contemporary, before Bondfield had to make hard choices.

Howard, Angela, and Sasha Ranaé Adams Tarrant, eds. Redefining the New Woman, 1920-1963. New York: Garland, 1997. Includes an essay by Bondfield about women in industry.

Lewenbak, Shiela. Women and Trade Unions. London: Ernest Benn, 1977. Excellent history of women’s trade unions, but almost entirely omits the textile industry.

Liddington, Jill, and Jill Norris. One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. London: Virago, 1983. A lively, incisive treatment that re-creates the past.

Soldon, Norbert C. Women in British Trade Unions, 1874-1976. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. A balanced and comprehensive treatment of the role of women in the trade unions of Britain.