History of Women in Politics: From Shop Assistant to Parliament – Margaret Bondfield

History of Women in Politics: From Shop Assistant to Parliament – Margaret Bondfield

History of Women in Politics

Julia Herdman writes historical fiction that puts women to the fore. Her latest book Sinclair, Tales of Tooley Street Vol. 1. is  Available on Amazon – Paperback £10.99 and on Kindle:

When Labour swept into power in 1997, nearly one in four of its new MPs was a woman. And when all 101 of them were photographed with the Prime Minister, they became known as ‘Blair’s Babes.’ As it turned out for many of those women, the most pressing problem was not the chaos at the Palace of Westminster but childcare.

According to Barbara Follett, the wife of novelist Ken Follett, going into the Commons was like stepping back in time. In an interview in the Observer in April 2007, she said: ‘The Tories made gestures [she cups an imaginary pair of breasts]. Even on our side, the men would stick their hands out, so you’d sit on them. The worst offender was Nicholas Soames, though we worked out how to deal with him. His ex-wife had said that being made love to by Nicholas was like having a large wardrobe with a tiny key fall on top of you. So we used to make a gesture [she mimes the turning of a small key]. That helped.’

Labour’s first woman MP Margaret Bondfield found no such comradery to help her through the sexism of the House of Commons. Margaret was born in 1873, the second youngest of eleven children in Chard in Somerset, a busy industrial town making lace, cloth and iron working among its trades.

Margaret grew up in a family environment that encouraged social fairness and an interest in working-class political movements. She was later to write in her book, ‘A Life’s Work’, that …” the old radicalism and nonconformity of Chard…must somehow have got into the texture of my life and shaped my thoughts….” Her anger at injustices she saw all around her may also have begun with her father’s dismissal from his lace factory job after many years of loyal service.

Working-class Margaret began her own working life as an embroideress then she worked as a shop assistant in Brighton and London. She was shocked by the working conditions and became an active member of the shopworkers’ union. Soon she began to move in socialist circles, and in 1898 was appointed an assistant secretary of the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks (NAUSAWC).

By 1910, she was working as an adviser to the Liberal government on their Health Insurance Bill, giving improved maternity benefits to mothers. This, along with her campaigning efforts for improvements in child welfare; a reduction in infant mortality rates and minimum wage laws cemented her activist reputation and paved the way for her subsequent political career.

Her ideals owed much to a prominent role within the Women’s Co-operative Guild, leading to lifelong links with the Co-operative movement. But her political activity did not stop there; she helped to found the Women’s Labour League (WLL) in 1906 and was chair of the Adult Suffrage Society. Her standpoint on women’s suffrage was at odds the movement’s more famous and glamorous leaders, she favoured extending the vote to all adults regardless of gender or property, rather than merely limiting women’s suffrage to the same as men’s.

She stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate three times and was successful in 1923 when she won the seat for Northampton. History was made in early 1924 when she was appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Labour – the first woman ever to become a government minister. This was to be short-lived, however, as Margaret lost her seat in the following year’s general election regaining her place as an MP in the Wallsend by-election of 1926. Bondfield became Minister for Labour in 1929 amidst the worst economic crisis of country had ever seen. Her support for the government’s policy of cutting unemployment benefit for some married women was her political undoing; she lost her seat in 1931 and never went back to mainstream politics again.

Bondfield remained active in NUGMW affairs until 1938, and during the Second World War carried out investigations for the Women’s Group on Public Welfare. She died in 1953; despite her years of service to party and union, and her successes in breaking through gender boundary have not been honoured within the Labour movement. According to a later female cabinet minister, Barbara Castle, Bondfield’s actions in office had brought her close to the betrayal of the Labour movement. I think the same could be said about Castle, another great Labour woman, who suffered much the same fate with her ‘In Place of Strife’ proposal, which was an attempt to tame the power of the trades unions. It took another woman to do that, Margaret Thatcher; and that is another story.

Sources: http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/margaret-bondfield, Wikipedia, Guardian online 22/4/2007.

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The First Women Elected to the UK Parliament

History of Women in Politics: Margaret Wintringham, A Headmistress from Grimsby Goes to Parliament

Princess Dorothea von Lieven and Metternich – The Prince and the Swan

Empress Elizabeth – A woman who wanted to sleep with common people

History of Women in Politics: Margaret Wintringham, A Headmistress from Grimsby Goes to Parliament

History of Women in Politics: Margaret Wintringham, A Headmistress from Grimsby Goes to Parliament

Mrs Margaret Wintringham who became Member for Lincolnshire South in 1921 and became the Liberal Party’s first female MP. She represented her constituency until 1924. Margaret was a teacher and headmistress from Grimsby.

Born Margaret Longbottom in 1879 in the West Riding she had a successful career outside politics, becoming a school headmistress and local magistrate and was active in politics particularly the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

When her husband became the Member of Parliament for Lincolnshire South she went to London with him but he died in 1921. Later that year she stood for election and won in her husband’s constituency. When she agreed to stand, she insisted that she be exempted from any requirements to make public speeches during the campaign as she was still in mourning. Instead, she would attend meetings at which others would speak on her behalf, including both her two sisters (though some accounts suggest the idea for this silence came from party managers who were keen to encourage a sympathy vote). Support was also expressed by the Conservative Nancy Astor – who saw getting an extra woman in Parliament as more important than the candidate’s party label.

In Parliament she campaigned for an equal franchise; the Representation of the People Act 1918 had extended the vote to all men over the age of 21, but only to some women over the age of 30. She also campaigned for equal pay for women, for state scholarships for girls as well as boys, and women-only railway carriages.

She lost her seat in 1924 and although she stood for Parliament in two more elections she did not get in. She became president of the Louth Women’s Liberal Association and from 1925 to 1926 she was president of the Women’s National Liberal Federation. In 1927 she was one of two women elected to the national executive of the Liberal Federation.

Margaret Wintringham died in 1955 an obscure figure in the Liberal Party. Being ‘ordinary and radical’ she lacked the glamour and connections within the party to maintain her place in history.

I imagine her as an older version of the main character in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, Miss Sarah Burton, a teacher who is appointed headmistress at a girls’ school in the fictional Yorkshire seaside town of Kiplington. She immediately ruffles the feathers of the more conservative locals with her forthright views about pacifism and feminism “I want my girls to know they can do anything,” she barks. For this reason, some scholars view the novel as a proto-feminist classic. I’m surprised it’s only some scholars. Holtby is a full on feminist to me.

Sources: Wikipedia, Liberal Democrat Voice http://www.libdemvoice.org/margaret-wintringham-22573.html

Julia Herdman writes historical fiction that puts women to the fore. Her latest book Sinclair, Tales of Tooley Street Vol. 1. is  Available on Amazon – Paperback £10.99 and on Kindle

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The First Women Elected to the UK Parliament

From Shop Assistant to MP – Margaret Bondfield

History of Women in Science: Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Physicist

History of Women in Science: Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Physicist

Astronomy, mathematics and physics were popular fields of study for many of the brightest 18th-century women with access to money and books. Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil was one such woman. She was the daughter of the French court’s chief of protocol and her father rather unusually for the time encouraged her education. By the time she was twelve she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German.

Gabrielle-Emilie was a precocious teenager as well as a child genius; she liked to dance, was a passable performer on the harpsichord, sang opera, and was an amateur actress. Being short of money for books, she used her mathematical skills to devise highly successful strategies for gambling. Her mother Gabrielle-Anne was horrified tried to have her clever daughter sent to a convent.

In 1725 Gabrielle-Emilie married the Marquis du Chatelet at the age of 19 and lived the life of a courtier at the French court. She bore her husband three children, but at age 27 she began studying mathematics seriously and then branched into physics. This interest intensified when she started an affair with the philosopher Voltaire. Their friendship, if not their relationship, was lifelong and one of mutual respect and admiration.

Her philosophical magnum opus, Institutions de Physique or Foundations of Physics, was published in 1740 when she was 34. It was an immediate success, circulated widely, and republished and translated into several other languages within two years of its publication. With a growing reputation in the world of men, she participated in the famous vis viva debate concerning the calculation of the motion of orbiting bodies – the planets. However, Du Chatelet’s most lasting contribution to science was her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which is still in use today.

At age 43, she fell in love with a young military officer and became pregnant; she died following complications during the birth of their child. Posthumously, her ideas were included in the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, Wikipedia, Illustration: The Granger Collection, New York.

Iona McNeal, is a character in my new novel, Sinclair. Iona is a bright young woman, the daughter of the head of Edinburgh’s medical school. She studies mathematics, physics and astronomy at home. You can find out what happens to her in my latest book Sinclair, Tales of Tooley Street Vol. 1. Available on Amazon – Paperback £10.99 and on Kindle

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From Housemaid to Commit Catcher – Caroline Herschel

Witch or Saint ? Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Nursing by Numbers

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Mary Wollstonecraft’s Friends

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Friends

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 she is one of the world’s first feminist writers.

Wollstonecraft decided to become a writer in 1787, 230 years ago, when she moved to 45 George Street, in Southwark, now called Dolben Street. It was from Dolben Street[1]  that she launched her career, with the publication of her novel, Mary: A Fiction or Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is a philosophical and gothic novel that revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband. The story focuses on the societal rather than the individual “wrongs of woman” and criticises what Wollstonecraft viewed as the patriarchal institution of marriage in eighteenth-century Britain and the legal system that protected it. However, the heroine’s inability to relinquish her romantic fantasies also reveals women’s collusion in their oppression through false and damaging sentimentalism. The novel pioneered the celebration of female sexuality and cross-class identification between women. Such themes, coupled with the publication of Godwin’s scandalous Memoirs of Wollstonecraft’s life, made the novel unpopular at the time it was published.

Two friendships shaped Wollstonecraft’s early life. The first was with Jane Arden. At the age of nine Wollstonecraft was taken to a farm near Beverley in Yorkshire with her brothers and sisters. They lived a wild life, roaming around the flat land of the Humber estuary until her father took a house in the town opposite the Minster. It was in Beverley she met Jane Arden. Life in Beverley was remarkably civilised, there was a theatre, dances at the Assembly Rooms and a race course with a spring meeting that co-inside with the Spring Fair. Part of my own novel Sinclair is set in Beverley.

Image result for Beverley yorkshire creative commons

Beverley, Yorkshire

The girls frequently read books together and attended lectures presented by Arden’s father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist. John Arden was the descendant of the playwright Arden of Faversham but was disinherited by his family, and forced to set himself up as a roving teacher of practical mathematics and experimental philosophy. After a spell in Germany, he settled in Bath for a while where he became a founder member of the Bath Philosophical Society. Then moved onto Derby where he made friends with the artist Joseph Wright. Wright painted him as the Philosopher in his work entitled: A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, or the full title, A Philosopher giving a Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in the place of the sun, in 1766.

 

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The Orrery, Joseph Wright of Derby – Derby Museum and Art Gallery

The Orrery, which now hangs in the Derby Museum, caused a sensation at the time because it replaced a classical motif with a scientific one. In this picture, Wright replaces the awe inspired by God with the wonder of science.  [John Arden – The Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, iOpening Books 2016.]

 

 

 

At fourteen Wollstonecraft revelled in the intellectual atmosphere of the Arden household and valued her friendship with Jane Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of being emotionally possessive. Wollstonecraft wrote to her: “I have formed romantic notions of friendship … I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none.” In some of Wollstonecraft’s letters to Arden, she reveals the volatile and depressive emotions that would haunt her throughout her life. Mary’s crush for Jane ended badly, in quarrel spiked with jealousy and rage.

Her second and more important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, who was introduced to Wollstonecraft by the Clares, an elderly couple from Hoxton who became parental figures to her. Mr Clare was a retired clergyman with a taste for poetry, and Mrs Clare encouraged Mary’s reading, providing her with copies of Milton, Shakespeare, Pope and Johnson. Like Fanny, Mary learned the accomplishments expected of a middle-class woman from Mrs Clare – sewing, drawing and letter writing. Above all, she learned to be feminine and neat.

Unhappy with her home life, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady’s companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. However, Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an experience she drew on when describing the drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787).

In 1780 she returned home because she was called back to care for her dying mother. Rather than return to Mrs Dawson’s employ after the death of her mother, Wollstonecraft moved in with the Bloods.

Fanny Blood was paid by the botanist William Curtis to paint wildflowers for his book Flora Londinensis. When Mary was living with the Bloods Fanny became engaged to Hugh Skeys, but the pair could not marry immediately and Skeys was forced to go the sea to finance the marriage. Fanny’s brother Lieutenant George Blood (1762–1844), became good friends with Mary so much so that William Godwin, Mary’s husband wrote that Mary had “contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind”.

Blood, together with Mary Wollstonecraft and Wollstonecraft’s sisters, Eliza and Everina, opened a school first in Islington, which soon failed, and then in Newington Green. The school was combined with a boarding house for women and their children.

On February 24, 1785, Fanny Blood married Hugh Skeys who had made himself into a successful wine merchant based in Dublin. When Blood married and left the school, Wollstonecraft left too, and so their other school failed.

Fanny died in childbirth in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 29, 1785. Wollstonecraft was deeply affected by Blood’s death and in part inspired her first novel, Mary: A Fiction in 1788. She also named her own daughter, Fanny Imlay (1794–1816), after her friend.Frances “Fanny” Imlay was Mary’s daughter by the American commercial speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay. The pair never married and when Mary died Fanny remained part of the family of the man her mother had married, William Godwin. She was born in Le Havre in 1794 as the French Revolution took hold. Her half-sister Claire Clairmont would become Byron’s lover and her sister by Godwin would elope with the poet Shelley and write the gothic novel Frankenstein.

In later years, Mary realised during the two years she spent with the Blood family she had idealised Fanny as a woman like herself, fiercely independent and intellectual but Fanny was not like Mary, she wanted to be a wife and a mother more than a revolutionary. Nevertheless, Mary loved the Bloods and remained dedicated to them throughout her life. Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they made plans to rent rooms together and to support each other emotionally and financially, but this dream come to nothing. The weight of economic reality and social conformity as well as  being women in what was to all intents and purposes a world designed and run by men for men made their dream impossible to fulfil.

Mary followed the publication of Mary: A Fiction, with works on the education of children. Her own experience of motherhood forcing her to reconsider her views on women and children.

Through her association with her friend and publisher Joseph Johnson, she met Thomas Paine, the writer of The Rights of Man. Paine who would become one of the great influencers of the both the French Revolution and the development of the American state opposed the idea of hereditary government and the belief that dictatorial government is necessary, because of man’s corrupt nature. She also met her future husband and one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement William Godwin through Johnson. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they were both disappointed in each other. Godwin had come to hear Paine, but Wollstonecraft assailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on nearly every subject.

It was after she left Dolben Street in 1791 that she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). There is no doubt that her time at Dolben Street, Southwark was the furnace of her intellectual development, and was the site of her most intensely creative years.

For more information on Wollstonecraft see: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/keywords/mary-wollstonecraft

 

Notes:

[1] George Street was formed circa 1776 and the houses on either side were completed and tenanted by 1780 when the street name first occurs in the sewer rate books. It was built across the open fields shown as “tenter grounds” on Rocque’s maps, on part of what became known as Brown’s Estate. The formation of George Street was part of the rapid development of the area which followed the erection of Blackfriars Bridge. The street was renamed Dolben Street in 1911 in honour of John Dolben (1625–86), Archbishop of York, who in 1671, when Bishop of Rochester, officiated at the consecration of Christ Church. Throughout the period that these houses are shown in the rate books and directories they have been occupied by small tradesmen, chandlers, bakers, etc., and by artisans. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol22/pp127-128

Southwark was the location of several London prisons, including those of the Crown or Prerogative Courts, the Marshalsea and King’s Bench prisons, those of the local manors’ courts, e.g., Borough Compter, The Clink and the Surrey county gaol originally housed at the White Lion Inn (also informally called the Borough Gaol) and eventually at Horsemonger Lane Gaol.

One local family of note, was the Harvards. John Harvard went to the local parish free school of St Saviour’s and on to Cambridge University. He migrated to the Massachusetts Colony and left his library and the residue of his will to the new college there, named after him as its first benefactor. Harvard University maintains a link, having paid for a memorial chapel within Southwark Cathedral (his family’s parish church).

Sources:The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft By Claire Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination by Barbara Taylor,  & Wikipedia

My own novel, Sinclair takes place in Southwark and Beverley.

Julia Herdman is a novelist. Her latest book Sinclair, Tales of Tooley Street Vol. 1 is  Available on Amazon – Paperback £10.99 on Kindle

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Byron’s Daughters – A Tale of Three Sisters

Madame Staël – A woman who abored all that was tyrannical, cynical, or passionless