‘Margaret Bondfield’ by Nan Sloane review

Early in her career as a trade unionist, a young Margaret Bondfield could be found exhorting her fellow workers to ‘cease from your dreaming’ in the pages of The Shop Assistant journal. ‘When you rouse yourself and realise the grand possibilities within you’, she implored readers, ‘you will be filled with that spirit of enthusiasm and unselfishness, without which you cannot become a real trade unionist.’ Bondfield’s own spirit of enthusiasm and unselfishness was a source of strength and inspiration to many of her comrades in the early decades of the 20th century. In 1923 she became the first woman to chair the Trades Union Congress and one of the first women MPs elected for the Labour Party. In 1924 she was appointed the first woman minister, and, in 1929, became the first woman cabinet minister in Britain. But Nan Sloane’s new biography shows that her life was significant beyond this list of pioneering achievements. It is a story of enduring commitment to the labour movement, and especially to the rights and needs of working-class women. Bondfield’s belief in the possibility of a better world never wavered. Nor did her commitment to fighting for it.

Like many of her contemporaries, Bondfield’s faith in trade unions and left-wing politics resulted from early experiences of hardship. Born in Chard, Somerset in 1873, the penultimate child of 11, she hardly knew her older siblings and was sent to stay with relatives by parents struggling to make ends meet. This instability was exacerbated when her father lost his job as a foreman at a lace factory, making the family’s precarious economic situation even more difficult. Her parents were determined that none of the children should follow their father into the factory, and saw teaching as a route to stable, respectable employment. But Bondfield was determined to strike out on her own. She went to work as a shop assistant in a drapery store, where her desire for autonomy clashed with low pay and inhumane conditions. Staff were locked in dormitories to sleep. Shops were legally required to provide chairs, but the law did not specify that shop workers, on their feet for ten or 12 hours a day, should be allowed to sit in them.

In contrast to this dehumanising drudgery, Bondfield found great joy in the fellowship offered by social and political clubs and at church. But it was the trade union movement – itself akin to a religion – that transformed her life. Told by her deacon that she needed to choose between politics and church, she did not hesitate. Her early efforts at exposing the harsh treatment experienced by shop workers in The Shop Assistant earned her respect; her public speaking won admiration. Devastated by the loss of her closest sibling, Kate, in 1901, and estranged from her family, Bondfield recalled: ‘I just lived for the Trade Union Movement.’

Bondfield was instrumental in establishing the women-led organisations of the labour movement including the Women’s Trade Union League (1894), the National Federation of Women Workers (1906), the Women’s Labour League (1906), and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (1924). She campaigned for adult suffrage, rather than women’s suffrage, on the grounds that ‘it is the quickest way to establish real sex-equality’ and that working-class women had the right to make their own decisions, distinct from their middle-class counterparts. Increasingly high-profile on the national stage, she also looked outwards. In 1920 she was part of the Labour delegation that travelled to revolutionary Russia, and various trips to the US allowed her to see the racial politics there first hand.

Bondfield’s private life – though barely separable from her political life – was enriched by her relationships with other women. Most significant was her long partnership with Maud Ward, another prominent socialist. In making the case that Bondfield was likely to have been a lesbian, Sloane argues that without attention to her sexuality we see neither the whole person, nor the full extent of the obstacles she faced.

Though hardly forgotten, Margaret Bondfield does not have the same posthumous status of contemporaries such as Nancy Astor or Sylvia Pankhurst. This is likely due to her role in the second Labour government (1929-31). Faced with a crisis in unemployment, as minister for labour Bondfield’s plans to generate savings in the national insurance system by making massive cuts were perceived as a betrayal by her union comrades, and were exacerbated by her decision to exclude married women from the system altogether. ‘Her time as a Cabinet Member was not her finest hour’, Sloane remarks drily. Her clear-minded assessment is that Bondfield failed – but so did the men around her. Bondfield’s decisions should be understood in context. It was better to try and save the insurance system than to allow it to go bankrupt, but in doing so Bondfield lost all respect from the very people who had propelled her into the political elite. Her reputation never recovered, and was not helped by an autobiography, A Life’s Work (1948), which, as Sloane puts it, ‘studiously gives the impression of a dull, dutiful woman who plodded along and achieved high office more or less by accident’.

But should people be remembered for their worst moments, or for the totality of their efforts? Margaret Bondfield was a courageous campaigner, beloved and admired by men and women across the labour movement. She held fast to her own worth and dignity, and to the worth and dignity of women in her class, in a world which strongly encouraged women like her to believe the opposite. Ellen Wilkinson, appointed as a cabinet minister in 1945, wrote to Bondfield to acknowledge ‘how much you personally had done for the movement to make things possible for the women who should follow you. To carry and hand on the torch you lighted and carried so bravely is my highest ambition’. Nan Sloane’s biography should rekindle a torch that deserves to burn more brightly in labour history. 

• Margaret Bondfield: The Life and Times of Britain’s First Female Cabinet Minister
  Nan Sloane
  Bloomsbury, 248pp, £20
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Lyndsey Jenkins is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in History at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.