Studies of the British Labour Party have emphasized the ideological and structural barriers to women's full participation in labor and socialist politics, a situation that was also common in the rest of Europe and North America, and the tensions between female activists and male leaders whenever women raised issues that challenged gender inequalities.Footnote ¹ Such conflicts were expressed most clearly in debates in the 1920s, led by women who were closely identified with the socialist group, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), over birth control, family allowances, and the constitutional position of the Labour women's conference.Footnote ² These attempts to prioritize issues of concern to women and to challenge party structures that limited women's influence were unsuccessful. In explaining this failure historians have looked both at structural barriers and also at the gendered culture of the Labour Party that constructed a distinct identity for the Labour woman that prioritized class over gender.Footnote ³ Pamela Graves and others have suggested that women's loyalties were divided between class, sex, and party and that they were reluctant to pursue a potentially “feminist” agenda if this meant creating disunity in the Labour Party.Footnote ⁴ Graves argues that this was reinforced in the 1930s after the disaffiliation of the ILP when fascism, the threat of war, and the problem of unemployment focused the attention of all Labour Party members on class issues rather than gender.

This approach through binary oppositions—between sex and class, women and men, or feminists and nonfeminists—has been questioned since it fails to capture the complicated ways in which Labour women developed and negotiated their political identities.Footnote ⁵ Too often Labour women have been judged against a rigid definition of feminist characteristics and demands—such as support for a limited franchise or opposition to protective legislation for women—and found to be lacking.Footnote ⁶ Pat Thane's pioneering work has consistently challenged the view that Labour women could be seen as “puppets of male leaders” or as “traitors to a feminist movement.”Footnote ⁷ She has argued instead that Labour women had organizational importance, independence of mind, and a coherent analysis of women's social role, which should be seen as part of the development of British feminism.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, recent studies that have drawn attention to the wide variety of ideas and aspirations of feminists from the mid-nineteenth century onward have suggested that there were “multiple forms of feminism.”Footnote ⁹ This approach provides a different framework in which to assess the concerns of Labour women and their contribution to feminism.

In order to understand the complex ways in which women made sense of their engagement in Labour Party politics, this article will look beyond the national leadership to focus on a group of women who worked as paid organizers at a regional level in the interwar years. Local scholarly studies have emphasized the importance of grassroots organization in explaining the growth of the Labour Party in this period.Footnote ¹⁰ They have highlighted the extent to which women played a key role in broadening the appeal of the party beyond its trade-union base by tapping into the everyday experiences of workers in a particular locality, articulating community demands, and convincing men and women that Labour politics was about everyday life.Footnote ¹¹ We are aware of the importance of some individual organizers within this process. The republication of Elizabeth Andrews's autobiography highlights her significance as the first woman organizer for Wales, and there is also a biography of the chief woman officer, Marion Phillips.Footnote ¹² And yet we know little about the work of the paid labor organizers as a specific group. There is certainly nothing to compare with Krista Cowman's important study of the paid suffragist organizers of the Women's Social and Political Union, a group that shared many features in common with labor organizers.Footnote ¹³ Where the latter differed from their suffrage counterparts was in having to face issues that came from working within a mixed-sex organization, and one that had not always recognized the importance of, or given priority to, the specific needs and experiences of women. Thus, although the organizers focused on women and the issues that concerned them, they also emphasized the shared interests of working-class men and women.

Many labels have been used to capture the distinctiveness of Labour women's views. Some, such as maternalist feminist and social feminist, with their emphasis on social reform goals, define Labour women's interests too narrowly. Others, including feminist-comrade and labor feminist, have the potential to capture the broader goals and aspirations of Labour women.Footnote ¹⁴ Dorothy Sue Cobble's definition of a “labor feminist” as someone who recognized and tried to eliminate sex-based disadvantages, who focused on the needs of working-class women, and who saw the labor movement as the best vehicle for achieving the changes she sought fits most closely with the outlook of British Labour organizers.Footnote ¹⁵ Nonetheless, the organizers rarely described themselves as feminists and were at times hostile to the label and all it implied. Therefore, the term feminist will not be used in this study to describe the organizers since it can obscure rather than illuminate how they viewed their political aims.Footnote ¹⁶

This article will look at what women organizers aimed to achieve and how far, within the constraints of their employment, they were able to make a difference on behalf of their women members. The analysis is constrained by the sources available. Since little personal material remains, the article relies heavily on official party publications, in particular Labour Woman, on minutes of women's sections, and on annual reports.Footnote ¹⁷

Organizing Women Separately

When women were enfranchised in many countries, both before and after the First World War, social democratic and labor parties sought to increase the number of female members and to attract women's votes. Although there were national differences in the extent to which they focused on “women's issues” and in the organizational structures that were developed, parties on the Left all emphasized the class solidarity between working-class men and women and claimed that they were committed to social welfare reforms that would improve women's lives.Footnote ¹⁸ In Britain, where all men over twenty-one, and most women over thirty, had gained the Parliamentary vote in 1918, the Labour Party changed its constitution to enable men and women to become individual members. Women could join mixed-sex branches alongside men, but there was also a parallel structure of organization that catered to women alone. The Women's Labour League, formed in 1906 to encourage women to support the Labour Party, was disbanded and, instead, women's sections were established in local districts.Footnote ¹⁹ Three paid organizers were appointed at a national level in 1918 to ensure that sections were developed throughout the country. They had the support of the chief woman officer, Marion Phillips, from 1918 to 1932 and then Mary Sutherland until her retirement in 1960. The number of organizers increased in 1919, when the party changed its organizational structure. The country was divided into nine regions, each with a male and female organizer. Two of the original national organizers, Lilian Anderson Fenn and Mamie Anderson, were appointed to the North East and the North West, respectively, and they were joined by seven other women who were new to the role. This strategy appeared to be successful, since by the late 1920s there were over 250,000 female members, most of whom were in the sections, and in the interwar years as a whole at least half of the party's individual members were women.Footnote ²⁰ As the number of sections increased, their work was coordinated through Women's Advisory Councils, which could be based within a city or cover a much broader region. By 1947 there were seventy-four councils.Footnote ²¹

The establishment of separate structures for women had long been a controversial issue within labor and social democratic parties in Europe and North America since it appeared to contradict the rhetoric of many parties concerning the equality of the sexes.Footnote ²² In the interwar years there continued to be differences in the way in which national parties approached the question. In Norway and Sweden, for example, there were separate organizations for women along similar lines to those in Britain, whereas in Denmark the male leadership remained hostile to separate women's associations throughout the period.Footnote ²³ In Britain, opposition to a separate organization for women came from both sexes. Some experienced women activists feared that women's sections would marginalize women members and their concerns and would restrict the sphere of their activities to organizing social events. Opposition also came from men who doubted women's potential for collective action and from those who were not keen that their wives take part in political activities outside the home.Footnote ²⁴ Although Mary Sutherland thought that there was less hostility by the 1930s, since women's sections had proved their worth,Footnote ²⁵ she still felt the need to defend the sections at the 1946 Women's Annual Conference against “a number of quaint notions of critics, who know nothing about their work, the idea for example that a women's section was a place where they went to drink tea!”Footnote ²⁶

The chief women officers and the organizers were convinced of the need for a separate organization for women. They agreed that men and women had shared goals, including the aim of improving women's social position, and that all aspects of political work should be open to both sexes on an equal basis.Footnote ²⁷ Yet they also supported a separate organization that they thought would encourage less confident women to take an active part in politics and would strengthen women's position within the party.Footnote ²⁸ Their arguments were based on two fundamental premises: that working-class housewives could, and should, become politicized and that, given their roles as wives and mothers, they had a distinct point of view that needed to be heard.

In her introduction to Women and the Labour Party, a key text published in 1918 that provided the rationale for continuing with a separate organizational structure, Marion Phillips argued that there were “certain matters in which the experience of women is far wider and closer than that of men can ever be; those which most intimately concern home life, the nurture of the young, the care of the sick and weakly, the planning of the dwelling itself, are especially women's questions.”Footnote ²⁹ During the 1930s Mary Sutherland continued in the same vein: “While the vote admitted women to all questions, some of these questions are, in a special sense, women's questions, and on these women have a special responsibility to give a lead.” She believed that without women's sections they would be unable to adequately voice these opinions or to make them effective.Footnote ³⁰

The chief women officers could be comfortable, therefore, with the gendered assumptions of the Labour Party that identified the Labour woman with the home. As David Howell suggests, this was not just an imposition by a male leadership, since “to many labour women it made sense,” even if at times pressures on the working-class housewife meant that issues such as birth control and qualifications for unemployment benefits emerged that “generated conflict between the party's women's organizations, and the party and trade union leaderships.”Footnote ³¹ Graves has assumed that this focus on women in the home meant that Labour women “accepted as axiomatic that men belonged to the world of public life and women to domesticity and maternity,” but this does not do justice to the complexity of their views.Footnote ³² The women officers and organizers did not see the lives of women as confined by their work within the home. They argued that women “must raise themselves out of the overwork and drudgery of their lives and insist on conditions which give them opportunities for Freedom, Health, Reasonable Leisure and Useful Public Service.”Footnote ³³ Elizabeth Andrews was always irritated if women's sections did not want to move beyond social events and tried to persuade them away from “just having a cup of tea and a jolly evening,” since she realized that men would not take women seriously if they did not play this more extensive role.Footnote ³⁴ Marion Phillips never doubted the capacity of working-class, married women to take action to achieve change. Sometimes she called on “the woman in the home” to engage in campaigns; at others she referred more specifically to mothers. During the miners' strike of 1926, for example, she claimed that “we are building up … a great mass movement of mothers which shall make the whole world one.”Footnote ³⁵

The potential for “women in the home” to take collective action and to challenge mainstream definitions of “the political” has been the subject of a number of recent studies. Gillian Scott's work on the Women's Cooperative Guild, described by its leader, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, as “a sort of trade union for married women,” explores how the Guild's focus on the private sphere of the working-class family led the organization to take up controversial issues such as divorce-law reform and maternity before the First World War. Guild members argued that these were political rather than personal questions, despite opposition from the male-dominated cooperative movement.Footnote ³⁶ Studies of the involvement of housewives in food riots and protests against increases in the cost of living have suggested that support for the sex division of labor in the home was not just a conservative view, but had the radical potential to challenge the emphasis of socialist politics on production, the workplace, and class-based issues and raised the possibility that “everyday life was a political process.”Footnote ³⁷

In Britain, the conditions of war brought consumer interests to the forefront of labor politics. Marion Phillips, as a member of the newly established Consumers' Council, aired the concerns of working-class women as family providers, although women's specific interests tended to be subsumed within a broader labor movement concern with working-class living standards. It was difficult to sustain an interest in consumer politics into the interwar years. A growing emphasis on electoral politics, the impact of depression, and the decline of organized feminism created a context in which it was an uphill struggle to assert the importance of the working-class household as a site of political struggle.Footnote ³⁸

The Organizers

The women organizers had a central role to play in attempting to foreground the political potential and needs of the working-class housewife, since the majority of section members were married, non-wage-earning women. As employees, organizers were answerable to head office and were expected to carry out party directives and policies, but they were also encouraged to develop new initiatives. Their role was more varied than that of many other party workers. In the early days they helped to organize the mixed-sex branches as well as the women's sections, played their part in election work, and served as propagandists as well as organizers. It was her skill as a propagandist for which Gertrude Francis, organizer for the eastern region, was best remembered, since “she possessed all the qualities of the eloquent speaker, amongst which were sincerity, imagination, passion and a rich modulated voice.”Footnote ³⁹ Organizers therefore developed a wide range of skills that not only increased their effectiveness in organizing women but also helped them to gain respect and loyalty from other activists who turned to them for advice and support.

The lengthy careers of most of the organizers, at a time when others came in and out of political activism, also increased the influence that they had in their regions. Of the thirteen women appointed as organizers during the interwar years, six remained in post for the entire period.Footnote ⁴⁰ In addition, Mary Sutherland worked as an organizer for eight years before her appointment as chief woman officer.Footnote ⁴¹ Organizers usually stayed in the same district, although Lilian Anderson Fenn and Harriet Fawcett changed places with each other in 1929. The organizers, therefore, were familiar figures in their local districts and had a wealth of experience that they could put to good use in the service of the party.

At a time when the Labour Party sought to attract working-class women voters and was hostile to “bourgeois” women's groups that might compete for that support, the leaders of the party emphasized how the organizers understood the needs of working-class women because of their own personal experience. Their working-class backgrounds were highlighted in short biographies in Labour Woman. Here it was noted, for example, that Harriet Fawcett was one of ten surviving children of a Yorkshire farm laborer, and Elizabeth Andrews was the third of eleven children of a coal miner from South Wales.Footnote ⁴² The organizers told their own stories in a similar way. After retirement, Elizabeth Andrews reflected on her evidence to the Sankey Commission on the Mining Industry in 1919 and claimed that “as a miner's daughter I could speak with deep knowledge and long experience of the problems of the women in the mining communities.”Footnote ⁴³

In common with their section members, the majority of the organizers—seven out of thirteen in the interwar years—were married women, and one, Margaret Gibb, was a widow. Nonetheless, their position was an ambivalent one. On the one hand, they did have familiarity with working-class women's lives, but their political activism, their education, and their paid work differentiated them from the rank-and-file women they were trying to organize. Margaret Gibb, Lilian Anderson Fenn, and Mary Sutherland were all educated to a level that enabled them to work as schoolteachers, while even those who started work at an early age in working-class occupations had ambitions to improve their education and to do something different. Harriet Fawcett, a confectionery worker and cook, was self-educated, reading whatever she could get her hands on as a child, and claimed that she could “knit, tend cows and read books at the same time.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Elizabeth Andrews had to leave school at thirteen to help at home but continued to study at evening classes. She was thwarted, however, in her ambition to be a teacher or a missionary because there was no money for training and therefore had to take up dressmaking instead.Footnote ⁴⁵

The organizers emphasized the importance of the wife and mother in the home, but their own working lives were outside a domestic setting, and it was difficult to describe them as “housewives.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Mamie Anderson, for example, undertook paid work for the Labour movement both before and after her marriage to the future Member of Parliament Frank Anderson, while Margaret Gibb, who married Labour Party agent and ILP activist Tom Gibb, worked as a head teacher and took an active role in her local women's section. After her husband's death in 1927, she took over his role as labor agent in Sheffield before her appointment as an organizer in 1930.Footnote ⁴⁷

Another differentiating factor was motherhood. Only three of the married organizers had a child, and this could be seen as significant by women members. At the women's conference in 1928, Marion Phillips suggested that lay members of committees of inquiry into maternal mortality and family limitation should be “representatives of working women,” a group that she considered would include women who had to earn their own living like herself. This was opposed by many delegates from the sections, who joined with middle-class leaders of the birth control campaign, Dora Russell and Frida Laski, to argue that representatives should be “married working women” who had experience of maternity.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this instance, therefore, motherhood and marital status were seen as more important than class and education.

Political and Personal Relationships

It was not easy for women organizers as paid employees both to represent the needs of their section members and to carry out the directives of head office and the chief woman officer. It is difficult to assess how they experienced their working relationship with head office since their own published writings are silent on the issue. However, Lilian Anderson Fenn, in a letter to the assistant general secretary, Jim Middleton, does refer to the isolation organizers sometimes experienced. After thanking him for listening to her when she asked to change her job, she claimed that “I think at times the outside staff is cut off from Head Office and it is difficult to make personal requests.”Footnote ⁴⁹

There must have been tensions with the chief women officers over policies and working practices that could then be exacerbated by personality clashes. Marion Phillips was described by Beatrice Webb as having an “insolently critical attitude towards all persons and institutions” and a “sharp satirical tongue” that made her “much disliked by the other leading women in the labour movement.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Webb's assessments, however, need to be viewed with some care, since she tended to be harsh in her criticisms of labor colleagues. Women organizers themselves remembered Phillips as “considerate,” “understanding,” and “appreciative.”Footnote ⁵¹ Mary Sutherland often felt isolated as a woman in a male-dominated head office and was described by one organizer, Margaret Gibb, as “moody to a serious degree” as well as unpredictable in her state of mind. Nonetheless, Gibb also recalled in private correspondence that “there would be days that would be delightful.” Sutherland “was extremely sympathetic about any problems in one's job and understood the sort of life that we (political organisers) had to lead.”Footnote ⁵²

The organizers might well have felt a sense of solidarity with the chief women officers as they faced opposition to their work from other party activists or became exasperated with the attitudes of some section members who were not keen on political work. The words most commonly used in official publications to describe the work of the organizers were “selfless devotion,” “dedicated service,” and “loyalty to the movement.” Duncan Tanner has suggested that loyalty was a key part of the operational ideology of the Labour Party as it sought to establish itself, and this became even more crucial when it faced competition from the Communist Party and the United Front in the interwar years.Footnote ⁵³ Claire Collins has claimed that it was particularly important for Labour women, who wanted to gain the trust of the party, to show such loyalty and to differentiate themselves from nonparty political suffrage and women's rights organizations.Footnote ⁵⁴ And yet it could also be argued that the commitment of the organizers to achieving change through the Labour Party meant that their sense of loyalty was more deeply felt than this instrumental view implies. At the end of her letter to Jim Middleton, for example, Lilian Anderson Fenn claimed that whether she gained the job that she wanted at head office or was appointed somewhere else, “I will serve the Party as loyally and faithfully and well as I have tried to do in the past.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Other organizers sent letters to Middleton when he became general secretary of the party, thanking him for all his support and encouragement over the years, which showed a real affection toward him and an appreciation of his loyal work for the party from behind the scenes.Footnote ⁵⁶ Elizabeth Andrews in particular was very bitter toward the Communist Party and was consistent in appealing to women's sections in the South Wales coalfield to remain loyal to the Labour Party and “for the women not to be led away with the United Front.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The meaning of loyalty and “dedicated service” was complex. The hard work that organizers put into building up the party was not entirely selfless, since they were also able to develop fulfilling careers that gave them pleasure in working for a cause in which they believed. All of the women organizers were already committed activists in the labor movement. Many had worked as trade union organizers, including Agnes Hardie, with the Shop Workers' Union; Annie Somers, with the National Union of Clerks; and Mamie Anderson, with the Railway Clerks' Association, while both Harriet Fawcett and Agnes Lauder had been organizers for the National Federation of Women Workers. An exception to this was Annie Townley, whose experience had been gained as a paid organizer for the Election Fighting Fund, established to promote the alliance between the Labour Party and the women's suffrage movement before the First World War.

The organizers gained emotional satisfaction from their work, which they expressed in a series of articles entitled “I liked my job.” For Grace Tavener, politics was her hobby and she felt like “the most fortunate of mortals, when I was invited to spend all my time, and earn my living, in this most absorbing hobby … I never felt the least bit bored.”Footnote ⁵⁸ After her retirement because of poor health, Annie Somers echoed these views in a letter to Middleton when she claimed that “I know I often wish myself back on the job.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Political scientists have drawn attention to the importance of the emotions in providing the basis for motivating individuals to become involved in social movements, for creating solidarities with others, and for sustaining their activities over a long period.Footnote ⁶⁰ This was particularly important for women organizers, whose long hours of work and emotional commitment to labor politics dissolved the distinctions between paid employment, personal life, and “leisure” time. When Marion Phillips became chief woman officer, for example, Brian Harrison suggests that her personal and party ambitions were now fused.Footnote ⁶¹

Loyalty to labor politics was reinforced and sustained by close friendships with others who shared a similar vision. Margaret Gibb's reminiscences are typical of many when she wrote: “And above all there has been during all the years a growing, deepening friendship from Labour Party members, a friendship which has been the richest thing in life. All sorts of conditions of men and women, young, old, shy, confident, quiet, talkative—to work with them all—to share victory with them all has been utter joy.”Footnote ⁶² Some of these friendships included women from other countries. Sutherland, for example, visited Canada to give advice on how to organize women successfully and then continued to correspond with activists whom she met there.Footnote ⁶³

“Love, passion and politics” came together in a powerful combination when husbands and wives were equally involved in the movement and further dissolved the boundaries between personal and political life.Footnote ⁶⁴ All of the married organizers had the support of husbands who were also active in the labor movement. Elizabeth Andrews, for instance, dedicated her autobiography to “the memory of my husband whose devoted partnership and encouragement meant so much to me in all my public life.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The organizers also developed a good working relationship with other male activists. Lilian Anderson Fenn claimed that she had generous support from trade union leaders in the north east and from a host of male comrades who “appreciated so clearly the practicalities of a strong women's organisation.”Footnote ⁶⁶ When she first began her work in Wales, Elizabeth Andrews worked closely with the three political agents of the Miners' Federation, who helped her to organize miners' wives in the valleys.Footnote ⁶⁷ In contrast, in Bristol East it was ILP activists and city councillors who held positions of influence in the local Labour Party, which supported Annie Townley, while Gertrude Francis was very close to the Labour Party district organizer Fred Hopkins.Footnote ⁶⁸

Changing Women's Lives

Women organizers also made clear that their “dedicated service” had not been aimed at building up the party machinery for its own sake but because they saw it as a vehicle for achieving change in women's lives.Footnote ⁶⁹ This change would not just be of a material kind, achieved through welfare reforms, but would also include broadening women's horizons beyond the confines of the home. To that end, the organizers first tried to convince working-class housewives that politics were relevant to their lives. Phillips argued that “it is necessary to show that the ideals of the movement have a practical bearing upon daily life, and that by giving their strength and energy now to the work of political organisation we can achieve that reconstruction in peace time which is the best guarantee against future wars.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Secondly, they aimed to encourage women to stand for elected positions and to train them so that they could be effective in public roles. They ran weekend and summer schools where women could “gain confidence because they gain knowledge,” organized mock council meetings, and encouraged sections to engage speakers to cover party policies.Footnote ⁷¹ Elizabeth Andrews urged members to “make the sections the working woman's university.”Footnote ⁷²

Organizers were also engaged in broader campaigns to improve women's lives as well as in education and training. Annie Townley, for example, encouraged Bristol women's sections in their campaigns over housing, maternal welfare, and education. Mamie Anderson was active in the agitation in Manchester over maternal mortality after the death in childbirth of a young woman, Molly Taylor, who was turned away from a hospital, gave birth on the steps, and was then made to travel in an ambulance at a critical moment. On behalf of the Women's Advisory Council, Anderson took part in the public inquiry that led to a campaign for “safe motherhood” in the city and brought together women across a range of organizations.Footnote ⁷³ The organizers, under the direction of Marion Phillips, led the efforts of the women's sections in collecting money for miners' families during the 1926 General Strike. Elizabeth Andrews in particular was “at the centre of relief efforts” in South Wales during the miners' lockout that followed the General Strike and also during the depression of the 1930s.Footnote ⁷⁴

Elizabeth Andrews was exceptional in the range of her activities and clearly had outstanding abilities as an organizer, a propagandist, and a campaigner for welfare reforms. Under her guidance, women's sections and women's advisory councils “developed political and educational activities,” and she was described as having “a flair for pageantry” and “great gifts as a teacher.”Footnote ⁷⁵ She gave expert testimony to government inquiries on the heavy domestic workload of miners' wives and acted as liaison officer for the women's section of the Labour Party in Wales on several ministry committees during the Second World War.Footnote ⁷⁶ She communicated her ideas to a wide audience through her journalism, which included regular monthly reports and occasional articles for Labour Woman, and a women's column in the Colliery Workers' Magazine, where she used her official status as an organizer to give authority to her writings.Footnote ⁷⁷ Elizabeth Andrews did not just cover the material difficulties faced by working-class men and women, she also probed more deeply into the psychological damage caused by their conditions of employment and home life. In one article, entitled “Fear,” she pointed to the fear created by job insecurity and lack of education and argued that this destroyed liberty and made workers servile.Footnote ⁷⁸

In addition, Andrews worked closely with the councillor Rose Davies to put pressure on local authorities to implement the 1918 Child and Maternal Welfare Act to deal effectively with tuberculosis and to introduce nursery schools—the first was opened in the Rhondda Valley, an important coal-mining district in South Wales, in 1935.Footnote ⁷⁹ In all of these campaigns Elizabeth Andrews emphasized what would be gained if working-class women could have a voice in achieving and then shaping social welfare reforms. For example, she argued that although local councils had been asked to draft plans for nursery schools under the Education Act of 1918, she thought, personally, that they would neglect to do this since “it is chiefly men that sit on these bodies” and they would not see the issue from a woman's point of view. It was vital, therefore, for women voters to press for the reform and to help to make it a popular question.Footnote ⁸⁰ Andrews and Davies did manage to gain support from the Labour Party in South Wales for their reform efforts. Duncan Tanner suggests that pressure from these individual women was more effective than that of the sections because they were part of the party's official machinery.Footnote ⁸¹

Domesticity and Dirt

It is in her involvement in the agitation for pit head baths for miners, however, that we can see most clearly how Elizabeth Andrews attempted to develop a politics of everyday life. Labour women had long argued that work in the home should be seen in the same way as paid work in the labor market and that it was just as essential for the national economy.Footnote ⁸² A corollary of that position was the view that the home should be treated as a workplace and the conditions in which women worked should, and could, be improved by legislation. When housing reform became a key political issue toward the end of the war, it provided an opportunity to highlight the fact that “the woman's workshop is the home.”Footnote ⁸³ This approach was also central for those women who took up the issue of pit head baths.

Women had taken a role in the campaign for pit head baths from before the First World War. Katherine Bruce Glasier, a well-known national propagandist for the Independent Labour Party, wrote a pamphlet on the subject that was welcomed enthusiastically by Robert Smillie, MP, president of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, but was greeted with hostility by many mining trade unionists and rank-and-file miners and their wives, who were reluctant to change old customs.Footnote ⁸⁴ It was feared, for example, that miners would catch cold if they used the baths or that their spines would be weakened if they washed too frequently. At the end of the war Glasier continued to argue the need for the baths in the chapter she contributed to Women and the Labour Party, “the Labour woman's battle with dirt.” This might seem on the surface to be confirming women's identification with the home and domesticity and their need to support male workers, but the chapter's arguments focused on the need to solve problems faced by working-class women themselves. She suggested that “dirt” should be seen as a political issue since it was nothing less than “black slavery” when women had to wash the coals dust from their male relatives in houses where there was often no running water.Footnote ⁸⁵ They suffered injuries from carrying heavy coal and ill health from “germ laden pit clothes.” Reflecting on the meaning of citizenship for the new woman voter, she noted that “students of political psychology might do well to enquire whether a really free and democratic citizenship—built on the self-respect and frank sense of essential equality between the different citizens—can ever be built up without this reform.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Dirt was also a theme at the annual conference of the Women's Labour League in 1918, when the chairman, Mrs. Lowe, made an explicit link between the workplace and the home. She referred to the “callousness of the employing classes towards the never ending toil of the working housewife who has to cleanse the home of the dirt which should remain at the mine or working place where it is made.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Elizabeth Andrews, a close friend of Katherine Bruce Glasier, took up the cause of pit head baths in the immediate postwar years and was responsible for making it “one of the central issues of social reform of the day.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In her evidence to the Sankey Commission she drew attention to the importance of such baths for the health of women and children as well as of miners.Footnote ⁸⁹ In urging women to support the measure, however, she went beyond health questions, claiming that it would mean “shorter hours for the miner's wife,” which in turn would enable her to take an interest in local and national affairs that affected her life. Adapting the familiar words of the Communist Manifesto to women in the home, she wrote: “Women awake, you have nothing to lose but the chains of dirty work, and physical strain, but you have a new world to gain, a world that will give you and your children a fuller and freer life to develop the best that's in you.”Footnote ⁹⁰

During the 1920s, the movement for pit head baths had become part of the official program of the miners' union, and women were no longer so central to the campaign. Nonetheless, Elizabeth Andrews still used her column in the Colliery Workers' Magazine to point out how important the issue was for women, suggesting that there should be a pit baths committee in each area that would include representatives of miners and their wives.Footnote ⁹¹ This was a campaign that could bring together the interests of men and women, but it also highlighted that both sexes benefited in different ways. For women, there would be physical improvements, but also they would gain more personal space for other activities. Thus, Andrews disagreed with those who thought that it would be enough to have baths within the home, since this meant that the wives of miners would still be employed by the mine owners (without pay) to clear up the dirt in their homes that should have been left at the pit top.Footnote ⁹² Along with housing, it was another campaign that drew attention to the fact that conditions such as dirt that were taken seriously at the workplace were seen as far less significant and were certainly depoliticized if they were found within the home. Katharine Bruce Glasier, who claimed that “‘Industrial dirt' has always pricked the pores of my conscience,” was unusual, therefore, in suggesting that industrial dirt was found both in public workplaces and in the home and in linking the two together.Footnote ⁹³

Woman Focused?

The activities outlined above suggest that women organizers could be seen as woman focused. They spent most of their time in attempting to persuade working-class women that politics affected their day-to-day lives and in trying to do something about the problems that they faced. Their agenda for the most part arose from the lives and priorities of the women they were trying to organize as well as from their own experiences, and these were not always the same as the ones emphasized by middle-class women both inside and outside the labor movement. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, marital status and motherhood could cut across class, and therefore the question of representing working-class women's interests was not necessarily straightforward.

When they drew attention to the interrelationship between family life and the industrial workplace—as in the campaign over pit head baths—organizers did raise issues that were controversial. On the other hand, they did not take a key role in the debates around birth control, family allowances, and the constitutional position of the women's conference in the 1920s that posed a challenge to certain gender roles and inequalities. Elizabeth Andrews never addressed these issues in her monthly columns and, despite highlighting the high rates of maternal mortality, did not document the local campaigns in Wales on birth control. She spoke positively in her autobiography about family allowances, which were now party policy. However, she had expressed little support for the scheme in the 1920s when it attracted opposition, in particular from the trade union movement.Footnote ⁹⁴

Proposals for family allowances were usually greeted with suspicion by labor movements throughout Europe and North America in the 1920s, since it was feared that they would undermine the male family wage.Footnote ⁹⁵ Such fears were exacerbated by the example of France, where the introduction of family allowances had led to wage reductions and had been proposed by conservative groups concerned about demographic decline.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Britain the debate did not necessarily follow a straightforward division between men and women or between the rank-and-file and the leadership.Footnote ⁹⁷ Marion Phillips continued with her prewar position that it would be better if women received services in kind rather than a cash payment, but the experience of separation allowances during the war meant that other women leaders, and the majority of rank-and-file women, had greater sympathy with family allowances in the interwar years. Section members were suspicious of feminists, such as Eleanor Rathbone, who were willing to accept a reduction in male wages but were more comfortable with the arguments of the ILP that family allowances would reduce poverty and redistribute wealth.Footnote ⁹⁸

In this instance Marion Phillips and the organizers did not take a lead on an issue that had gathered increasing support among women in the sections. The freedom for organizers to express their own views would have been curtailed by their status as employees since they were accountable to the National Executive Committee and not to women in the sections.Footnote ⁹⁹ It is perhaps significant that Agnes Hardie was vocal in advocating greater sex equality in the interwar years when she was an MP rather than an organizer.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nonetheless, the reticence of organizers to deal with controversial questions that raised gender inequalities in an explicit way also stemmed from complicated personal attitudes and political positions that mirrored those of male and female members of the Labour Party as a whole.

The organizers did not simply follow the party line of the male leadership. They were aware that the views of rank-and-file women were often based on class solidarity and a common interest with male relatives in maintaining family income. The organizers' own belief that the achievement of socialism, through the vehicle of the Labour Party, was the best way to improve working women's lives was a deep-seated one. Thus, even when she was a suffrage organizer, Annie Townley expressed impatience with the middle-class, liberal members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies who were reluctant to campaign for the Election Fighting Fund on behalf of Labour candidates.Footnote ¹⁰¹ She was prepared, however, in the interwar years to organize regional conferences on the subject of family allowances and birth control, whereas Elizabeth Andrews was more reticent on the subject. Steeped as she was in the politics of the coalfield, Andrews was concerned that when the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry suggested that family allowances could be a part of a new wage structure, this would be another means to divide the working class.Footnote ¹⁰² Over some issues, therefore, organizers could be pulled in different directions between their paid position, their loyalty to the Labour Party, and the immediate priorities of rank-and-file women in the sections.