Abstract
The single greatest cause of change in the organization and activities of the Labour Party and women’s groups was war. The experience, during the First World War, of organizing a Party consisting of affiliated organizations, which were not always of the same mind, was an important factor in the adoption of a new Labour Party constitution. This provided for individual Party membership and made the constituency the heart of Party organization but entailed the disbanding of the Women’s Labour League. Labour women’s contribution to the war effort was a factor in the creation of the Standing Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organizations (SJC) that, to an extent, replaced the League. In the Second World War, the constituency base, which had served the Party well, was disrupted by bombing, evacuation and conscription into the services or industry. Greater workplace organization favoured the Communist Party. During both wars, women’s participation in the labour force greatly increased. In the Second World War older and married women formed a greater part of the female workforce and women worked for the first time alongside men in heavy industries. As a result, women’s union membership started to grow; industrial women’s representation in the Labour movement was thus strengthened.
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Notes
See Collette, The International Faith: Labour’s Attitudes to European Socialism, 1918–1939 (Ashgate, 1998), Chapter 6.
Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement 1918–1928 (London, 1997);
see also Collette, ‘Women and Politics’ in Chris Wrigley (ed) Early Twentieth Century Britain (Blackwell, 2003).
For Averil Sanderson Furniss’s comments see Averil Sanderson Furniss, ‘Citizenship of Women’, The Book of the Labour Party (London, 1925), p. 254 and
Sanderson Furniss and Marion Phillips, The Working Woman’s House (London, 1920), pp. 10, 49.
See Collette, ‘Questions of Gender: Labour and Women’, in Brian Brivati and Richard Heffernan (eds), The Labour Party: A Centenary History (MacMillan, Press Ltd., 2000), reproduced with permission of Palgrave MacMillan. Labour Party affiliation, Standing Joint Committee archives (SJC), Labour Party archives, Mary Sutherland to Dear Mr Gaitskell, 12 January 1949.
Matthew Worley, ‘Building the Labour Party: Labour Party Activism in Five British Counties between the Wars’, Labour History Review, 70 (1) 2005, p. 7 writes that membership of women’s councils might exceed that of their male counterpart but were ‘dwarfed by the affiliated membership of the trades unions’.
Marion Phillips and Grace Taverner, Women’s Work in the Labour Party: Notes for Speakers and Workers’ Classes with Charts and Useful Forms (Labour Party, n.d.) and, cited, Marion Phillips, DSc (Econ.), JP, Organisation of Women within the Labour Party: A Handbook for Officers and Members of Women’s Sections (Labour Party, 1921), p. 2. These are remarkably similar to the 1993 Labour Party pamphlet, Women in the Labour Party.
SJC, deputation to London County Council, 1934; Eleanor Barton, Married Women and Paid Positions: A Plea for Solidarity Amongst Women (Co-operative Guild, 1934); TUC and Labour Party, Employment of Married Women, n.d.
First printed in Labour Heritage Women’s Research Committee Bulletin 1, Spring 1986. See Sue Bruley, ‘The Politics of Food: Gender, Family, Community and Collective Feeding in the General Strike and Miners’ Lockout of 1926’, Twentieth Century British History, 18 (1) 2007 which includes interviews with some of the women involved.
First published in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, Siän Reynolds and Rose Piper (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006). Mary Sutherland’s papers are kept in the Labour Party Archives and Study Centre, John Rylands Library, Manchester University, but her personal papers were destroyed by her nephew after her death.
First appeared in Davis, Joan, Labour Heritage Women’s Research Committee Bulletin 2, Spring 1987.
Helen Boak, ‘Women in Weimar Politics’, European History Quarterly 20 (3) July 1990.
Sara Huysmans, ‘Women’s Suffrage in Belgium’, Labour Magazine, iii (7) November 1927.
Leff, Ann, ‘My Brilliant Career in War Work’, Labour Heritage Women’s Research Committee Bulletin 5, 1996.
Joan Davis ‘A life in the Labour Movement’, Labour Heritage Women’s Research Bulletin no.2 (1987); Bertha Elliot and others contributing to Labour Heritage Conference, 18 July 1992.
Amabel Williams-Ellis, ‘Is Women’s Place in the Home’ Labour Discussion Series no.9 (London 1947) p. 3, 9.
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© 2009 Christine Collette
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Collette, C. (2009). War: The Standing Joint Committee. In: The Newer Eve. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230236981_3
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