Class rather than gender: Women in the Scottish Labour Movement, 1900-1945
p. 153-162
Résumé
“Scottish labour history: no woman’s land?” was the provocative title of Jane McDermid’s article for the Labour History Review’s spring issue of 1993. Indeed, to paraphrase Cairns Craig, women were out of history, at least of labour history. Since then, the balance has been redressed to take into account the contribution of women to the workers’ organisations and struggles. The aim of this paper is to try and assess the role of women in the Scottish labour movement in its industrial, political, educational and commercial activities during the first half of the twentieth century. Women were particularly active in the latter two fields, more precisely in the socialist Sunday schools and the co-operative societies, which they often used as stepping stones to a seat in local government. I shall then move on to the often underestimated role of women in industrial action, then to their minimal presence in Parliament, and wind up with a case study of socialist women and birth control.
Texte intégral
1“Scottish labour history: no woman’s land?” was the provocative title of Jane McDermid’s article for the Labour History Review’s spring issue of 1993 (Vol. 48: 1). Indeed, to paraphrase Cairns Craig, women were out of history, at least of labour history. Hugh Clegg’s monumental, and momentous, A History of British Trade Unions since 1899, volume II: 1911-1933, contains 91 very short biographies of “leading trade unionists of the period who are mentioned in the text”, out of which… two are devoted to women.1 A quick scan through the indexes of most histories of the Scottish working-class movements published from roughly 1960 to 1990 will produce gey few female first names.2 It is only since Eleanor Gordon’s pioneering study of 1991, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850-1914,3 that the balance has been redressed to take into account the contribution of women to the movement. The labour movement is usually perceived as having two wings, the industrial and the political. It would be more aptly described as having four wings, two of which have atrophied through evolution: the two already mentioned plus the educational and the commercial wings. Women were particularly active in the latter two, more precisely in the socialist Sunday schools and the co-operative societies. I shall briefly deal with these two organisations, then with women in local government, move on to industrial action, then to women in Parliament, and wind up with a case study of socialist women and birth control.
2The Scottish wholesale co-operative society was founded in 1869. It adhered to the “Rochdale principles” of the first co-operative store, founded in the Lancashire town of that name in 1844. Alongside its commercial raison d’être, the movement had social and political activities. AScottish co-operative women’s guild was set up in 1889. In 1919, the Scottish guildswomen – numbering almost 30,000 – launched a campaign against “the government’s support of the Russian reactionaries”. In 1920, they campaigned for the abolition of the House of Lords, in 1922 for the recruitment of women into the police forces, in 1926 for family allowances, in 1927 for female suffrage from the age of 21. They constantly advocated unity of action between the Scottish Co-operative Women’s Guild, the Trade Unions organizing women, and the Women’s Sections of the Labour party (there were 88 of these in Scotland by 1925, run by the Scottish organiser, Mary Sutherland). A number of local councillors were trained in the co-operative movement. The first women to be elected to the Education authorities were members of the Cooperative guild, Agnes Hardie in 1910, Agnes Dollan in 1919. Mary Barbour, a member of the new Co-operative party,4 was the first woman to become a Glasgow city councillor in 1920, followed by Jean Roberts in 1923. Writing in The Scottish Co-operator (August 30, 1930), the latter was brave enough to tackle a cherished Scottish myth: “We braggards boast about our Scottish educational system. We jeer at the Sassenach’s lack of interest in education. And yet, we release thousands of children from school and set them to work in factories, yards, shops, etc.” Indeed, releasing twelve-year olds from school was standard practice in most industrial areas. Fife was the exception:
Years before I was born, Grandfather Lee and a handful of others […] were already members of the school-boards. Steadily they pressed for free books, better schools, free secondary education, maintenance grants for all… If our parents could manage to feed and clothe us, the education authority did the rest. […] That was one of the by-products of a lively socialist movement in the industrial parts of Fife.
Lee, Journey 60
3A collier’s daughter and granddaughter, Jennie Lee attended the socialist Sunday school of Cowdenbeath. In her autobiography of 1963, she recalls how she learned to recite from a poem called ‘The Image of God’, by the miner poet, Joe Corrie, and adds in her account of her life with Aneurin Bevan:
Where would I ever had heard Oscar Wilde’s the happy prince in an ordinary school? Or learned to sing ‘We are children but one day / We’ll be big and strong and say / None shall slave and none shall slay./ Comrades all together’. We were thoroughly indoctrinated with a wealth of idealism that inspired some of us for the rest of our lives. Looking back, I can find nothing to deplore and everything to praise in all that we were taught in our [Socialist] Sunday School.
Lee, Life 29
4As we know, Scotland was the birthplace and a stronghold of the socialist Sunday school movement. Founded in Glasgow in 1896 by a number of Keir Hardie’s ILP middle-class friends, including several women,5 the movement could boast 153 schools in Britain at its apex in 1921, one third of which were in Scotland, where they were attended by some 2,500 children and young adults. These two institutions trained and propelled a number of young women into local politics.
5Women were allowed to stand for election to city and burgh councils from 1907, and while some of England’s large cities had female councillors before the war, Edinburgh returned its first female town councillor in 1919, followed by Glasgow in 1920, Aberdeen in 1930 and Dundee in 1935, some four years after it had elected a female MP.6 While Liverpool could boast a female lord mayor as early as 1927, it took Glasgow until 1960 to choose a female lord provost, the aforementioned Jean Roberts. Noting that “in contrast with the situation in parliamentary elections, the available evidence suggests that Scottish women had comparatively less electoral success in city council elections than did English women”, Kenneth Baxter rightly points out two major structural differences between the two systems: English councils had a number of aldermen, who were not elected but appointed, thus clearing the way for new and less experienced candidates, including women. Typically, an English (lord) mayor was elected for a one-year term, a Scottish (lord) provost for a three-year term, meaning that the office was vacant much less frequently (Baxter 260-83).
6Two middle-class Scotswomen were prominent trade unionists in the early years of the twentieth century, one in London, one in Scotland. Born to the owner of a drapery business, Mary Macarthur became secretary of the Ayr branch of the Shop Assistants’ Union in 1901. In 1903, she moved to London where she became Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, took part in the formation of the National Anti-Sweating League and, in 1906, of the National Federation of Women Workers, a general labour union “open to all women in unorganised trades or who were not admitted to their appropriate trade union”.7 She was elected to the presidency of the new body and, after the war (which she opposed), to the executive committee of the Labour party, shortly before her untimely death in 1921.
7The daughter of a ship’s captain, Margaret Irwin, a graduate of St Andrews University and Glasgow College of Art, became organising secretary of the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades, which by 1895 numbered some 100,000 members. She produced reports for the Royal Commission on Labour, detailing the awful conditions of shop girls, laundry workers, and others. Urging that Scotland needed its own unions, not just branches of national bodies, she was the secretary of the Scottish Trade Unions Congress for its first three years (1897-1900), but declined a long-term appointment, lest prejudice against a woman in the job should harm the new body.8
8Whether women were organised or not (approximately one woman in twelve was a trade-union member by 1914, as against one man out of four), they were willing to take part in industrial action whenever deemed necessary. Three of the principal strikes during the Great Labour Unrest of 1910-14 saw the heavy involvement of women: the dispute at the American-owned Singer sewing machine factory at Clydebank in 1911; the jute and flax workers’ strike at Dundee in 1912; and the net curtain workers’ strike at Kilbirnie in Ayrshire in 1913. It was women workers who took the lead in all three disputes. At Dundee for instance, the employers locked out 30,000 workers, mostly female. The 2,000 spinners at Lochee, who were mostly Irish girls and women, defied their union, the Jute and Flax Workers Union, and refused to return to work, eventually gaining union recognition and collective bargaining. There were other, less publicized strikes: in 1910, some 2,000 very young thread workers at Neilston, near Paisley, went on strike. At Bo’ness, West Lothian, over 600 male and 100 female woodyard workers downed tools, and the latter did not shirk from giving the blacklegs brought in by the employers a piece of their minds.9 In 1911, the United Turkey Red workers at the Vale of Leven in West Dunbartonshire went on strike, the National Federation of Women Workers demanding a 10 % increase in wages for all workers and a reduction of the working week to 55 hours. As William Kenefick has found out, the Board of Arbitration awarded the Bo’ness men wage increases but not the women, and the Board of Trade gave the Vale of Leven women a wage increase which was 50 % less than that set for the men. The women rejected the offer but, for want of male support, eventually had to give in. As Kenefick puts it, bluntly but lucidly: “where women directly competed with men in the labour market, they failed to attract the support of the male-dominated union and labour movement, and of the wider community.”10 The point was made painfully obvious in the immediate aftermath of World War one. When the war started, extra labour was recruited from other parts of Britain and from the USA to work in the Scottish armaments industry. As a result of this influx, landlords hiked up the rents. As early as April 1915, hundreds of working-class women in Glasgow refused to pay the new rents. In November, with the support of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, 20,000 homes were taking part in the rent strike. Lloyd George had to rush through Parliament a ‘Rent Restrictions Act’ which kept rents at their pre-war level. The “revolutionary” workers of the CWC, most of whom were skilled engineers, weren’t particularly grateful: at the end of the war, their unions, most notably the Amalgamated Engineering Union, demanded the “termination of all dilutees’ work”, i.e. the replacement of female labour hired during the war by card-carrying (i.e. male) members of the engineers’ union.
9By all accounts, women pulled their weight in the various strike committees, picket lines, demonstrations, soapbox speeches which were features of the ‘General Strike’11 of 1926. As is well known, many of the blacklegs hired during the strike by the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies were university students. One of the very few notable exceptions was Jennie Lee, then a student at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of its Labour club. After her final exams she returned to Fife where the locked-out miners fought on for months, and made a name for herself as a fiery outdoor speaker. In 1927, she was appointed delegate to the ILP National Conference and selected as Labour candidate for North Lanark, a mining constituency, where she was elected in the by-election of 1928 at the age of 24. Breaking with tradition she delivered a highly controversial maiden speech a month later. “O for another Jennie Lee, a woman with attitude who used her maiden speech in 1928 to attack the chancellor, Winston Churchill, for ‘cant, corruption and incompetence’”, Kenneth Morgan wrote in his review of her biography by Patricia Hollis, in which he contrasts her “sparkiness” with the “blandness of ‘Blair’s Babes’”, the 107 women Labour MPs elected in 1997.12
10She lost her seat in the 1931 Labour rout. In 1932, the ILP disaffiliated from Labour, and she stayed out of the Labour Party until shortly before the 1945 general election when she was returned to Parliament as member for Cannock, a Midlands mining constituency. The 393 Labour MPs elected in the landslide of 1945 included a mere 21 women. One of them was Jean Mann, the Labour MP for Motherwell, 1945-61. She recollects in her memoirs how she had been turned down in 1935 by the Dundee divisional Labour party because she wouldn’t “buy her selection”, as a result of which a sponsored candidate was chosen13. As a matter of fact, before 1939 the largest number of women in any Parliament was 15 in 1931, out of a total of 615 MPs, none of the women representing Labour, whose DLPs often required financial sponsorship of one of the male-dominated unions, putting women at a disadvantage.14
11Jennie Lee the firebrand and Jean Mann the moderate had one thing in common: they couldn’t be bothered with “women’s issues”, except, obviously, for the suffrage struggle. Two members of the ILP,15 Jennie Allan (daughter of a shipowner) and Helen Crawfurd (a future co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain) set up the Glasgow branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. “In Glasgow, the office-bearers had difficulty in convincing the more conservative ladies of the non-militant Association for Women’s Suffrage that the WSPU was not in fact an ILP organization.” (King 4)16 As for the rest, Lily Gair Wilkinson, an Edinburgh member of the Socialist Labour Party, voiced a commonplace opinion in her pamphlet of 1906, Revolutionary Socialism and the Women’s movement:
The interests of working women are the same as the interests of working men – directly opposed to the interests of the members of the capitalist class, women and men alike… The question is one of practical interest for the women of the bourgeoisie, but for the women of the working class the practical question is the question of class antagonism. The feminist movement, like other reform movements, is of direct interest to the bourgeoisie only, and not to the workers. Feminism, in its larger sense, claims equal political and social rights for women as for men within the framework of the present social system… The enemy of the women workers is not the male sex, but the capitalist class.17
12“A socialist who just happened to be a woman”, Jennie Lee never had much sympathy with feminism – she thought it represented merely the sectional interests of middle-class women. Like her closest colleague, the combative Ellen Wilkinson, the ILP MP for Jarrow, “the town that was murdered”, she was concerned with class rather than gender.
13One major issue highlights their attitude: birth control. Dora Russell, the honorary secretary of the Workers’ Birth Control Group, expostulated in the Forward of March 23, 1926:
In your last issue Miss Mary Sutherland complains that insufficient attention is given in Scotland to the organization of women. This probably explains the stupidity and indifference of the Clydeside MPs on such women’s questions as Birth Control and maternity care. Not one of them voted for Mr Thurtle’s Bill (the local authorities (birth control) enabling bill). Countless down-trodden silent women of Clydeside who seem indifferent to politics can be stirred to responsibility by an intelligent propaganda on Birth control18.
14The next issue of Forward (April 3, 1926) carried an open letter to Dora Russell by Jean Mann, at the time a member of the Rothesay ILP:
The rich have robbed the worker of his gold but he still has his wealth – like Silas Marner – in the soft, warm curls of the little child. And surely the aim of our party is to be found, not in Birth Control, but rather in the sentiments of Burns: “To make a happy fireside clime…”
15The matter was then taken up by Arthur Woodburn, secretary of the Scottish Labour Council, in Forward, 25 Sept. 1926:
Will Birth Control cure poverty? A policy for Labour or a capitalist stunt? [...] When the industrial reserve army grows too large, birth control becomes a necessity for capitalism. [...] Labour must beware of this red herring. It can in no way solve the problem of poverty. It is purely a difficulty due to the capitalist system. [...] In even extreme cases many of the mothers of large families ask for no other vocation, if they could obtain the necessaries of life.
16To which Dora Russell replied: “The shadow of threatened religious opposition blinds many Scottish members and organizers to the reality of possible support [for Birth Control] from the awakening women.” (Forward, Feb.20, 1928).
17However, the threat was not so shadowy: at the November 1927 municipal election, the Glasgow ILP group lost five of its councillors (four of whom were Catholic) as a result of a campaign led by the Catholic weekly The Glasgow Observer against the supporters of, or rather the non-opponents to, the Birth Control News, a series of pamphlets which had been made available in the city’s public libraries. Which brings us back to Jennie Lee’s defeat in 1931: In North Lanark, the miners’ leaders felt that “their” seat had been taken from them, and the Catholic church blackballed every MP who had voted down an amendment to Trevelyan’s Education Bill, which would have given greater provision to Catholic schools. Lee remembers how three leaders of the Scottish ILP, Maxton, McGovern and Campbell Stephen:
When the vote was about due [...] literally got hold of me to explain to me ‘the facts of life’. In the west of Scotland I could challenge the authority of the Labour Party and still survive, but if I also antagonized the Catholic vote there was not the slightest hope I could hold my seat. (Lee Life 94)
18When he was Attlee’s Scottish Secretary, Arthur Woodburn famously quipped about the so-called ‘Red Clydeside’ of the interwar years: “The most revolutionary action that took place in Scotland at the time was when T.D. Clarke’s wife asked Davie Kirkwood to wash the dishes.”19 It is well known that Jennie Lee’s mother devoted a lot of her time and energy to cooking meals for her daughter’s socialist comrades whom she put up time and again at the family home. One could however argue that it was revolutionary for a lass o’ pairts to move up from coal miner’s daughter to university graduate and on to Member of Parliament. In 1964, Harold Wilson unexpectedly made Jennie Lee Minister for the Arts, an appointment which was widely seen as ‘a wreath for Nye’, her husband Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service, who had died in 1960. Her six years in the post saw the setting up of the National Theatre, the English National Opera, the National Film School, and of course the University of the Air, Wilson’s idea which she took up, better known as the Open University, which was to prove one of Britain’s unique contributions to social progress.
Bibliographie
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Bibliography
Civardi, Christian, Le Mouvement ouvrier écossais, 1900-1931. Travail, culture, politique, Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997.
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201434.001.0001 :Gordon, Eleanor, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850-1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Graves, Pamela, Labour Women: Women in British Working Class Politics 1918– 1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hollis, Patricia, Jennie Lee. A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hunt, Cathy, The National Federation of Women Workers 1906-1921, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625178.001.0001 :Kenefick, William, Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872 to 1932, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
Lee, Jennie, This Great Journey, London: McGibbon & Kee, 1963.
Lee, Jennie, My Life with Nye, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Notes de bas de page
1 One of whom is a Scotswoman based in London, Mary Macarthur (see p. 4). Clegg, Hugh Armstrong, A History of British Trade Unions since 1899, volume II: 1911-1933, Oxford University Press, 1985, 572-581.
2 In the index to one classic book of 1989, Donnachie, Ian, Ch. Harvie & I.S. Wood (eds.) Forward! Labour Politics in Scotland 1888-1988, one woman is not even graced with a first name (Irwin, Miss) while another’s surname is misspelt (Crawford, Helen). For the real Helen Crawfurd, see 5.
3 Gordon, Eleanor, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850-1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. See also, among others: Thane, Patrick, ‘The Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906–1945’ in Smith, H.L. (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, Aldershot, 1990; Breitenbach, Elizabeth, and Gordon, Eleanor (eds), Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800–1945, Edinburgh U.P., 1992; Graves, P., Labour Women: Women in British Working Class Politics 1918–1939, Cambridge U.P., 1994; Kenefick, William and A. McIvor (eds), Roots of Red Clydeside 1910-1914? Labour Unrest and Industrial Relations in West Scotland, Edinburgh U.P., 1996; Knox, William, Lives of Scottish Women: Women and Scottish Society, 1800–1980, Edinburgh U.P., 2006; Abrams, L., E. Gordon, D. Simonton and E. Yeo (eds.), Gender in Scottish Society since 1700, Edinburgh U.P., 2006; Baxter, Kenneth, “‘The Advent of a Woman Candidate was seen... as outrageous’: Women, Party Politics and Elections in Interwar Scotland and England”, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 33.3, 2013, 260-283; as well as several articles in the Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society.
4 Founded in 1917, it agreed on an electoral pact with the Labour party, with candidates selected in common using the description of Labour and Co-operative Party.
5 Katherine and John Bruce Glasier, Lizzie Glasier, Carolyne Martin, Margaret Macmillan, Clarice McNab, Archie MacArthur, Alex Gossip, William Martin Haddow. See Civardi, Christian, “The Scottish Labour Movement’s Educational Activities, 1890s-1920s”, pp. 95-107 in Graham, Lesley (ed.), The Production and Dissemination of Knowledge in Scotland, Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2017.
6 The Conservative Florence Horsbrugh, MP 1931-45.
7 Hunt, Cathy, The National Federation of Women Workers 1906-1921, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014.
8 “AMiss Irwin topped the poll… but she declined the chair because ‘feeling was not quite ripe enough for a woman to occupy such a position’.” Craigen, James, “The Scottish T.U.C.– Scotland’s Assembly of Labour”, p. 134 in Donnachie et al., op. cit. Hence the ‘Irwin, Miss’ of the index in note 2, 1 above.
9 “A feature of the onslaught was the plucky and effective assistance of the women: The Glasgow “scabs” learned to their hurt what a handy little instrument a pit-prop can be when it is swung by a Bo’ness woodyard lassie.” Forward, June 4, 1910, quoted in Kenefick, William, “A Comparative interregional study of strike activity among women workers in Scotland 1910 to 1911”, forthcoming, 2.
10 Ibid., p. 2. See also Kenefick, William, Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c. 1872 to 1932, Edinburgh U.P., 2007.
11 Or more properly ‘national strike’, since the metal industries, engineering, shipbuilding, etc., weren’t called out until the beginning of the second week of the strike, two days before the TUC called the whole thing off.
12 Kenneth O. Morgan, review of Hollis, Patricia, Jennie Lee. A Life, Oxford University Press, 1997, in the London Review of Books, 8 Nov. 1997.
13 Jean Mann, Woman in Parliament, London: Odhams, 1962, 44.
14 Which is why Labour women persuaded their leadership in the 1990s to allow All-Women Shortlists (AWS) for candidate selection in a number of constituencies, which greatly increased female representation.
15 Although it affiliated to the LP in 1906, the ILP kept one major specificity: individual membership, as opposed to membership of the LP through a trades union; hence, a number of middle-class men and women joined the ILP in Scotland, the party’s stronghold.
16 Elspeth King, the Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement, Glasgow, 1978, 4. See also Leneman, Leah, A Guid Cause: the Women’Suffrage Movement in Scotland, Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1996.
17 Wilkinson, Lily Gair, Revolutionary Socialism and the Women’s Movement, Edinburgh: Socialist Labour Party, probably 1906, 2, 7, 23, 28.
18 Dora Black was born into an English upper-middle-class family. A graduate of Cambridge, she married Bertrand Russell. In 1924, she joined with Katharine Glasier, Susan Lawrence, Margaret Bondfield, Dorothy Jewson and H. G. Wells to found the Workers’ Birth Control Group. As mentioned above (p. 2), Mary Sutherland was the Scottish organiser of the Women’s Sections of the Labour Party.
19 A skilled engineer, David Kirkwood was one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee, and then the ILP MP for Dumbarton, 1922-51. He took the Labour whip after the ILP’s disaffiliation, and became Lord Bearsden in 1952.
Auteur
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Christian Civardi
Professor Emeritus of British studies at the University of Strasbourg. A founding member of the Société Française d’Études Écossaises, he has published widely on Scottish history, society and culture, notably Le Mouvement ouvrier écossais, 1900-1931 (1997), L’Écosse depuis 1528 (1998), L’Écosse contemporaine (2002) and translated William McIlvanney’s novel Docherty.
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