Women, Trade unions and Learning: Finding the Women Who Were Always There
- gavinmccann9
- Jul 13
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 14
Who Gets Remembered?
At a recent workshop organised by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and led by brilliant trade union educator Cilla Ross, we were asked to consider the prominence of women in the story of trade union history. How many women are listed in the index of those standard texts, and why is that?
The Problem with Neat Histories
As a man trying to write a trade union history book, this is something I am acutely aware of. It’s not just about including women — it’s about ensuring there’s no condescension, no tokenism, and no clumsy missteps that ignore the nuance behind the omission of women from the historical recording. It’s all too easy to accept broad-brush explanations that offer neat conclusions. There are a few common missteps that could easily be made: most notably, ignoring women entirely or making sweeping generalisations without lived experience to back them up. One option could be to broaden my very strict definition of ‘trade union education’ — that is, education supported or organised by a trade unionist. If women were excluded from the senior ranks of trade unions, they were nonetheless highly active in other bodies such as the Women’s Co-Operative Guild. One of the Guild’s co-founders, Mary Lawrenson, was a teacher and the daughter of a printer and trade unionist. She became the first woman elected to a co-operative education committee with her appointment at the Royal Arsenal Co-Operative (RACS), which has been described as essentially an Amalgamated Society of Engineers body. This also raises questions about the role of teachers, who were perceived as middle-class, and therefore outside the scope of the working-class remit of the TUC.
Women’s Exclusion: Culture and Control
In Sheila Rowbotham’s words, women have been ‘hidden from history’[1] for many reasons. For one, they were often excluded from the workplace altogether. But even when they weren’t, trade union history is riddled with examples where men saw women as a threat. The strong Christian culture within the working class also reinforced the idea that women belonged at home, as carers and home-makers. And even when they did work outside the home, they were still expected to be the home-makers and the child-carers. This left little time for leisure, let alone organising and learning. In his autobiography, Frederick Rogers, the self-taught trade unionist, describes, in detail, his motion to the TUC calling for women not to be employed six weeks before, or six months after the birth of a child. “The men, with one solitary exception, voted in favour of the resolution, and it was carried. The women — to a woman — voted against it.” Even when maternity care was considered, it was being ‘done to’ the woman, rather than an attempt to change the structure of the society on which it is based. The first trade unionists be elected to Parliament, Thomas Burt (Northumberland Miners) and Henry Broadhurst (Stonemasons) had earlier campaigned to exclude women from working in coal mines, something resisted by the Women’s Trade Union League.
Within unions, too, women were deliberately sidelined. Alice Foley’s experience (see https://www.librariesgaveuspower.net/post/a-day-with-alice) is a case in point. Even in sectors, such as the cotton industry, where women made up the large part of the workforce, union leadership remained firmly in male hands, with women such as Alice actively blocked. More recently, during the strike by women at Ford’s Dagenham plant many male trade unionists were reluctant to support the campaign by the women to be treated as skilled workers, concerned that women’s desire for ‘pin money’ would disrupt the grading structures for men.
Invisible Architects: The Case of Mary Bridges Adams
My book is not a general history of trade unions — it focuses on lifelong learning. Teasing out the threads of that story is challenging enough, and identifying women’s roles within it can be even harder. But it is there, and it must be included.
Two of the most important figures within the story I want to tell are Alice Foley and Mary Bridges Adams. I’ve written about Alice before, but Mary was someone whose role was a mystery to me until I read Jane Martin’s Making Socialists – Mary Bridges Adams and the fight for knowledge and power 1855-1939. Before that, the main reason I’d hear Mary’s name was in the histories of the early WEA pioneers who, it is fair to say, weren’t exactly her biggest fans as she came down decisively in the Labour College ‘camp’ in the war of words with the WEA.
At the time I discovered Mary’s story, I had been considering placing Will Thorne of the Gasworkers at the heart of my story. (I probably still will — it’s a fantastic story: an illiterate man who famously signed his wedding certificate with an X, formed a union, led a hugely successful strike, and later became an MP). It was Will’s experiences of poverty that ensured the TUC debated schooling each year — calling for free education for working-class children, free school meals, and improvements to children’s health through medical checks and physical exercise.
The early Labour party, dominated by union leaders raised in poverty and frustrated by the limited education they’d received, adopted the TUC’s policies on education. But while reading Professor Martin’s book, I came across this striking excerpt from an article which Mary wrote for The Cotton Times in February 1916:
“My work in education…has been on the lines of the education programme, which for so many successive years was endorsed at the Trades Union Congress. This was not strange, seeing that the programme was wholly of my drafting, and that the introduction of the most far-reaching and fundamental of the proposals contained in it was due to my initiative....Not only so, the Education Bill, introduced into the House of Commons by many members of the Labour Party soon after the 1906 election, was of my drafting, and, as I did this without the aid of a lawyer, the Bill means what it says, and says what it means: so much so, indeed, that its appearance caused no small alarm in high circles, as may be seen from the criticisms at that time in the Tory Press”[2]
I was astonished.
Mary claims, and there is no reason to doubt her, that she was the driving force behind Will Thorne’s campaign and that of the early Labour Party. It’s important to state here that Will and the Gasworkers never hid how highly they valued her work and championed her. Yet her role is largely unacknowledged. Every telling of Will Thorne’s story must include the ‘fact’ that he was taught to read by Eleanor Marx, but it seems unlikely that Mary did not also play a large part. She was among one of the first working-class women elected to a School Board, which were established following the 1870 Education Act. She was fearless in raising the issues that mattered to her — issues she understood through firsthand experience.
School Boards and the Politics of Education
The significance of the School Boards is often under-recognised. They offered the working class and women the first real opportunity for election to public office — a rare chance to prove their worth and gain administrative skills and knowledge. In doing so, they may well have played a pivotal role in the development of the Labour Party. Across the country, Socialist women played an extraordinary role on the Boards. Most famously, Margaret Macmillan — after supporting workers during the London Dock strike — moved to Bradford and became a pioneer for children’s health and education. In my chat with Professor Martin, she made an important point: the political history of education is often downplayed and ignored. This only deepens the marginalisation of women in our histories. That perspective is neatly demonstrated by GDH Cole and Raymond Postgate in their book, The Common People 1746-1938, where they reflect on the election of Benjamin Lucraft, the first working-class member of a School Board:
“…a success received with a delight which today seems a little disproportionate” [3]
If women seem absent from the histories of trade unions and lifelong learning, it’s crucial to recognise that they had more to fight for than their male counterparts — not just a vote, but often just for a voice. From the late nineteenth century unions for women such as the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW), led by Mary Macarthur, began appearing. Frankly, it’s entirely understandable that women should want nothing to do with men who ignored or opposed their rights and chose to go their own way.
In the Boot and Shoe industry, Mary Bell-Richards emerged as a persistent advocate for women’s equality within the union structures. At the Union’s 1922 conference, she warned that the Leicester Women’s branch may break away, declaring, “The sex war in our union is forcing women to look well after themselves first.” Eight years later, her resolve had sharpened: “We want to be equal members of the Union, and I want to say quite frankly that we shall fight this to the bitter end.” Despite this, she remained in the union, albeit clearly acting in an admirably irritating manner to those men who did not see equal minimum pay between men women as a priority. It’s notable that she also saw education as key to this work, “We are starting a Women’s Social Club in connection with our Branch for educational purposes, the need of combination and sex consciousness…From our mass meetings we have our instructions…Past history may repeat itself.”[4]
More to Fight For
The fight for education was another area where women faced greater barriers. Ivy Pinchbeck, in her 1969 book, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, notes that the age that children left school was entirely dependent on their wage-earning capabilities. It meant that in rural areas boys generally left school earlier, whilst in the towns and cities girls were needed to earn a living, although many farmers blamed the National Schools for a lack of dairymaids. In Mark Starr’s A Worker Looks at History (1919) he states that at Queen Victoria’s accession 49 per cent of boys and 57 per cent of girls could not read; and 67 per cent of the boys and 88 per cent of the girls could not write[5]. Girls were expected to be at home to cope with the domestic responsibilities and the attitude that it was pointless to give girls an education was common. Some libraries didn’t even let girls in.
Education as Resistance
This attitude did not simply die out. Post WWII, as men returned to the workplace and women were pushed back into the home, a women’s movement took shape — once again with education at its core. The 1945 Labour Government may have given us Britian’s first female Secretary of State for Education, Ellen Wilkinson — who had come through her union, NUDAW, and a long-standing champion of the National Council of Labour Colleges — but things did not move quickly for women and girls. Sheila Lewenhak[6] notes that women trade union leaders condemned the use of secondary schools to train girls into clerical work while the 11 Plus was often weighted against girls. In 1963 the TUC developed its Six Point Charter for Women at Work, and Lewenhak observes that three of the charter’s points dealt directly with education, whilst a fourth ‘Opportunities for Promotion,’ was clearly linked. Details of who was involved in the drafting of this document are still unclear to me, but while exploring Alice Foley’s archives I was thrilled to find her notes for a speech in support of it. I love the idea of Alice, drawing on all her experiences to help steer the union movement forward, beyond misogyny.
Building Confidence: A NUPE Case Study
Very soon unions began to take a real consideration of women in the workplace and in the union. Women’s Officers started to be appointed and dedicated women’s courses became popular. One union with a particularly poor gender-balance was NUPE who represented low-paid women across the public sector, often in catering and cleaning. In 1983, the TUC found that despite 67% of the membership being female, 95% of the Full-Time Officials were men.[7] They began a review in 1975 which reserved 5 seats on the NEC and established a National Women’s Officer role. This was a role filled by June Rahman, a former Ward Sister from the Rhonda Valley who’d been nicknamed ‘Moscow Lil’ when she started in her hospital. June told me of the importance of education to tackling the needs of women. Women-only courses were established and there was a focus on confidence building,
“ We had to fight them (the men) with education. One of the many problems was a lack of confidence. The women felt embarrassed in meetings and thought the men would laugh if they spoke up. But take them on a few courses and…..wow!”[8]
So, the women are not just there, they have been crucial to the development of trade union attitudes and policies towards education. The extent of my research for the book is time-limited but that doesn’t provide an excuse to exclude. Writers such as Jane Martin, Sheila Lewenhak, Sarah Boston, and many others have carried out extensive work which I will heavily rely on, I just hope to do them justice.
[1] Hidden from History: 300 years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (Pluto Press, 1973)
[2] Cotton Factory Times, 25 February 1916. Quoted in ‘Making Socialists – Mary Bridges Adams and the fight for knowledge and power, 1855-1939, P109. Jane Martin, Manchester University Press (2010)
[3] The Common People 1746-1946, Cole & Postgate (1968) P385
[4] National Union of Boot & Shoe Operatives 1874-1957, A Fox (1958) P484 & 485
[6] Women and Trade Unions – An outline History of Women in the British Trade Union Movement, Lewenhak (1977)
[7] Working Women – A TUC Discussion Book for all trade unionists (1983)
[8] Interview with June Rahman, 26 January 2024
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