69 Facts About Margaret Bondfield

1.

Margaret Grace Bondfield was a British Labour Party politician, trade unionist and women's rights activist.

2.

Margaret Bondfield had earlier become the first woman to chair the General Council of the Trades Union Congress.

3.

Margaret Bondfield was shocked by the working conditions of shop staff, particularly within the "living-in" system, and became an active member of the shopworkers' union.

4.

Margaret Bondfield began to move in socialist circles, and in 1898 was appointed assistant secretary of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks.

5.

Margaret Bondfield was later prominent in several women's socialist movements: she helped to found the Women's Labour League in 1906, and was chair of the Adult Suffrage Society.

6.

Margaret Bondfield was elected to the TUC Council in 1918, and became its chairman in 1923, the year she was first elected to parliament.

7.

Margaret Bondfield remained active in NUGMW affairs until 1938, and during the Second World War carried out investigations for the Women's Group on Public Welfare.

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8.

Margaret Bondfield, known in private life as "Maggie", was born on 17 March 1873 in Chard, Somerset, the tenth of eleven children, and third of four daughters born to William Bondfield and his wife Ann, the daughter of a Congregational minister.

9.

William Margaret Bondfield worked as a lacemaker, and had a history of political activism.

10.

Margaret Bondfield had been active in the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s.

11.

Margaret Bondfield was a clever child, whose skills at reciting poetry or playing piano pieces were often displayed at town events and Sunday School outings.

12.

Margaret Bondfield found some relief from this environment when she was befriended by a wealthy customer, Louisa Martindale, and her daughter Hilda.

13.

Margaret Bondfield found London shopworking conditions no better than in Brighton, but through Frank her social and political circles widened.

14.

Margaret Bondfield became an active member of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks, sometimes missing church on Sundays to attend union meetings.

15.

Margaret Bondfield began to record her experiences, in a series of articles and stories that she wrote under the pseudonym "Grace Dare", for the shopworkers' monthly magazine The Shop Assistant.

16.

Margaret Bondfield wrote surreptitiously, at night: "I would light my half-penny dip [candle], hiding its glare by means of a towel and set to work on my monthly article".

17.

In 1898, Margaret Bondfield accepted the job of assistant secretary of NUSAWC, which that year became "NAUSAWC" after amalgamating with the United Shop Assistants' Union.

18.

At the time the union's membership, at under 3,000, represented only a small fraction of shopworkers, and Margaret Bondfield gave priority to increasing this proportion.

19.

In 1899 Margaret Bondfield was the first woman delegate to the Trades Union Annual Congress, that year held in Plymouth, where she participated in the vote that led to the formation in 1900 of the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the Labour Party.

20.

In 1902 Margaret Bondfield met Mary Macarthur, some eight years her junior, who chaired the Ayr branch of NAUSAWC.

21.

Margaret Bondfield described the opening scene, set in a dreary, comfortless women's dormitory over a shop, as very like the real thing.

22.

From 1904 onwards, Margaret Bondfield was increasingly occupied with the issue of women's suffrage.

23.

Margaret Bondfield saw no benefit in this policy to the women that she represented, and aligned herself with the Adult Suffrage Society, which campaigned for universal adult suffrage, men and women alike, regardless of property.

24.

In 1907, in the course of a public debate with Teresa Billington-Greig of the Women's Freedom League, Margaret Bondfield argued that the only way forward was a bill that enfranchised all men and all women, without qualification.

25.

Margaret Bondfield wished good luck to those fighting for a "same terms as men" suffrage bill, but "don't let them come and tell me that they are working for my class".

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26.

At the conference, Margaret Bondfield agreed to the deletion of the last four words.

27.

When Margaret Bondfield tabled the WLL motion at the Labour conference, she was persuaded by Arthur Henderson to water it down.

28.

Several WLL members contested the London County Council elections in 1910; Margaret Bondfield stood in Woolwich, unsuccessfully.

29.

Alongside her WLL duties, Margaret Bondfield maintained a range of other involvements.

30.

Margaret Bondfield spent part of 1910 in the United States, lecturing on suffrage issues with Maud Ward of the People's Suffrage Federation, and studying labour problems.

31.

In 1910, Margaret Bondfield accepted the chairmanship of the British section of the Women's International Council of Socialist and Labour Organisations.

32.

In 1911 Margaret Bondfield assumed the role of the WLL's Organising Secretary, and spent much of the year travelling: she formed a WLL branch in Ogmore Vale, Glamorgan, reformed the Manchester branch, and found time to advise laundrywomen engaged in a dispute in South Wales.

33.

Margaret Bondfield assisted the Guild's education and training programme, lecturing on "Local Government in Relation to Maternity".

34.

Margaret Bondfield spoke at the ILP's mass anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square on 2 August 1914, organised by George Lansbury; other speakers included Keir Hardie, Henderson, and the dockers' leader Ben Tillett.

35.

Margaret Bondfield was a member of the Women's Peace Council.

36.

Margaret Bondfield had helped Mary Macarthur to found the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906.

37.

Margaret Bondfield told an NFWW conference on her return that if she were a Russian citizen she would support the Bolshevist government as currently "the only possible form of administration".

38.

Margaret Bondfield first sought election to parliament in 1920, as the Labour candidate in a by-election in Northampton.

39.

Margaret Bondfield increased the Labour vote significantly, but lost by 3,371 votes, to the Coalition Liberal candidate.

40.

Margaret Bondfield was contemptuous of the Labour leadership for not arranging a more promising seat; nevertheless, he came and spoke for her, but her margin of defeat widened to 5,476.

41.

Margaret Bondfield, who supported the merger, believed that provided women could maintain their separate group identity, it was better for men and women to work together.

42.

Margaret Bondfield was appointed in her place, and remained in the post until 1938.

43.

Margaret Bondfield added other responsibilities to her heavy schedule: chairing the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organisations, membership of the Labour Party's Emergency Committee on Unemployment, and chairman of the 1922 Conference of Unemployed Women.

44.

Margaret Bondfield was elected in Northampton with a majority of 4,306 over her Conservative opponent.

45.

Margaret Bondfield later described her first months in government as "a strange adventure".

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46.

Margaret Bondfield spent much of her time abroad; in the autumn she travelled to Canada as the head of a delegation examining the problems of British immigrants, especially as related to the welfare of young children.

47.

When Margaret Bondfield accepted the post of Minister of Labour in the new government, she became Britain's first woman cabinet minister, and Britain's first woman privy counsellor.

48.

Margaret Bondfield considered the appointment "part of the great revolution in the position of women".

49.

Under increasing pressure from the TUC, Margaret Bondfield introduced a bill that reversed the "Blanesburgh" restrictions on unemployment benefit introduced by the previous government, but with visible reluctance.

50.

Margaret Bondfield's handling of this issue is described by Marquand as "maladroit", and by Skidelsky as showing "monumental tactlessness".

51.

Margaret Bondfield did not join the small number of Labour MPs who chose to follow MacDonald, although she expressed her "deep sympathy and admiration" for his actions.

52.

Margaret Bondfield was defeated in Wallsend by 7,606 votes; Abrams observes that given the attacks on her from both right and left, "it would have been a miracle had she been re-elected".

53.

Margaret Bondfield remained Labour's candidate at Wallsend; in the general election of 1935 she was again defeated.

54.

Margaret Bondfield never returned to parliament; she was adopted as the prospective Labour candidate for Reading, but when it became obvious that the election due for 1940 would be delayed indefinitely by war, she resigned her candidacy.

55.

In 1938, after retiring from her NUGMW post, Margaret Bondfield founded the Women's Group on Public Welfare.

56.

Margaret Bondfield studied labour conditions in the United States and Mexico during 1938, and toured the US and Canada after the outbreak of war in 1939, as a lecturer for the British Information Services.

57.

Margaret Bondfield was active in her local Labour Party, and continued to chair the Women's Group of Public Welfare until 1948.

58.

Apart from her autobiography, Margaret Bondfield contributed to a collection of essays entitled What Life Has Taught Me, in which 25 public figures pondered on the lessons of life.

59.

Margaret Bondfield wrote that her religious convictions gave her "strength to meet defeat with a smile, to face success with a sense of responsibility; to be willing to do one's best without hope of reward [and] to bear misrepresentation without giving way to futile bitterness".

60.

In March 1948, Margaret Bondfield opened the Mary Macarthur Home at Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool in Lancashire, which provided subsidised holidays for low-paid women workers.

61.

Margaret Bondfield moved to a nursing home in Sanderstead, Surrey, where she died, aged 80, on 16 June 1953.

62.

Margaret Bondfield had the self-confidence to exist and thrive in a male-dominated world, deriving inspiration from a childhood that, though materially impoverished, her obituarist has described as "of great spiritual and mental wealth".

63.

Margaret Bondfield inherited a strong nonconformist faith, which became a key element throughout her later career, and retained her links with the Congregational Church throughout her life.

64.

Margaret Bondfield's career was punctuated by "firsts", in union, parliament and government spheres.

65.

In 2001, a speech by Tony Blair celebrating the Labour Party's 100 years in parliament paid tributes to many heroes of the movement's early years; Margaret Bondfield's name was not mentioned.

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66.

Margaret Bondfield was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Bristol, and in 1930 received the freedom of the borough from her home town of Chard, where in 2011 a plaque in her honour was fixed to the Guildhall wall.

67.

Margaret Bondfield was further commemorated in her old constituency of Northampton when a hall of residence in the University of Northampton was named the Margaret Bondfield Hall.

68.

The 1979 election saw this number fall to 19, but saw Margaret Bondfield Thatcher become Britain's first woman prime minister.

69.

Margaret Bondfield was a prolific writer of magazine and newspaper articles.