In February 1900 a group of men representing
trade unionists, socialists, Fabians and Marxists gathered in London to make
another attempt at establishing an organisation capable of getting
working-class men elected to Parliament. The body they set up was the Labour
Representation Committee; six years later when 29 of its candidates were
elected to the House of Commons, it changed its name to the Labour Party.
No women took part in that first meeting, but
several watched from the public gallery. Amongst them was Isabella Ford, an
active socialist and trade unionist who would have been familiar to most of
the men assembled below. She had been asked by her friend, Millicent Fawcett,
to attend and report back on what happened. A few years later she
would become the first woman to speak at a Labour Party conference, moving a
resolution on votes for women but, at the Party’s inception in 1900, she and
every other woman in the hall was silent.
Throughout Labour’s history, even in its
earliest years, women were present in the room, but they were not always
recorded or remembered. They came from many different backgrounds and they
worked for the causes they believed in as organisers, campaigners,
negotiators, polemicists, public speakers and leaders. They took on the
vested interests of their time; sometimes they won. Yet the vast majority of
them have been forgotten by the Labour movement that they helped to found.
Even Margaret Bondfield, who became Britain’s first woman cabinet
minister, often barely merits a footnote. Women made real and substantial
contributions to Labour’s earliest years and had a significant impact on the
Party’s ability to attract and maintain women’s votes after World War I. In
addition to Margaret and Isabella, in many of the rooms in which the Labour
Party found its feet, remarkable women wait to be rediscovered. This book
tells their story.
