Margaret Grace Bondfield (17 March 1873 – 16 June 1953) was a British Labour Party politician, trade unionist and women's rights activist. She became the first female cabinet minister, and the first woman to be a privy counsellor in the UK, when she was appointed Minister of Labour in the Labour government of 1929–31. She had earlier become the first woman to chair the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
Bondfield was born in humble circumstances and received limited formal education. After serving an apprenticeship to an embroideress she worked as a shop assistant in Brighton and London. She was shocked by the working conditions of shop staff, particularly within the "living-in" system, and became an active member of the shopworkers' union. She began to move in socialist circles, and in 1898 was appointed assistant secretary of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks (NAUSAWC). She was later prominent in several women's socialist movements: she helped to found the Women's Labour League (WLL) in 1906, and was chair of the Adult Suffrage Society. Her standpoint on women's suffrage—she favoured extending the vote to all adults regardless of gender or property, rather than the limited "on the same terms as men" agenda pursued by the militant suffragists—divided her from the militant leadership.
After leaving her union post in 1908 Bondfield worked as organising secretary for the WLL and later as women's officer for the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW). She was elected to the TUC Council in 1918, and became its chairman in 1923, the year she was first elected to parliament. In the short-lived minority Labour government of 1924 she served as parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Labour. Her term of cabinet office in 1929–31 was marked by the economic crises that beset the second Labour government. Her willingness to contemplate cuts in unemployment benefits alienated her from much of the Labour movement, although she did not follow Ramsay MacDonald into the National Government that assumed office when the Labour government fell in August 1931. 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.
Childhood and family
thumb|left|A modern (2009) photograph of the main street in Chard, Somerset, Bondfield's home town
Margaret Bondfield, known in private life as "Maggie", was born on 17 March 1873 in Chard, Somerset. William Bondfield worked as a lacemaker, and had a history of political activism. As a young man he had been secretary of the Chard Political Union, a centre of local radicalism that the authorities had on occasion suppressed by military force.|group= n He had also been active in the Anti-Corn Law League of the 1840s. Margaret was a clever child, whose skills at reciting poetry or playing piano pieces were often displayed at town events and Sunday School outings. Until the age of 13 she attended the local elementary school; she then worked for a year as a pupil-teacher (she was paid three shillings a week) in the school's boys' department. Local employment opportunities being scarce, she left Chard in 1887, at the age of 14, to begin an apprenticeship at a draper's shop in Hove, near Brighton. Her apprenticeship complete, she worked as a living-in assistant in a succession of Brighton drapery stores, where she quickly encountered the realities of shop staff life: unsympathetic employers, very long hours, appalling living conditions and no privacy. Bondfield reported on her experiences of living-in: "Overcrowded, insanitary conditions, poor and insufficient food were the main characteristics of this system, with an undertone of danger ... In some houses both natural and unnatural vices found a breeding ground".
She found some relief from this environment when she was befriended by a wealthy customer, Louisa Martindale, and her daughter Hilda. The Martindales, socially conscious liberals and advocates for women's rights, found Bondfield a willing learner, and lent her books that began her lifelong interest in labour and social questions. Bondfield described Mrs Martindale as "a most vivid influence on my life ... she put me in the way of knowledge that has been of help to many score of my shop mates".
Bondfield's brother Frank had established himself in London some years earlier as a printer and trades unionist, and in 1894, having saved £5, she decided to join him. She found London shopworking conditions no better than in Brighton, but through Frank her social and political circles widened. She became an active member of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks (NUSAWC), sometimes missing church on Sundays to attend union meetings. Her political and literary education was centred on the Ideal Club, where she met Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Under the influence of these socialist luminaries, she joined the Fabian Society and later the Independent Labour Party (ILP).
As a shopworker, Bondfield was expected to work between 80 and 100 hours a week for 51 weeks in the year, and might be sent out late at night to check that rival shops had closed before her employer would do so. She 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. She 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".
In 1896, she was recruited by the Women's Industrial Council (WIC) as an undercover agent, working in various shops while secretly recording every aspect of shop life. Her accounts of squalor and exploitation were published in articles under the "Grace Dare" name, in both The Shop Assistant and the Daily Chronicle newspaper, and provided the basis for a WIC report on shopworkers' conditions published in 1898.
Union official
thumb|Cartoon showing Bondfield addressing a NAUSAWC recruitment meeting, July 1898
In 1898, Bondfield accepted the job of assistant secretary of NUSAWC, which that year became "NAUSAWC" after amalgamating with the United Shop Assistants' Union. From this time onward she subordinated her life to her union work and to the wider cause of socialism. She "had no vocation for wifehood or motherhood, but an urge to serve the Union ... I had 'the dear love of comrades' ". At the time the union's membership, at under 3,000, represented only a small fraction of shopworkers, and Bondfield gave priority to increasing this proportion.
After leaving NAUSAWC, Bondfield transferred the main focus of her energies to the Women's Labour League (WLL), which she had helped to found in 1906. The president of the League was Margaret MacDonald, wife of the future Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald; Bondfield had known the MacDonalds since the 1890s, through their joint work for the WIC. Several WLL members contested the London County Council elections in 1910; Bondfield stood in Woolwich, unsuccessfully (she contested the same seat in 1913, with a similar result). The League was active in all types of elections, supporting and canvassing for candidates of either sex who spoke out for women's rights. Through these activities Bondfield experienced the lives of the poorest of families, writing: "Oh! the lonely lives of these women, hidden away at the back of a network of small, mean streets!"
Alongside her WLL duties, Bondfield maintained a range of other involvements. She spent part of 1910 in the United States, lecturing on suffrage issues with Maud Ward of the People's Suffrage Federation (PSF), and studying labour problems. At home, she worked with the Women's Co-operative Guild (WCG) on maternity and child welfare, and was co-opted to the Parliamentary Standing Committee that piloted the introduction of state maternity benefits and other assistance to mothers. Her investigation on behalf of the WIC into the working conditions in the textile industries led her to join most of the Labour leadership in a "War against Poverty" campaign.
Between 1908 and 1910 the WLL and the WIC co-operated in a nationwide investigation of married women's working conditions. Bondfield carried out the fieldwork in Yorkshire. The relationship between the two bodies was sometimes fractious, and when the report was due to be published, there were disagreements over how it should be handled. As a result of these and other clashes, Bondfield, MacDonald and the other League women resigned from the council. In 1911 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.
The sudden death of Mary MacDonald in September 1911 added considerably to Bondfield's workload; the strain, together with internal animosities within the WLL, led her to resign her position in January 1912. The League made strenuous efforts to retain her, and only in September did its committee reluctantly accept her departure. An attempt to re-engage her in 1913 was unsuccessful, and Marion Phillips was appointed to succeed her.
Campaigns and war
From 1912 Bondfield was a member of the WCG's Citizenship Subcommittee, where she worked with Margaret Llewelyn Davies investigating minimum wage rates, infant mortality and child welfare. Freedom from her WLL responsibilities gave her more time for political work, and in 1913 she joined the ILP's National Administration Council. On the outbreak of war a few days later, Bondfield joined the Union of Democratic Control that, while not pacifist, opposed the use of war as an instrument of national policy. She was a member of the Women's Peace Council. In March 1915 she attended a conference in Bern, Switzerland, organised by the Women's International of Socialist and Labour Organizations, which called for a negotiated peace. Later in the war the government, concerned by Bondfield's association with peace organisations, prevented her from travelling to similar gatherings in Sweden and the United States. In 1915 Bondfield became NFWW's organising secretary. Together with Macarthur, Phillips and Susan Lawrence, she established the Central Committee for Women's Employment, which organised relief work for the female unemployed. Bondfield's investigations into workers' pay revealed considerable differences between the rates paid to men and to women, even for identical work. A few months earlier, Lansbury had visited the incipient Soviet state and had been most impressed after meeting Lenin, whom he judged to be "symbolic of a new spirit", "the father of his people" and "their champion in the cause of social and economic freedom". Bondfield, who also met Lenin, was more cautious. She 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". Later, she came to see communism as anti-democratic and dictatorial, and voted against the application of the British Communist Party for affiliation to the Labour Party. She also became a Justice of the Peace.
thumb|Bondfield in 1920
At the general election of 1922 Bondfield was again adopted by Labour at Northampton and, as she had at Woolwich in 1913, turned to Shaw for help in the campaign. He 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.
Following two years of negotiation, in 1920 the NFWW voted to merge with the National Union of General Workers and become that union's Women's Section. 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. The secretary of the new section was to have been Mary Macarthur, but she died of cancer on 1 January 1921, the date that the merger came into effect. Bondfield was appointed in her place, and remained in the post (with leave of absence while holding ministerial office) until 1938. She added other responsibilities to her heavy schedule: chairing the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women's Organisations (SJCIWO), membership of the Labour Party's Emergency Committee on Unemployment, and chairman of the 1922 Conference of Unemployed Women.
Hoping to win a mandate for tariffs on imported goods, the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin called a general election in December 1923. Bondfield was elected in Northampton with a majority of 4,306 over her Conservative opponent. She was one of the first three women—Susan Lawrence and Dorothy Jewson were the others—to be elected as Labour MPs. The Labour Party had won 191 seats to the Conservatives' 258 and the Liberals' 158; with no party in possession of a parliamentary majority, the make-up of the next government was in doubt for several weeks. According to Lansbury's biographer, Bondfield turned down the offer of a cabinet post; instead, she became parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Labour, Tom Shaw. This appointment meant that she had to give up the TUC Council chair; her decision to do so, immediately after becoming the first woman to achieve this honour, generated some criticism from other trade unionists.
Bondfield later described her first months in government as "a strange adventure". The difficulties of the economic situation would have created problems for the most experienced of governments, and the fledgling Labour administration was quickly in difficulties. When she returned to Britain in early October she found the government in its final throes. On 8 October, MacDonald resigned after losing a confidence vote in the House of Commons. Labour's chances of victory in the ensuing general election were fatally compromised by the controversy surrounding the so-called Zinoviev letter, a missive purportedly sent by Grigory Zinoviev, president of the Communist International, which called on Britain's socialists to prepare for violent revolution. The letter, published four days before polling day, generated a "Red Scare" that led to a significant swing of voters to the right, and ensured a massive Conservative victory. Her main task in these years was her autobiography, published in 1948 under the title A Life's Work. The purpose of the book, she wrote, was not to celebrate her own achievements, instead she hoped that her experiences "may be of some service to the younger generation". The book had an indifferent reception; in The Observer, Harold Nicolson described it as "ill composed and badly proportioned", with too much space devoted to inconsequential meetings while truly important events were hurried over. Nevertheless, he thought the book provided "a fine example of resolute and in the end triumphant energy". The Manchester Guardians reviewer also criticised the work's confused structure and unselective detail, but found it "a useful, direct and honest" account of Labour's early years.
thumb|[[Golders Green Crematorium]]
Apart from her autobiography, Bondfield contributed to a collection of essays entitled What Life Has Taught Me, in which 25 public figures pondered on the lessons of life. 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".
In March 1948, Bondfield opened the Mary Macarthur Home at Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool in Lancashire, which provided subsidised holidays for low-paid women workers. In 1949, she made a six-month speaking tour of the United States, her final visit to the country; she left convinced that America would soon adopt a national health service.
Bondfield, who never married, maintained her good health and interest in life until her final illness in 1953. She moved to a nursing home in Sanderstead, Surrey, where she died, aged 80, on 16 June 1953.
Appraisal and legacy
In his biographical sketch for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Philip Williamson depicts Bondfield as "physically short and stout ... with sparkling eyes, a firm, brisk manner, and effective, sometimes inspired, public speaking". She 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. After her death The Times praised her "unusually wide human sympathies ... her generous nature and real sense of humour". Skidelsky, however, describes her unsympathetically as "a humourless and somewhat priggish person, with long black skirts and a voice that emitted a harsh cascade of sound". A more recent and sympathetic account of her life by Tony Judge sets her career more in the context of her championing of women's political and workplace rights, and her role in the 1931 crisis more as a hapless victim of MacDonald's machinations.
Bondfield's career was punctuated by "firsts", in union, parliament and government spheres. By temperament a realist, she based her actions in government on economic facts rather on party or sectional interests; Castle refused to contribute a preface to a Fabian Society booklet celebrating Bondfield's life, because she considered her predecessor's actions close to political betrayal. 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; Bondfield's name was not mentioned.
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, In 1948 she was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH). Many years after her death, streets and apartment buildings were named after her in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Barking; and Islington, small block of flats built to replace the house lived in by Dr H.H Crippen, destroyed by German bomb in 1940. She 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.
To mark Bondfield's centenary in 1973, Linda Christmas in The Guardian reviewed the progress of women in parliament since the 1930s. By 1973, Christmas reported, only 93 women had sat in parliament; their contributions had overall "not been stunning".