Margaret Bondfield, A Life’s Work (1948)
Despite the explosive industrial growth of the last third of the nineteenth century, life for European workers was still a struggle. They remained vulnerable to economic exploitation and fluctuations in the faster-paced, more competitive, and more complex marketplace. Workers began to take matters into their own hands by organizing formal unions to fight for better working conditions. Although men dominated the trade union movement, women found a place there too, as the following excerpt from the autobiography of Margaret Bondfield (1873–1954) reveals. The daughter of a lace factory worker, Bondfield went to work at age fourteen as a draper’s assistant. With the rise of consumer capitalism, shop assisting was among the fastest-growing employment opportunities for women. The long days and low wages prompted Bondfield to join the newly established National Union for Shop Assistants in 1894, launching her lifelong commitment to political activism.
From Margaret Bondfield, A Life’s Work (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948), 27–29, 36.
London: By dint of rigid economy, at the end of five years of shop life in Brighton I had saved £5, which seemed to me great wealth; but the material side of life did not bother me much. I had reached a stage in my spiritual pilgrimage which I must needs travel alone. Religion had become something personal, to be accepted or rejected; at home it was like the air—it permeated our lives, but was not discussed. I could no longer passively accept contemporary opinion on business morality, to which I applied the harsh judgments of the very young. The outward and visible sign of my protest was a sudden move to London. It was undoubtedly the turning-point in my life. But for that I might have become a successful business woman!
For the next three months I was nearer to starvation than at any time since. I learned the bitterness of a hopeless search for work. The kindness of a landlady who trusted me kept me going when I was penniless, and until I got a job.
In those days the seekers after work had no Labor Exchange to help them. The best plan was to visit the wholesale firms in the City and get information about vacancies from the commercial travelers, and then journey as fast as the old horse buses allowed—perhaps right across London—only to find a queue of 150 to 200 applicants already there. Before we had stood in the queue for long a notice would be put up: “No good waiting any longer—place filled.”
I have taken the whole of Oxford Street, going into every shop walking West on the one side, and every shop on the other side coming back on the chance that there might be a vacancy. I was not tall enough. I remember one man saying to me, “We never engage anyone under five feet eight inches.”
Even today those first months in the great city searching for work carry the shadow of a nightmare; but finally I got a job—only to find that conditions, which I had thought peculiar to the Brighton shop, were almost universal. . . .
A small thing led me to another adventure of faith. I was hungry and I went across to Fitzroy Street to buy a penn’orth of fish and a ha’p’orth of chips, served to me in a newspaper; munching my feast, I strolled around Fitzroy Square reading the paper, in which was a letter from James Macpherson, Secretary of the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, urging shop assistants to join together to fight against the wretched conditions of employment. I was working about sixty-five hours a week for between £15 and £25 per annum, living in. Here I felt was the right thing to do, and at once I joined up.
My brother Frank was in London, working at Clement’s House Printing Works, where he was “Father of the Chapel” and a member of the Union committee to negotiate terms for the introduction of the Linotype. He encouraged my Trade Union activities. This was a happy time for me.
My Union officers gave me all the work I could do in my scant leisure, and every kind of encouragement. They elected me on to the district council, and once I attended a national conference. For the next two years the Union utilized me for platform work in an ever-increasing degree.
Encouraged by T. Spencer Jones, the editor of our little Union paper, I ventured first to undertake reports of meetings, and later to write a few short stories under the pen-name of Grace Dare. It was quite impossible for me to write in the presence of any who might know what I was doing, and as I had not one inch of space I could call my own, I would wait till one or two of my room-mates were asleep, and then stealthily, with the feeling of a conspirator, and knowing that I was committing an offense for which I could be heavily fined, I would light my halfpenny dip, hiding its glare by means of a towel thrown over the back of a chair, and set to work on my monthly article.
If my room-mates woke they were kind enough not to remember it the next morning, and although this surreptitious writing was kept up for about two years, I do not think any breach of rules was ever reported to the firm.
In those early days—1894 to 1896—executive committee meetings of my Union were called for Sundays, the only possible day. The committee members had often to travel long distances on night trains, arriving early on Sunday morning, sitting for the transaction of business in a stuffy room, clouded with tobacco smoke, starting back again on Sunday night to be in time for business at 7.30 or 8 a.m. on Monday; they were the pioneers, and to me they were heroes, for they had only bare expenses from the Union. . . . “Death to the Living-in System,” “Abolish Fines and Deductions,” “Reduce the Hours Worked in Shops,” were the slogans. We had no delusions about the size of the job. We frankly told our audiences that we invited them to share in hard work for the next ten years in building up the membership. We were about 2,000 strong in a trade employing 750,000 people. “Come, pioneers! O pioneers!” we sang, and they were coming! . . .
From this time on I just lived for the Trade Union Movement. I concentrated on my job.
This concentration was undisturbed by love affairs. I had seen too much—too early—to have the least desire to join in the pitiful scramble of my work-mates. The very surroundings of shop life accentuated the desire of most shop girls to get married. Long hours of work and the living-in system deprived them of the normal companionship of men in their leisure hours, and the wonder is that so many of the women continued to be good and kind, and self-respecting, without the incentive of a great cause, or of any interest outside their job.
Many of them would toil after business hours to make their clothes, so that, from their small salaries, they could help some member of their family. Some women, much older than myself, would look forward to marriage with hope and dread—hope of economic security, and dread of the unknown ordeal of childbirth. Through what sex knowledge I was able to pass on, Mrs. Martindale resolved their fears, but it was not at all easy to transmit to them the reverence for motherhood, which I had seen at its best and highest, but which to them was too often linked with the obscene.
I had no vocation for wifehood or motherhood, but an urge to serve the Union—an urge which developed into “a sense of oneness with our kind.”
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