ABSTRACT
Although there was sporadic union activity involving women before the 1870s, there were no systematic attempts to organize women in trade unions. The antagonism of working-class men towards women factory workers developed and hardened throughout the century. Women were increasingly regarded as a threat to male working practices and this perception was often justified when cheap unorganized female labour was used by employers to break a strike or simply to replace men. However, there are instances in the mid-nineteenth century of women supporting male workers during industrial action and sometimes this support involved campaigning for higher male wages so that women did not need to work.13 As the ‘woman question’ became more prominent from the middle of the century onwards though, attention turned to the conditions of women workers as well as the rights of women to be able to work. SPEW was just the first of several organizations that emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century which focused on women’s employment. The perception of a common bond with working women led some to form a movement that aimed to help the working-class woman fight for her industrial rights. This not only involved opening up new areas of work for women but also campaigning to ensure that women were treated fairly by employers. Further, as male workers were often antagonistic towards women workers and excluded them from unions or did not represent their interests even when they were unionized, some women decided that they needed their own unions, which not only represented women in trades dominated by women workers but also represented women’s interests in male-dominated areas. The organizers in the early days concluded
that women should protect themselves through unionization rather than protective legislation. The emphasis on women organizing to help themselves was common to all the organizations focused on in this chapter in the period 1870-1914. This changed after the First World War and the reasons for this will be discussed in Part Three. The Women’s Protective and Provident League (WPPL) was the prime mover in putting the unionization policy forward. The WPPL was superseded by the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), which was less sanguine about trusting to unionization to cure all working women’s problems and looked to protective legislation to improve women’s employment conditions. By 1914, women’s organizations such as the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC) were organizing surveys, collecting data and lobbying Parliament on a whole range of issues affecting women’s work. In this chapter, I focus on the development of these organizations which sought to organize women workers, fight for women’s employment rights and ultimately to investigate employment sectors in which women were already engaged.
