ABSTRACT
Black was the eldest daughter of a solicitor and when her mother died she took over caring for the family and business apprentices. She worked for a while as a teacher, during which time she met and befriended Eleanor Marx. She was also a novelist. In the 1880s she moved to London with two of her sisters and through Marx became involved with radical groups. Through this connection, she became interested in questions concerning working-class women’s work. She became the secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League but, possibly because of her involvement with the Match Girls’ strike, she left and became a founding member of the Women’s Trade Union Association (WTUA) which was later superseded by the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC). Black was pivotal in the WIC and working and serving as its president for many years. A keen advocate of protective legislation, she came into conflict with older feminists, such as Boucherett, and wrote an essay defending the Factory Acts. She was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Anti-Sweating League and fought long and hard for the Trades Boards Act. This issue caused a split in the WIC with Black on the opposite side to Margaret McDonald. The split caused her to resign the presidency for a time while she concentrated on campaigning for the Trades Boards legislation. As a writer, she produced many books and articles on the problems that women workers faced, based on her work with the WTUA and WIC. She was also the acting editor of the suffrage newspaper The Common Cause from 1912-13. Black was never wealthy and had to support herself and her niece by writing which she continued to do until her death. Her written non-fiction work includes many articles in the Fortnightly Review, The Common Cause,
Women’s Industrial News and numerous other WIC publications including Sweated Industry and the Minimum Wage, 1907; A Case for the Trades Boards, 1909; Married Women’s Work, 1915; and A New Way of Housekeeping, 1918.
