ABSTRACT
Before 1905, in all-male government circles, employment policies were being developed which catered for a proportion of unemployed working-class men, but which omitted any specific reference to women. Feminist campaigns for unemployed women’s inclusion resulted in the creation of a limited number of places for women under the 1905 Unemployed Workmen Act. Although the attempts of the ‘right to work’ movement in the decade before the First World War was to force the State to accept responsibility for creating paid employment for unemployed men have been documented (Brown, 1971), the fact that there was a women’s ‘right to work’ movement at this time has been mentioned only in passing (Harris, 1972). This omission is serious, because it obscures the fact that unemployment and income maintenance policy in this period was devised to manage and control a male workforce, and the ways in which women were treated very differently. The debates surrounding women’s ‘right to work’ before the First World War highlight the way in which feminist demands for the right to paid employment with the potential for economic independence for women were regarded by leading policy-makers as highly threatening.
