ABSTRACT
Throughout the interwar years, there were tensions for women within the labour movement and one of the most important concerned the pull that women's issues and women's organisations could have for the female membership. It was in their neighbourhoods and local communities that most people, particularly women, practised their politics. Equally important to understanding women's experience of Manchester's labour movement, particularly in the 1920s, was the continuing influence of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Retrieving the names of women who laboured at the grass roots of the party is more difficult still. In Manchester, there were a number of episodes where underlying tensions surfaced about separate women's organisation within the Labour Party. The 1930s have been represented as a decade which saw a decline in the vigour and assertiveness of the Labour women's movement, overwhelmed by the cult of domesticity.
