ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Clara Rackham’s marriage in 1901 and ends in 1918 with the partial enfranchisement of women over twenty-one. Rackham founds the Cambridge branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, becomes an elected Poor Law Guardian and joint Secretary of the Cambridge Charity Organisation Society. She contributes to Eglantyne Jebb’s Cambridge, a Study in Social Questions in 1906 and to Helen Bosanquet’s Social Conditions in Provincial Towns in 1912. Rackham joins the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) proving herself a gifted speaker and organiser. She chairs the Eastern District and speaks alongside the President, Millicent Garrett Fawcett at the Hyde Park Rally at the end of the Great Pilgrimage of 1913. Rackham chairs the NUWSS when the organisation was divided between the powerful anti-war lobby on the Executive Committee and others who accepted Fawcett’s appeal for support of the women’s war effort. She is credited with preventing the organisation falling apart. Rackham joins the Union of Democratic Control and chairs its women’s conference. She resigns from the NUWSS Executive to take up a position as one of four women factory inspectors appointed by the government during the First World War. Inspecting women in factories in Manchester and London gives Rackham unique insights into industrial women’s work that differ radically from the insights of the male leadership of the trade union movement enabling her to become an authority on factory conditions, workers’ rights, protective legislation, and the 40-hour week.
