ABSTRACT
This chapter is based chronologically on events and developments in the 1930s. Rackham chairs the Labour Party Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organizations and the National Conference of Labour Women in 1930, serves with William Asbury as one of two Labour representatives on the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance and writes the Minority Report. She champions the cause of the unemployed against the reduction of unemployment benefits and the Means Test. Rackham leads the extra-parliamentary battle against the iniquitous Anomalies Act which prevented married women from claiming unemployment benefits. She serves on the Workers’ Educational Association’s National Education Advisory Committee and frequently visits R. H. and Jeannette Tawney in rural Gloucester. She opposes Franco’s dictatorship in the Spanish Civil War and is a member of the Cambridge Basque Children’s Committee which welcomes and accommodates refugee children. She visits the Soviet Union and sets out on a fact-finding tour of prisons in Eastern Europe with Margery Fry for the Howard League for Penal Reform. Rackham stands as a Labour Party candidate against R. A. Butler in the Saffron Walden by-election campaigning against tied cottages and rural poverty. She publishes her book, Factory Law in 1938. Rackham supported the demonstrations organised by the Peace Pledge Union but modifies her pacifist position in response to the growth of Fascism in Europe opposing Neville Chamberlain and appeasement of Hitler.
