[Image: First page of the October 1907 issue of Woman Worker, TUC Library Collections]
Guest blogger Lena Wånggren shares some of her work on women’s early trade union periodicals, the majority of which are housed at the TUC Collections in London, and why these are important today – both as evidence of past struggles and as inspiration for the ongoing struggle for equality and decent work.
Last year, in between intense periods of industrial action, I wrote an exploratory article on literature and labour. In this essay, I situated my (imagined) research on early women’s trade unionism and their writings alongside my precarious working conditions in UK higher education. I sketched out the fantastic work done by early women trade union pioneers in Britain, and how the gendered and racialised structures of early trade unionism still find echoes in our contemporary movement. Since writing the article we have won our pensions back, and I have published a book on precarity in UK universities (it took us seven years to write!). While I still have four different jobs in the contemporary academic ‘gig economy’, I have been lucky to receive funds from The Willison Trust, enabling me to study the early women’s trade union movement and, importantly, the role of imaginative literature therein. The TUC Library collection is a wonderful resource for this work.
[Image: Photo of the Match workers’ strike committee, 1888, TUC Library Collections]
Why study early women’s trade unionism? And why, specifically, examine early women’s trade union periodicals? As Sarah Boston describes in Women Workers and the Trade Unions (2015), while women have always worked, and women workers have always been part of the industrial struggle, women – excepting in the mixed textile unions – have had to fight two battles simultaneously: against both exploitative employers and against sexism within the trade unions. Women’s trade unionism as such (again, excepting in the textile industry) was not properly organised into stable structures until 1874, when Emma Patterson set up the Women’s Trade Union League (originally named Women’s Protective and Provident League, changing its name and tactics in 1891). The League was instrumental in organising women into unions, including during the 1888 Match Girls strike; ‘the match that lit the explosion of “New Unionism”’ (Boston 2015) with its more accessible and often radical increased unionism in previously unorganised sectors. In 1906, during a period of mass unionism, Mary Macarthur (active in the League) set up the National Federation of Working Women, a trade union open to all, and which remained active until 1921 when it was incorporated into the mixed General Workers Federation and part of TUC.
Both the League and the Federation saw their periodicals as key to their movement, spreading the word and connecting women workers across Britain and the world. Patterson, who had worked in bookbinding, established a Women’s Printing Society and printing press through which she in 1876 started publishing the Women’s Union Journal, the official printed publication of the League. The Journal changed name and format in 1891, to the Women’s Trade Union Review, remaining in print until the League became the Women’s Section of the TUC, the origin of today’s Women’s Committee.
Patterson, and later editors of the Journal and Review, were pushing new ground with their periodicals. As Harold Goldman (1974) notes, the Journal was ‘a remarkable publication’: ‘It was remarkable that it existed at all. Trade unions at that time were about activity – protests, demonstrations and stoppages, as they often are indeed today … active unionists saw little need for the printed word other than leaflets, pamphlets and calls to meetings. They were not very good at regular publications to be taken home and read.’ Indeed, an 1880 letter from a male miner, published in the Journal, highlights this novelty:
‘I am struck forcibly with the idea that so far as being able to manage and support a trade journal the women are far ahead of the men … Many a time during the latter half of the nineteenth century have workmen essayed the issue of a trade journal, but I believe in every case they have failed miserably.’ (Women’s Union Journal,December 1880)
The Women’s Union Journal was the first lasting trade union periodical, making it a historical first.
[Image: An 1877 issue of the Journal notes the creation up of a new union, publishing ‘union poetry’ from its inaugural meeting for readers to share in other meetings, York University Library]
It is clear to me not only that periodicals play a crucial part in early women’s trade unions, but also that the imaginative writings published therein play a key part. All three major women’s trade union periodicals contain literature including drama, fiction, poetry, and book reviews. With the League having built a foundation for literary women’s trade unionism, Macarthur turned her periodical Woman Worker (1907-1920) – the official publication of the Federation – into a mass produced weekly periodical that published not only literary works by more established writers but also non-fiction and imaginative writing by women workers and readers themselves.
Just as one example, the October 1907 issue in ‘The Poet’s Corner’ publishes Ethel Carnie’s poem ‘A Twentieth Century Song.’ While Carnie later became a novelist, and a regular contributor to the periodical, in this issue she is described as ‘a textile worker, and is only 21 years old’: ‘We prophesy a future for her.’
[Image: ‘The Poet’s Corner’ in the October 1907 issue of Woman Worker, TUC Library Collections]
While in the 21st century we do not often receive poems or short stories in the communications from our trade union reps and officials, as I have discovered, literature was a staple in early women’s trade union periodicals. Women’s Union Journal publishes poetry alongside reports on the setting up of new trade union branches, while the Women’s Trade Union Review mixes in short stories among quarterly reports and updates on factory legislation. The Woman Worker contains poetry, short stories, short plays, book reviews, and various forms of imaginative literature, alongside reports on legislation, trade union work, home improvement, and dress. Alongside writers such as Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and Constance Smith the periodical also contains readers’ works, especially in the section entitled ‘Our Prize page’, to which readers are encouraged to submit their own writing.
Macarthur notes the key role of the publication in organising women workers:
‘Those of us who were concerned to stir industrial women found our task very difficult. The living voice is mighty, but we were few. Though we went hither and thither, only a comparative number of women heard our message, and of these, when we departed, many forgot. / It seemed that a journal might be a medium of wider appeal, might touch some whom else we should never reach, might be a means of deepening the faith of those who already heard the call of Unionism and Comradeship. So, tremblingly, we started our paper. … [T]he little journal of September last is a great organ now.’ (‘The Last Word’, in Woman Worker June 1908)
As Macarthur writes here: ‘The living voice is mighty, but we were few’. She echoes here the words she penned in the February 1908 issue, when thanking readers from the many readers’ letters ‘from working girls between whom and the Woman Worker an enduring friendship has already been formed’, messages which convince her that ‘the Woman Worker is proving a useful auxiliary in the struggle for betterment, and, as Walter Crane puts it, “is representing the woman’s side in a way never done before”’ (‘Between Ourselves’, in Woman Worker February 1908). With the help of the periodical, the Federation was able to spread the message of unionism, and build solidarity, where they could not go physically. And literature, including the readers’ own writings, played a key part in spreading the message.
My hypothesis when I started thinking up this project, quite a few years ago, was that women’s trade union periodicals would be a vital source for understanding women’s place in both literary and labour history. Given the double marginalisation of women in (literary and trade union) history, and of periodicals in book history, I was hoping to find some key voices in these periodicals. I have so far only scratched the surface, in my survey of the three main periodicals of the early women’s trade union movement, but have already found a rich history, new narratives, and much inspiration. While sexed and racialized structures still structure both the labour market and trade unions today, we can learn from previous generations and fight on.
Big thanks to Jeff and colleagues at the TUC Library Collections for their assistance, and to the Willison Trust.
Want to know more? Here are some reading tips:
Sarah Boston, Women Workers and the Trade Unions (2015)
Barbara Drake, Women in Trade Unions (1921)
Cathy Hunt, The National Federation of Women Workers, 1906-1921 (2014)
Working Class Movement Library material on women’s trade unionism (https://wcml.org.uk/)
Dr Wånggren is a Teaching Fellow (Centre for Open Learning) and Tutor (Department of English Literature) at the University of Edinburgh, teaching courses on English and Scottish Literature, gender studies, and feminist writing. Her work is interdisciplinary, concerning gender, intersectionality and social justice in both nineteenth-century literature and the contemporary workplace.