Following International Women’s Day, there is no better time to remember Labour’s Margaret Bondfield, the first female cabinet minister and privy councillor. Labour won 288 seats in the general election of 30 May 1929, making it the largest party, but short of an outright majority. Bondfield had actually been on holiday when she returned to Victoria station to pick up a telegram from the new foreign secretary, Arthur Henderson, informing her that the new prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, wanted to see her urgently. He had been searching for her for days.
MacDonald asked Bondfield to become minister of labour. Bondfield modestly asked him if he was sure about the choice, as other talented female MPs had been elected, and then returned home to carry out household chores. A few days later, she was sworn in. King George V had been ill, so the five new privy councillors were taken to Windsor for the ceremony, rather than Buckingham Palace. Bondfield later recalled that she did not want to wear a hat, due to the fear that it would scratch the king’s nose when she knelt down. As there was no established protocol for a woman to be sworn in, her request was granted. When she knelt on the king’s footstool, rather than him remain in silence, as was the custom, he told her that he was delighted that the opportunity to swear in the first woman was his.
The second Labour government of 1929 to 1931 was defined by the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash of October 1929. Unemployment soared; it was probably the worst possible time in the 20th century to have been minister of labour. But that should not obscure the achievements of Bondfield. Born in 1873 in Chard, Somerset, her father had been a textile worker. At 14, she started work in a draper’s shop, and progressed through the Shop Assistants’ Union before becoming secretary of the Women’s Labour League.
At this time, during the Edwardian period, one of the great questions of British politics was votes for women. As chair of the Adult Suffrage Society, Bondfield was not interested in some sort of compromise by which only middle-class women were given the vote. She thought that would disadvantage the working classes from achieving the vote. As a believer in a universal, equal suffrage, it was fitting that she became a cabinet minister after the first election held under an equal franchise, which had been introduced in 1928.
She became member of parliament for Northampton in 1923, though lost her seat in the 1924 general election. She returned to parliament in a 1926 by-election, thereafter sitting for Wallsend until losing her seat in Labour’s general election defeat of 1931. In 1935, she failed to regain her seat, and would have stood for Reading had there been a general election in 1940, and the second world war not broken out. As it was, she published her autobiography, My Life’s Work, in 1948. Given her significance in the advancement of women in British politics, it deserves a wide readership.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics. He writes the Labour history column for Progress and tweets @NThomasSymonds
Margaret Bondfield’s power base was in the trade unions; she was a very prominent figure in the TUC long before being elected to Parliament.
In the crunch of 1931, Margaret Bondfield was among the majority in the cabinet who supported the proposal to cut unemployment benefit, but Ramsay Macdonald did not invite her to join the National Government (and she would certainly have refused). This left her position somewhat exposed when Labour went into opposition and renounced its support for spending cuts.