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The Women in the Room - Labour's Forgotten History (Paperback)
Loot Price: R353
Discovery Miles 3 530
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The Women in the Room - Labour's Forgotten History (Paperback)
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Loot Price R353
Discovery Miles 3 530
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In February 1900 a group of men representing trade unionists,
socialists, Fabians and Marxists gathered in London to make another
attempt at establishing an organisation capable of getting
working-class men elected to Parliament. The body they set up was
the Labour Representation Committee; six years later when 29 of its
candidates were elected to the House of Commons, it changed its
name to the Labour Party. No women took part in that first meeting,
but several watched from the public gallery. Amongst them was
Isabella Ford, an active socialist and trade unionist who would
have been familiar to most of the men assembled below. She had been
asked by her friend, Millicent Fawcett, to attend and report back
on what happened. A few years later she would become the first
woman to speak at a Labour Party conference, moving a resolution on
votes for women but, at the Party's inception in 1900, she and
every other woman in the hall was silent. Throughout Labour's
history, even in its earliest years, women were present in the
room, but they were not always recorded or remembered. They came
from many different backgrounds and they worked for the causes they
believed in as organisers, campaigners, negotiators, polemicists,
public speakers and leaders. They took on the vested interests of
their time; sometimes they won. Yet the vast majority of them have
been forgotten by the Labour movement that they helped to found.
Even Margaret Bondfield, who became Britain's first woman cabinet
minister, often barely merits a footnote. Women made real and
substantial contributions to Labour's earliest years and had a
significant impact on the Party's ability to attract and maintain
women's votes after World War I. In addition to Margaret and
Isabella, in many of the rooms in which the Labour Party found its
feet, remarkable women wait to be rediscovered. This book tells
their story.
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