MARGARET BONDFIELD

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 31 August 1929, Page 11

MARGARET BONDFIELD

Grace Bondfield, Minister of Labour in the nqw (British Government, is a pioneer. She was the first woman delegate ever to appear at a Trade Union Congress; she.was the first woman elected to serve on a Trade Union Executive Committee; she was the first woman to be chair-

man of a Trade Union Executive Committee; she was the first woman ever to be a member Of a British /Government, as Under-Secretary of Labour in the first 'MacDonald Ministry. Now she is the first woman to attain Cabinet rank and to be a member of the King's Most 'Honourable Privy Council,

which carries with i't the prefix “(Right Honourable ” and the suffix “P.C.” Miss Bond field (writes T. .T. C. Martin) is a hard worker and such honours as she has received, she has ( earned. Her .position in Parliament and in -Brit?.,]! public life is a great one. As a Minister of the 'Crown she will sit in the -House of Commons on the Government (bench. Socially she ranks midway down the table of precedency as -a Privy 'Councillor in order of seniority of appointment. She emerges as a great public figure who may have the ear of the King on matters of State. ; Such a record any • woman in arty country might .well be , proud of; but in England, where women have not yet won the degree of freedom they .have in some other countries, her success is much greater.

Born at iChard, in Somerset, Miss Bondfield is now 56. She is small in physique, pvith masses of dark hair shot with gray. Her eyes are dark and bright and she carries her head alertly. Around her lips, even when they are compressed, there is alweays a humorous curl, and her broad forehead is suggestive of the intelligence that lies behind it. Alertness, keen perception and a sharp vivacity are the traits which most mark her out as an exceptional woman. If Miss .Bondfield is a hard worker

she is no less a hard thinker. No one can listen to her speeches without being struck by their quality of eom,m onscnso. They are singularly free from hyperibole; they deal always with the actualities of a given situation. 'She is widely read and the knowledge she has thus amassed is not the stale stereotyped knowledge of the so-called intelligentsia, but knowledge put to work to pro-

HER ROMANTIC CAREER

duco thoughts that have the staying power of conviction. Miss Bondfield may toe said to have toegun her career in her teens working in a store. As early as that she came to know the horrors of unemployment. She was 20 when she arrived in the

metropolis. After many weary weeks of searching for work she at last found employment in an East End dry goods store. Then 'began her life’s work for the Labour movement. Her faculty for organisation immediately found full play in spreading propaganda for the Shop Assistants’ Union,

of which body she rapidly became the mainstay. In the suffrage movement Miss Bondfiekl was an energetic and indefatigable worker. But she eschewed the militant wing of that famous fight of the past. Votes for women appealed to her as an inherent right of woman as a 'citizen, but it-was a smaller part of the emancipation of women. At about this time, in order to further the emancipation .of women, she joined the Independent Labour Party, the parent of the Parliamentary Labour Party now in power. The value of her; work was early recognised and she became a member of its executive committee, in which position she remained until hgr trade union work became too heavy. Soon

after the war .she pvas sent at a member of the British delegation to the International ‘Conference at IBerne. In the same year she attended the French Trade Union Congress and went to Washington as labour adviser to the League of Nations Labour Convention. In 1920 she again went to America to attend the congress of the American Federation of Lalbour. It was not until the following year, 1921, that she first stood for Parliament. She obtained 7,000 voltes, but failed of election. In the election of

1923, she won a seat with a majority of some 4,000 votes and sat as member for Northampton and as Undersecretary of Labour—the. first womajn ever to be in the 'Government—during Mr MacDonald’s short-lived Ministry. In 1924. she failed of election, but was elected in 1926, on a by-election insuccession to Sir Patrick Hastings. . Thus her new Parliamentary triumph marks the zenith of her political career. #