The Romance of “Maggie” Bondfield

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 750, 24 August 1929, Page 20

The Romance of “Maggie” Bondfield

First Woman to Attain Cabinet Rank in Britain

BA R G A R E T GRACE BONDFIELD, Minister of Labour in the new British Government, is the tirst 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 chairman of a Trade Union Executive Committee; she was the first woman ever to be a member of a British Government, as Under-Secretasy 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 it the prefix “Right Honourable” and the suffix "P.C.”—-an honour which may last for the lifetime of the recipient, unless the present King or a succeeding King should cancel the appointment. Miss Bondfield (writes T. J, C. Martin) is a hard worker and such honours as she has received, she has earned. Her position in Parliament and in British 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 w oman in any 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. In a sense her high appointments are the tribute which Miss Bondfield pays to herself, for she has earned them— Britain still expects that every man and every woman shall do his or her duty, and on that basis Britain is prepared to reward them. Born at Chard, in Somerset. Miss Bondfield is now 56. She is small in physique, with 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 always j a humorous curl, and her broad fore- 1 lead is suggestive of the intelligence j that lies behind it. Alertness, keen perception and a sharp vivacity are ; the traits which most mark her out j as an exceptional woman. If Miss Bondfield is a hard worker j she is no lees a hard thinker. N'o ■ cue can listen to her speeches with- j

out being struck by their quality of commonseuse. They are singularly free from hyperbole; 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 produce thoughts that have the staying power of conviction. Miss Bondfield's speeches are not without the fire of passion, for such speeches never hit their mark. Her faith, her belief in the rights and duties of the worker, whether man or woman, are her passionate convictions, but tempered, one feels, with logic.

Miss Bondfield may be said to have begun her career in her teens working in a store. As early as that she came to know the horrors of unemployment. Unless the workers organised, she thought, there would be no hope for them. But there was nothing in those days remotely resembling a workers’ organisation for women. Miss Bondfield went to London. 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 propa-

ganda for the Shop Assistants’ Union, of which body she rapidly became the mainstay. In the suffrage movement Miss Bondfield 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 but 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 her trade union work became too heavy. Soon after the war she was sent as a member of the British delegation to

the International Conference at Berne. 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 Labour. If was not until the following year, 1921, that she first stood for Parliament. She obtained 7,000 votes, but failed of election. In the election of 1923, she won a seat with a majority of some 4,000 votes and sat as memher for Northampton and as Undersecretary of Labour —the first woman 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 in succession to Sir Patrick Hastings. Thus her new Parliamentary triumph marks the zenith of her political career.