The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History

by Nan Sloane

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. Six years later, this body became 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. Millicent was the President of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and Isabella had been involved with the suffrage movement for a long time. A few years later she would become the first woman to speak at a Labour Party conference. 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. 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, History, Politics, Social Justice, Gender

288 pages, Hardcover

Published December 30, 2018

Reviews

[anna marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow this really demonstrated the labour party has always been this way lol

i think this is an impressive book considering a. how much history it covers b. how many leagues/unions/orgs/societies/etc it covers & c. how it manages to paint some key figures pretty clearly even though it’s fairly short.

i am really interested in women especially radical, leftist, working class victorian + edwardian women & there are definitely a few women who fit some/ all these things in this book about the development of the labour party & the women involved in its founding. i think the way this complicated received wisdom about the fight for women’s suffrage is really important & illuminating. a lot of women socialists at the time including those who were in the nascent labour party(/parties) were rly alienated by the ‘apolitical’ middle classness of especially the women’s social and political union & to a lesser extent the national union of women’s suffrage societies. as well as this it showed how these organisations capitulated sm to classist respectability politics & focused on property being the thing that should entitle someone to a vote - at the same time a lot of campaigning and militancy was happening for women’s right to vote i think about 40% of men (all working class) couldn’t vote still, and many reform bills that did include women voters did so only insofar as allowing certain middle class women the right. despite not liking party politics & being frustrated sometimes with the sense that sloane wanted the labour party to exist so badly she wld prefer ppl to be electable than to be genuinely socialist (a problem that is obviously ongoing lol) i still cried at various points because of the way it tenderly and humanely depicted flawed people trying to do what was right (also i just love women + unions!). & especially because it showed how the left sucks the vivacity out of amazing political women, destroys their bodies (many died so young!) and then allows them to be forgotten/actively writes them out of the story.

it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in turn of the century politics, trade unions in the uk, women socialists/+trade unionists, suffragettes/suffragists & working class history, but it can get a little tedious and nan sloane is not a fan of anarchists at all lol which did make me laugh at points but is frustrating bc there were some cool anarchist women also participating in leftist politics & spaces during the time the book covers!!

[Sarah AF · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahh, a period of history that I'm *so* incredibly familiar with having studied it, but in this book I recognised how that barely scratched the surface of the role that women played in the labour movements of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. It wasn't just about getting the vote (and even that, I feel, was framed as a "silly women chucking themselves in front of horses" sneer rather than an exploration of gender inequality), women campaigners were active in ALL areas of life, aspects which often (although not exclusively and they certainly weren't always welcomed) aligned with the concerns of the early years of the Labour Party in its various forms.

These women have barely been permitted a footnote in the history of trade unions, social history and political history and what Nan Sloane did so effortlessly in this book was present the early history of the Labour Party and, in doing so, interwove the integral role that women played in shaping the party. This is an excellent book about the origins of the Labour Party, that an author chooses to research and present the role that women played in that has to be celebrated as an "outlier" is a depressing reflection of the inherent patriarchal nature of political history. I'm just grateful that women like Nan Sloane are working hard (as women always have had to do to be heard) to redress that balance.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Nathan Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important book about important women that more people need to read.

[Shay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent and enjoyable read. However the author's bias is clearly pre-concieved and plays loose with the facts as a result. Though informative in many ways, this book has a clear agenda and one that doesn't always correlate with what actually happened. I would still recommend this however and I enjoyed it overall.