It was the working-class women of Bow who called the strike and held it, winning the reinstatement of the women organisers, proper lunch breaks in rooms away from the poisonous phosphorus, clean washrooms, an end to fines and a proper rate of pay. They founded one of the country’s biggest trade unions, the Union of Women Matchmakers, to protect their working conditions in the future.81 The first women factory inspectors were appointed to enforce safety, especially in businesses that employed many women, and white phosphorus would finally be banned from matches in England four years after the 1906 Berne Convention.

  Throughout, the striking women were known as ‘girls’, and the protest is still widely referred to as the ‘Matchgirls’ Strike’. But despite the patronising language, the walkout had a profound effect, inspiring the great dock strike the following year. When the leader of the dockers John Burns called on a meeting of thousands of dock workers, he said: ‘Stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember the match women who won their fight and formed a union.’82

  The years between 1907 and 1911 were years of the ‘great unrest’ when women’s union membership increased and women undertook industrial action. In London alone, unionist Mary Macarthur organised 20 simultaneous strikes involving 200 women. Women understood that they had to have equal pay, or they would be used to undercut men’s wages. As Eleanor Rathbone said: ‘If the wages of men and women are really based on fundamentally different conditions and if these conditions cannot be changed then it would seem that women are the eternal blacklegs, doomed, despite themselves, to injure the prospects of men whenever they are brought into competition with them.’83

  Women were determined not to be ‘eternal blacklegs’ bringing wages down and breaking strikes. In the bad jobs usually delegated to them, they went on strike to raise pay and improve conditions. Jam- and pickle-makers, ragpickers, bottle-washers, laundry women, envelope-, biscuit-, cocoa- and tin box-makers, and distillery and confectionery workers – all low-skilled, low-paid light work, some of it in sweatshop conditions – went on strike from 1910–14. Women’s actions emerged as the old food riots used to emerge: when an incident triggered a widespread sense of outrage. In 1911, a herring fish-wife put a red rag on a broom and carried it before her like a flag, going around the yards to call out workers on strike.84 She had no union assistance and no outside agitators: it was women standing up for women.

  In the housing estates and slums of the new industrial towns, women’s protest took a new form: the rent strike. In the first years of the First World War, with many men away, many women could not pay their rents, especially when landlords imposed a 25 per cent increase, as they did in Glasgow’s Govan area in 1915. The unrest spread to other Scots’ towns and to the English towns of Leeds, Bradford, Edmonton, Barrow, Workington, Coventry and Birmingham, until it was so widespread that the government created the Rent Restriction Act of 1915, and in 1919 ordered towns to provide new good-quality social housing for working people.85

  In Bradford, working-class women used this new tactic of a rent strike to control an abusing man. They forced a private landlord to exclude a man and his mistress from the family home by withholding their rent until he had been evicted. Wood, a dyer’s labourer, made no financial contribution to the family home but lived off his wife – a daily domestic cleaner who sold goods door to door. The couple had four children, one of them a girl named Maud. When Maud was four, the heavy-drinking Wood brought his mistress to live in the family home. When Maud was ten years old, her father sexually assaulted her, and gave her an infection which prompted her to tell her mother. The quarrel between husband and wife was heard by the neighbours. Later, as an adult Maud said: ‘The happiest day of me life is when I came home from the mill, and he’d gone. Me mother says “he’s been thrown out”. The neighbours signed a petition saying they would withhold the rent if me father weren’t thrown out. Well, the woman next door lived wall-to-wall, and they could hear it carry on, they could hear it, and they thought my mother had had enough. So she got the petition up, and he had to go, and take his fancy woman with him.’86

  A spontaneous strike by women bus drivers and workers brought wartime transport in London and other cities’ to a halt in 1918, when a group of women, without union support, met at Willesden Bus Garage and demanded that the 3,500 women employed by the London General Omnibus Company should get equal pay to men for the same work and be paid a 5s male bonus. Both male trade unions and male employers were committed to a breadwinner wage favouring men. The Willesden women went on strike the next day and were joined by women from Acton, Archway, Hackney and Holloway bus depots and garages. Other women working on the London Underground came out too, bringing the Tube to a halt, and women strikers walked out of garages at Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, Hastings and Southend. About half of all the women employed in transport – 18,000 women – stopped work for a few days before they were offered the 5s bonus (but still not equal pay to men) and returned to work.87

  The post-war recession prompted women workers to drop the campaign for equal pay, calling instead for job creation and better pay for everyone. Groups of unemployed women joined together informally for mutual support, and the Women’s Group in the 1922 Trades Union Congress demanded unemployment insurance for domestic servants, cleaners and home-workers.88

  In 1926, private coal mine owners attempted to reduce miners’ wages and the Trades Union Congress called a General Strike. The unions were so afraid of sparking political unrest that they limited the strike to heavy industries: 1.7 million workers went on strike, and some more radical women workers, such as the sweetmakers at Rowntree’s in York, walked out to support the striking miners. Government reaction was immediate and hostile. The strike was broken in nine days, largely by gentry and white-collar volunteers called out by the government. Union membership collapsed under the pressure of anti-trade union legislation and the gruelling experience of defeat in the strike itself. The miners themselves held out for a further six months until forced by absolute poverty to go back to work at lower rates.

  The General Strike proved a deeply divisive experience for English women. Working-class women in mining areas experienced terrible poverty, causing one Labour campaigner to describe the affected neighbourhoods as ‘famine areas’. Women stormed the dole office in Merthyr when benefits were cut, and Rhondda women broke through three police cordons to take their complaints to the Prince of Wales.

  A miner’s wife wrote for help: ‘I am pregnant. The children have no boots or clothes, and to make things worse we have not a bite of food in the house and the children are crying for bread . . . If you visit us you will find things worse than what this letter says we are, but I have no more writing paper to say more – Please believe me.’

  Many women from the wealthy and working classes sympathised deeply with the miners and the terrible poverty their families suffered without pay for six months. Marion Phillips, the chief woman officer of the Labour Party, set up the Women’s Committee for the Relief of Miners’ Wives and Children. The all-women committee organised appeals, flag days, sales of goods, concerts and a ‘boot day’ to raise money to buy shoes for miners’ children. People donated clothes, food and money, and a scheme for miners’ children to stay with temporary foster families saw women opening their homes to poor children: ‘The hostesses came from every class of society, from those who owned motor cars to working people living in small flats, but the children seemed to fit in very readily with all. Often when they came, “aunts” were very troubled about their food. They had become so accustomed to having little, and probably in addition, arrived so tired with the journey, that at first they would eat nothing but bread and jam, to the bitter disappointment of the hostess who had been looking forward seeing them enjoy their first solid meal in weeks.’89

  Not all women responded with sympathy. The Women’s Guild of Empire led by Mrs Flora Drummond – who had worked on a campaign by the Pankhursts against wartime strike action – urged wives to discourage their husbands from striking: ‘It is up to us to do all we can to save these women from themselves.’90

  Apparently, miners’ wives did not want to be saved from themselves. A meeting of the Women’s Guild for Empire needed a heavy police presence to protect the speakers from a crowd of 500–600 people, ‘mostly women’, who protested and threatened a ‘riot’. Mass rallies of women supporting their husbands’ strike action were held in May 1926, with 10,000 women attending. In June, there was a near-riot in Blaenavon, where 2,000 people (mostly women) locked the ‘relieving officer’ in his office after he refused relief payments to husbands unless they signed receipts. Some so-called ‘riots’ seem to have had echoes of early community protests. Miners’ wives in Wales attacked ‘blackleg’ or strike-breaking men in processions very like medieval skimmington rides. In Bryneath Colliery, some wives got hold of a strike-breaking miner, William Gregory, on his way to the pit. They dressed him in a white shirt and took him to his home in Coity in a wheelbarrow while playing a concertina. Six women were charged with unlawful assembly and intimidation; all but one went to trial and were bound over to keep the peace for 12 months.91

  For many elite women the General Strike gave them an opportunity to play at working-class jobs, sometimes even dressing up in faux uniforms. Few volunteered to replace striking men and do hard or dirty work. Volunteers chose jobs that they thought they would enjoy: male students took on the roles of driving buses and trains and volunteered their private cars as taxis, while upper- and middle-class women volunteers did household chores to support them – cooking hot food, serving in canteens and cleaning up afterwards. Gentry women undertook work usually done by their servants: laundering clothes and making up beds in the temporary camps set up in parks in London and at railway stations.92 One upper-class volunteer said: ‘I can remember enjoying the General Strike very much, with never a thought for the miners. We were quite sorry when it came to an end. My contemporaries and I had no particular feelings about the rights or wrongs of the strike, we simply had no feelings either of sympathy or antipathy towards the miners; but felt that it was our job to help the country as a whole to be as little affected as possible.’93

  Lady Lindsay (formerly the Duchess of Westminster) saw the strike as an interlude in the social season: ‘In a way, we all had great fun you see. As I said, we weren’t at all seriously interested in the problems of the day. I really didn’t know whether the miners had enough or not. It sounds bad; but I mean that is the truth of it! We were so young! I don’t remember anybody sort-of discussing the rights and wrongs. You did what your parents said . . . It was . . . rather a joke. When the strike was over, we just went back the way we were, shook out our party dresses and went to the next ball.’94

  The party atmosphere was very far from the experiences of working-class women. The newspaper Labour Woman wrote: ‘The women of the governing classes of to-day have enjoyed the brilliancy of the season. Let them go. After all, they are of the past, lingering on the scene too long. The women of the future, the women who will help to make our country great, not with “seasons” but with all-the-year-round happiness, are to be found in other places. Above all amongst the women in the coalfields.’95

  The Nature of Women

  ‘Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? . . . Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?’ wrote Virginia Woolf in 1929.96 The greatest men of the century explored the new sciences and found they proved – just like the old ones! – that men were indeed superior. This from Charles Darwin himself: ‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is [shown] by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.’97

  Darwin – one of the greatest observers of the natural world – concluded not only were women naturally inferior to men, but they would evolve to become more inferior. While men evolved greater superiority in all their diverse talents, women would only become more fertile and successful as child-bearers.98

  Darwin’s idea was confirmed by other thinkers like Karl Vogt, who believed that evolution made the sexes more and more specialist – making men stronger and women frailer: ‘The inequality of the sexes increases with the progress of civilization.’99

  An 1859 conduct book writer understood that science confirmed the God-given superiority of men. A husband should ‘consider himself the divinely appointed priest of his own household’.100

  Obviously, women should be encouraged to specialise in the only thing they could do well: conceiving and giving birth. Motherhood was elevated to religious heights by philosophers as if to console women that it was the only thing they could do. One male self-styled expert recommended: ‘A new philosophy of sex which places the wife and mother at the heart of a new world and makes her the object of a new religion and almost of a new worship that will give her reverent exemption from sex competition and reconsecrate her to the higher responsibilities of the human race.’101

  Motherhood, performed on the most elevated plane, would save the world, according to psychologist G. Stanley Hall: ‘Women in parliament and in journalism, their representation in the local and general government, in peace congress, in workingmen’s meetings, in science and literature: – all this will produce small results until women realise that the transformation of society begins with the unborn child . . . This transformation requires an entirely new conception of the vocation of mother, a tremendous effort of will, of continuous inspiration.’102

  In this thinking, women’s demand for equal pay and opportunities could only be a doomed conflict against women’s physique, nature and evolutionary destiny, as W.R. Greg knew:

  Those wild schemers . . . who would throw open the professions to women and teach them to become lawyers and physicians and professors, know little of life, and less of Physiology. The brain and the frame of woman are formed with admirable suitability to their appropriate work, for which subtlety and sensitiveness, not strength and tenacity of fibre are required. The cerebral organisation of the female is far more delicate than that of the man. The continuity and severity of application needed to acquire real mastery in any profession, or over any science, are denied to women, and can never with impunity be attempted by them: mind and health would almost invariably break down under the task.103

  Once women had been defined as completely different from men, indeed the ‘opposite’, it became more and more important to identify a baby’s sex: that parents and adults might respond appropriately to either a boy or his infant opposite, a girl; that the child might be taught from the first moment how to behave appropriately for his or her sex, and to firmly fix from the moment of birth, one of two possible sexual identities.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, babies wore gowns only in the early months of infancy and were then put into short coats called ‘rompers’ or ‘Russian skirts’. They were the same style for boys and girls, but coded by colour so that total strangers should know at first sight whether the baby was a ‘strong little fellow’ or a ‘pretty little love’. A little boy would be dressed in pink, as it was a ‘strong’ colour, while for a girl it would be pale blue or pale yellow.104 As Jo Paoletti recorded: ‘The cherubic white dresses of infancy, once worn well into the third year, shifted in less than a generation from being exactly right for babies to not only wrong but harmful for boys. A boy was not a girl and should never be mistaken for a girl. Banishing white dresses was just the beginning; lace, ruffles, gathers, flowers, kittens, and a sizable portion of the color spectrum were all eliminated from little boys’ clothing over the course of several decades.’105

  Little boys had to be taught early that they must be manly, but little girls could be infantilised. Harper’s Magazine wrote in December 1876: ‘The girl wears forever the infant petticoat, with all its power and privileges.’106

  By this time, the petticoat with ‘all its powers and privileges’ had become a disabling burden for elite women. The gown was supported by a wired crinoline, composed of many layers, tiers and flounces, with pantalette worn underneath and a huge bell-shaped skirt on top, a bodice and jacket often on top of that, a shawl on top of all that, and hair styled elaborately in braids and always worn pinned up. It was clothing that inhibited movement, prohibited action and deterred deep breathing and even digestion. It was an appearance that could only be achieved with a background of servants to make, launder and repair, and a maid to help the lady dress. The clothing not only made elite women dependent on others for dressing and undressing, it disabled them, making walking an arduous exercise, running and any form of sport impossible. The fashionable look for elite women became more and more doll-like, pale, fragile, with a tiny waist. Elite women took poison, including arsenic, to lose weight and bleach their skin; they swallowed tapeworm eggs with the intention of growing a parasite worm in their stomachs to eat their food until, when the ideal weight had been achieved, ingesting a dose of antiseptic or mild poison to kill the worm.107 It was hoped the worm would die and be passed, but some grew very large and strong.

  Elite women wore whalebone corsets that were tightly laced, pulled in by an assistant dresser to achieve a 22-inch waist (10 inches smaller than today’s average female waist).108 The ribs were deformed and the spine permanently curved.

  Physiology for Young People, 1884, showed the deformed position of the liver and the stomach, from tight lacing in corsetry