page_title: Margaret Bondfield
section_title: Shop worker
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Bondfield / Early career / Shop worker
caption_attribution_description: English: Beatrice &amp; Sidney Webb working toggther at a table. Published in Beatrice Webb's second volume of autobiography 'Our Partnership' (1948). Martha Beatrice Webb (1858-1943); nee Potter, social reformer. Sidney James Webb (1859-1947); Baron Passfield; politician IMAGELIBRARY/1385 Persistent URL: http://archives.lse.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&amp;id=IMAGELIBRARY/1385
context_page_description: Margaret Grace Bondfield CH PC was a British Labour politician, trade unionist and women's rights activist. She became the first female cabinet minister, and the first woman to be a privy counsellor in the UK, when she was appointed Minister of Labour in the Labour government of 1929–31. She had earlier become the first woman to chair the General Council of the Trades Union Congress.
  Bondfield was born in humble circumstances and received limited formal education. After serving an apprenticeship to an embroidress she worked as a shop assistant in Brighton and London. She was shocked by the working conditions of shop staff, particularly within the "living-in" system, and became an active member of the shopworkers' union. She began to move in socialist circles, and in 1898 was appointed assistant secretary of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks. She was later prominent in several women's socialist movements: she helped to found the Women's Labour League in 1906, and was chair of the Adult Suffrage Society.
context_section_description: Bondfield joined a drapery and embroidery business in Church Road, Hove, where the young apprentices were treated as family members. Relations between customers and assistants were cordial, and Bondfield's later recollections of this period were uniformly happy. Her apprenticeship complete, she worked as a living-in assistant in a succession of Brighton drapery stores, where she quickly encountered the realities of shop staff life: unsympathetic employers, very long hours, appalling living conditions and no privacy. Bondfield reported on her experiences of living-in: "Overcrowded, insanitary conditions, poor and insufficient food were the main characteristics of this system, with an undertone of danger ... In some houses both natural and unnatural vices found a breeding ground". She found some relief from this environment when she was befriended by a wealthy customer, Louisa Martindale, and her daughter Hilda. The Martindales, socially conscious liberals and advocates for women's rights, found Bondfield a willing learner, and lent her books that began her lifelong interest in labour and social questions. Bondfield described Mrs Martindale as "a most vivid influence on my life ... she put me in the way of knowledge that has been of help to many score of my shop mates".
  Bondfield's brother Frank had established himself in London some years earlier as a printer and trades unionist, and in 1894, having saved £5, she decided to join him. She found London shopworking conditions no better than in Brighton, but through Frank her social and political circles widened. She became an active member of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks (NUSAWC), sometimes missing church on Sundays to attend union meetings. Her political and literary education was centred on the Ideal Club, where she met Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Under the influence of these socialist luminaries, she joined the Fabian Society and later the Independent Labour Party (ILP).
  
  As a shopworker, Bondfield was expected to work between 80 and 100 hours a week for 51 weeks in the year, and might be sent out late at night to check that rival shops had closed before her employer would do so. She began to record her experiences, in a series of articles and stories that she wrote under the pseudonym "Grace Dare", for the shopworkers' monthly magazine The Shop Assistant. She wrote surreptitiously, at night: "I would light my half-penny dip [candle], hiding its glare by means of a towel and set to work on my monthly article". In 1896 she was recruited by the Women's Industrial Council (WIC) as an undercover agent, working in various shops while secretly recording every aspect of shop life. Her accounts of squalor and exploitation were published in articles under the "Grace Dare" name, in both The Shop Assistant and the Daily Chronicle newspaper, and provided the basis for a WIC report on shopworkers' conditions published in 1898.
caption: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, c. 1895; they were among Bondfield's early socialist acquaintances.
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