page_title: Jessie Stephen
section_title: Middle years
hierarchical_section_title: Jessie Stephen / Biography / Middle years
caption_attribution_description: Blue plaque for Jessie Stephen MBE (1893-1979) in Chessel Street, Bristol. Councillor and Trade Unionist who in 1952 became the first woman president of the Trades Council. Lived and died here.
context_page_description: Jessie Stephen, MBE was a twentieth-century British suffragette, labour activist and local councillor. She grew up in Scotland and won a scholarship to train as a teacher. Family finances dictated otherwise, leading to her becoming a domestic worker at the age of 15. She became involved in national labour issues as a teenager, via organisations such as the Independent Labour Party and the Women's Social and Political Union. After moving to Lancashire and London she visited the United States and Canada, where she held meetings with the public including migrant English domestic workers.
  Stephen later become more involved in formal political parties, being elected as a local councillor and standing as a candidate in general elections. After moving to Bristol she became the first woman president of Bristol Trades Council. She was appointed MBE in 1977 and her life is commemorated by a blue plaque in Bristol.
context_section_description: Stephen later lived in Lancashire and also in London, where she became involved in the East London Federation and sold the Women's Dreadnought. She was elected Labour borough councillor for Bermondsey in 1922, after failing to be selected as a parliamentary candidate for the ILP, and worked for Bermondsey MP Alfred Salter. She stood as Labour candidate for Portsmouth South in the general elections of 1923, 1924 and 1929, and for Kidderminster in 1931.
  From 1924 she worked as a freelance journalist, established a secretarial agency in Lewes in 1935 and joined the National Union of Clerks in 1938. At the time of the Second World War, she worked for Murphy Radio in Welwyn Garden City.
  She later moved to Bedminster, Bristol, where she worked at the Broad Quay branch of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and with the National Union of Clerks. She later became chair of the local CWS management committee. Around this time, she spoke publicly and gave advice on birth control. She was elected to the city council. In 1952 she became the first woman president of Bristol Trades Council.
caption: Blue plaque in Bedminster, Bristol
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