“Any help possible will be given”: The Minute Books of the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Union Council 1895-1919.
In this guest blog writer, researcher and political activist, Bernadette Hyland, discusses the importance of the minute books of the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Union Council, part of the Working Class Movement Library’s collection.
The Manchester and Salford Women’s Trade Union Council was set up in 1895 to organise women workers into trade unions. At this time trade unions were organisations of men; they were either indifferent to or opposed to women workers joining trade unions.
The original hand-written Minutes of the Council came to light during the research into the life of Mary Quaile for the pamphlet “Dare To Be Free,” published by the Mary Quaile Club in 2015. Mary worked as the Organising Secretary for the Council from 1911 to 1919, and took the Minutes with her when the office was shut down and it merged with the men’s Trades Council to form a single body.
The Minutes are a complete record of the meetings of the Council, and are a unique item of national significance. They will be a major contribution to the study of women workers and trade unionism in the late C19th and early C20th.
The Minutes tell the story of how a small group of philanthropists, including C.P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian and Julia Gaskell, daughter of author and social campaigner Elizabeth Gaskell formed the MSWTUC which then went onto to be shaped by less-well known grassroots activists including Mrs. Olive Aldridge, Sarah Reddish, Eve Gore Booth, Mary Quaile and the many anonymous women and men who assisted and supported women in setting up their own trade unions and challenging injustice and inequality at work.
The Council worked hard to organise women in laundries, bookbinding, shirtmaking, boxmaking, printing, the india rubber trade, tailoring and upholstering. By 1900 it had 950 members and two paid organisers.
The Minutes show that on occasions women workers were quite prepared to walk out of workplaces where they were treated badly by employers. The Council then stepped in to support these women in organising themselves collectively into unions.
Organising poorly paid women workers was not easy. The Annual Reports of the MSWTUC outlined the barriers felt by working class women and how they responded. In 1902 the Annual Report explained how they set up a tea fund to buy tea, sugar, milk, and cake for women attending the meetings after work.
In 1903 the Annual Report of the Council explained: “For however severely trade grievances may be felt, the first steps in organisation are always difficult. The timidity of inexperience is hard to overcome, and people naturally fear to jeopardise their week’s earnings.”
The Minute Books provide new information about unknown women including Miss Nellie Kay, a pioneering first woman organiser of the tailoresses. It was her actions and that of her sister tailoresses that changed the history of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors, forcing it to take women into their union and become the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses.
The MSWTUC also lobbied at local and national level to improve the social and economic conditions of all workers, including children, influencing legislation, and taking part in research and working parties.
The Minutes are comprehensive ; well-written vignettes of the struggle to get women organised into bodies that would lift them out of poverty and exploitation. They comprise a historical record that shows how the campaign for the vote split the organisation with the more radical and working class- based activists in 1904 leaving and then setting up the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades and Labour Council. This new organisation campaigned for both trade unions and votes for women, reflecting the mood of working-class women trade unionists
The 23 years of the MSWTUC, as told through the Minute Books, are important to women and the trade union movement. They are an important lesson for all oppressed workers showing how they can defeat injustice and poverty and achieve self-respect and self-determination.
The Mary Quaile Club raised money from the trade union movement and individuals to transcribe the Minutes and placed them on a website for all to read. This also includes some of the Annual Reports of the MSWTUC and those of the MSWTLC. Sadly, the Minute Books of the latter have never been found.
The Minute Books and website were donated to the WCML so that they can be accessed by students and researchers. We hope it will encourage other people to become active in doing further research about women and trade unions. This is just the beginning and we hope that further research will be added to the website.
Bernadette Hyland is a writer, researcher and political activist. She has written several publications including “Northern ReSisters. Conversations with Radical Women” and co-wrote “Dare to be Free. Women in Trade Unions Past and Present”. She is a founder member of the Mary Quaile Club and was an activist in the Irish in Britain Representation Group whose archive she documented and is now available in the Working Class Movement Library.