Category Archives: Politics

Books Feminism Politics

Matchwomen – founders of New Unionism…

March 29, 2013 – 12:09 am

First published on Blogcritics

Even if you have never studied history, you probably have some vague awareness of the Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 in London – and think of poor waifs, frail girls and young women, victims of vile Victorian exploitation. If you have studied history, you were probably taught that the strike was led by middle-class Fabian, Annie Besant, who provided the leadership that the uneducated East End women simply could not have found from their own ranks.

In either case, what you should do is read Louise Raw’s Striking A Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History , a spectacular but very readable account of epic original research that has uncovered a very different story from the traditional tale.

It is astonishing that so long after this iconic event no one before Raw had seriously tried to research it, and very sad that no one recorded the participants’ own views before it was too late – as Raw found had been for the Melbourne tailoresses’ strike of 1882-3 (which has considerable parallels with the later strike).

In fact to find out very much at all, Raw had to engage in some serious detective work, and find creative ways to recover knowledge apparently lost in the mists of time. A lot of her information came from the grandchildren of three of the matchwomen – two of the probably strike leaders, Mary Driscoll and Eliza Martin, and Martha Robertson. Raw combines this with census data and a close examination of contemporary accounts of the strike, to paint a picture of a spontaneous, but well-planned and executed, walkout by the women – their own choice, their own action.

Besant played a role, before the action, in attacking the management, which led them to try to force the women to sign letters attesting good treatment – which when the women resisted led to the sacking that precipitated the strike, and afterwards, in helping to collect strike pay (although the workers also found some of their own from their own community), but she was in no way a leader of the strike, and in fact, Raw shows convincingly, was actually opposed to the whole idea of a strike.

There’s much more to this book too than rewriting a colourful fragment of history – Raw says that New Unionism, a major part of British political history, should be dated back to the matchwomen, rather than the dockers’ strike the following year, as is traditional. The two were closely linked by more than geography – Raw makes a detailed case for the ties of marriage and community (both groups having large Irish continents) between matchwomen and dockers. And Raw quotes from a contemporary account of the dockers strike which has John Burns telling a mass meeting: “The matchgirls had formed a union and had got what they wanted, and so had the gas stokers at Beckton, and surely the Dock Labourers could do the same” to cries of “hear hear”. (p. 166)
read more »

Permalink | Comments (27)
Books Environmental politics

Eating meat and starving men

March 27, 2013 – 11:09 pm

Notes from What It Means to be Human by Joanna Bourke

This is a fascinating read, as ever, from this Birkbeck historian, but I’ve no time for a full review so here’s just some interesting points…

“The great expansion in meat-eating in Britain and America only occurred after the 1860s… According to one estimate, meat consumption in Britain almost doubled between the 1860s and the 1890s, and had increased still further by 1914. .. in 1909, Americans consumed on average 51 kg of boneless trimmed meat each year…. by the late 1960s the average person was eating more than 70 kg of such meat a year — or the equivalent in animal flesh of his or her own body weight… Today, the average American consumes a staggering 125 kg of meat a year.” (p 278)

Historically of course what most people ate as meat varied widely. Bourke comes up with a fascinating list from early West Coast America: ” Teal, summer and mallard duck, plover, lark, robin, prairie grouse, quail, snipe, wild geese, swan, wild pigeon, while turkey, grey and white cranes, white and black tailed deer, antelope, beaver, black bear, hare, raccoon, opossum, grey black and fox squirrels and bison. If especially hungry, they might also tuck into the flesh of blackbirds, bluebirds, buzzards, crows, doves, dippers, Eagles, owls, hawks, mockingbirds, ravens, mice, gophers, prairie dogs, panthers, skunks, foxes, wildcats, coyotes, wolves or mustangs.” (p. 277)

Now of course, we’re down to cows, pigs and poultry – with a heavy stress on the last.

“At the turn-of-the-century, only around 10% of the world grain was fed to animals… In America today, around 60% of the grain is fed to animals. This shift is even more remarkable when it is noted that the animals being fed grain in 1900 were primarily those working in the field … As opposed to animals raised dissatisfied people’s carnivorous appetites.” (p278)

And in echoes of today … “A highly publicised incident of alleged cannibalism took place in Hampshire. at the Andover workhouse male paupers had been put to work crushing bones use as fertiliser. In 1845 a local farmer and member of the board of guardians discovered that the paupers was so hungry that they were fighting over the bones in order to eat them. To great consternation, it was revealed that some of the bones came from the local cemetery. The gruesome story caused uproar, forcing the government to institute a Parliamentary enquiry into what happened. The scandal was a godsend for people protesting against the stringent new Poor Law… The master … was accused of introducing increasingly harsh measures to prevent the workhouse from becoming overcrowded by the growing numbers of unemployed men and women. The English gentleman said every person in Britain was ” entitled to food – it is his inherent right, as much as the air he breathes but he is bound to burn it honestly. If we cannot employ him – if we cannot accept his Labour – or if he is incapable of work – still he is one of us, and must not be shut up to gnaw the bones of dead men. policy and Christianity teach us otherwise”. ” (p319)

Permalink | Comment (0)
History Politics

Notes from Cannabis Nation by James Mills

January 24, 2013 – 5:09 pm

p. 195 – in September 1999 the Green Party took a public position saying their policy was to allow public to grow for recreational and medicinal purposes. Plaid in 2001 promised to approve recreational use. …”the reshuffle of the Cabinet following the 2001 general election was to bring the issue to a head. it ushered in a period of intense activity where legislators and politicians attempted to assert themselves over the British compromise that had evolved since the 1960s where cannabis had been devolved into the hands of the courts and the police.” …
In 2008 possession of cannabis remained an arrestable offence and the police continued to be the key powerbrokers in matters related to the drug throughout the period. … it was police that made the policy: at each stage it was the police officer who was empowered to decide who was stopped, who was warned, who was cautioned, who was sent to court, and even how much cannabis constituted a serious offence.. the fate of the individuals depends not “on the will of Parliament, the conclusions of the scientists, or the interests of the user.”

Permalink | Comment (0)
Books History Politics

Some notes from Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order by Philip Coggan

January 24, 2013 – 5:05 pm

p. 31 ” In a Second World War debate on monetary systems, Lord Addison, a Labour peer, remarked that he was not convinced that ‘to dig gold out of the ground in South Africa and to bury it, refined in a cellar in the United States, in fact adds to the wealth of the world’.”

p. 58 “Industrial workers also required credit. A house in town, however humble, required furniture – bed, table and chairs. Few could afford the expense upfront… Cowperthwaite & Sons, a New York furniture retailer, was one of the first to adopt the practice. The Singer sewing-machine company took up the idea with enthusiasm later in the century. The idea of instalment plans was far from new … John Law sold shares in the Mississippi Company in instalment form. But a system based on regular payments was suited to an industrial age where workers received regular income. Instalment selling greatly widened the potential market for a retailer’s goods, and the financing charges more than offset any bad debts. … when they did default, buyers had usually made several payments, usually ensuring loss was limited.”

p. 71 “The [gold] standard ‘worked’ in the sense of keeping prices stable. … outside times of war, long-term inflation did not exist in the British economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, although prices did fluctuate, usually in response to changes in the supply of food… In The Death of Inflation, Roger Boodle cites the cost of a Hackney carriage. In 1694, the same year the Bank of England was founded, the cost was set at one shilling a mile. Two centuries later, the rate was at the same level. In 1932, the average level of prices in Britain was slightly below what it had been in 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars. … Low inflation also meant low interest rates …. What the gold standard also helped to create was the first great era of globalisation. This was particularly true in Great Britain … Low yields on British government debts gilts caused the prosperous middle classes to buy bonds in Argentine railways in search of higher incomes (an early version of the ‘search for yield’ that would be seen in the current era).”

p. 74 “In a sense this was all a confidence trick. Britain’s gold reserves rarely exceeded £40 million, a figure that was only 3 per cent of the country’s total money supply … Had foreign creditors demanded the conversion of their claims into gold, Britain could not have met the bill… there were some hairy moments. When Baring Brothers, what was then called a merchant bank, came close to failure in 1890, the Bank of England had to borrow gold from France and Russia in the face of a run on its reserves… what kept the system going’ there was international cooperation between central banks.. Central bankers were generally of a similar class (the upper or creditor classes) … the Reichsbank in Germany borrowed money from Britain and France in 1898.. they did not compete for funds via interest rates; the level of rates in the big countries tended to move in tandem. … the gold standard was accompanied by general prosperity so countries were keen to see it last. Or, to qualify that statement, the leaders of those countries were keen to see it last … sound money has a price. Maintaining a sound currency often required a central banker to push up interest rates, or find some other way of restricting demand, when gold reserves were falling. The lack of democracy insulated politicians and central bankers from the anger of those thrown out of work in the resulting recessions.”
read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Victorian (and later) citizenship – inclusion and exclusion

December 28, 2012 – 9:59 pm

Notes from Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (2000)

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867” (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male'”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”
read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
Books Feminism Women's history

Meeting Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant

December 24, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Reading Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, I was pleased to meet Dora Russell, one of the exes of Bertrand.

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

Permalink | Comment (1)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »