Ep 11: 'One Hand Tied Behind Us' - Women workers, trade unions, and the fight for suffrage

Labour Days: a labour movement podcast

In the centenary year of the "Representation of the People Act", which extended the franchise to certain, propertied, women, Labour Days looks at the question of working-class and labour movement involvement in the women's suffrage movement, and introduces listeners to the activity of labour-movement suffrage fighters like Julia Varley, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Ada Nield Chew. The reccommended reading for this episode is Jill Norris and Jill Liddington's book 'One Hand Tied Behind Us', which looks at the radical roots of the suffrage movement in the activity of working-class and socialist women organisers. You can buy a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Hand-Tied-Behind-Us/dp/1854891111 At the top of the show we mention four strikes of education workers, which you can read more about here: University lecturers' strikes against pension cuts in the UK: https://theclarionmag.org/2018/02/26/ucu-strike-channel-anger-against-management/ (and http://twitter.com/occupation_hub for updates on student sit-ins in solidarity with the strikes) Teachers' strikes for decent pay in West Virginia, USA: http://www.labornotes.org/2018/03/west-virginia-option University lecturers' strikes in Kenya: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kenya-strike/kenyan-university-lecturers-strike-again-over-low-pay-idUSKCN1GE0NW Non-academic university workers' strikes in Nigeria: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-news/260287-three-months-strike-action-university-workers-set-nationwide-protest.html We also reccommended LabourStart as a good starting point for all your international labour movement news: http://www.labourstart.org We also mentioned the Picturehouse cinema workers' International Women's Day strike, which you can read about here: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/03/if-picturehouse-strikers-demands-were-met-women-would-benefit The strike linked up with other IWD events via the Women's Strike initiative, which you can read about here: https://womenstrike.org.uk/ and here: https://theclarionmag.org/2018/03/04/8-march-womens-strike-collectivising-our-fight/ All the usual copyright disclaimers apply about the music used here, which we don't own. The post-credits music was a snippet from Joan Baez and Mimi Farina's version of 'Bread And Roses', James Oppenheim's 1911 poem about the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile workers' strike. The slogan "bread and roses" originates with sweatshop worker organiser Rose Schneidermann ("the worker must have bread, but she must have roses too"), who used it to assert the idea that the labour movement should fight for workers' right to a rich and fulfilling life rather than just mere economic subsistence.