London: The Biography

Some female occupations were quite new, however, and the period of both world wars fundamentally changed the nature of labour. When the young men were despatched to the trenches and battlefields of the First World War, women were for the first time accepted within previously male reserves. They began to do “war work” in heavy industry, particularly in munitions and in engineering. The number of women employed at Woolwich Arsenal rose from 125 to 28,000, while the old workhouse at Willesden was used as lodgings for the women working at factories in Park Royal. There were female bus-and tube-drivers, with a steady admission of women into clerical or commercial work. Although women were not continually employed in the heavier industries after the First World War, their counterparts in office life remained. This was complemented by another great transition. By the end of the First World War the number of women in their once traditional occupations, dress-making and domestic service, had dropped quickly and significantly. Instead women found work in banking and commerce, local government and retailing, shops and businesses, public administration and the civil service.

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One distinct type had been the “factory girl,” whose token moment of emancipation arrived in the summer of 1888 when 1,500 “girls,” working in the Bryant amp; May match factory in Bow, walked out of their jobs in a demand for higher wages; they were to a certain extent organised by the Fabian militant, Annie Besant, and their success had significant consequences. In that year also women were allowed to vote in local London elections, and of course the movement of the suffragettes found its source and purpose in London. For the first time in the city’s history, women were able to engage its egalitarian spirit in pursuit of their own interests.

In 1913 Sylvia Pankhurst founded the East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU itself was established by her mother ten years earlier); the federation’s birthplace was a baker’s shop along the Bow Road, not far from the Bryant amp; May factory. Sylvia wrote later that “I regarded the rousing of the East End as of utmost importance … The creation of a woman’s movement in that great abyss of poverty would be a call and a rallying cry to the rise of similar movements in all parts of the country.” So through the efforts of women London reacquired its destiny as the home of radical dissent; it was a suitable response, kindling a spirit in all those women who had been written off as “soaks” or worse.

The history of the suffragettes connected with Sylvia Pankhurst was associated very closely with that of the East End, and became a genuine expression of the area’s concerns. Meetings were held in Poplar, Bromley and Bow; processions began, or ended, in Victoria Park; the printer of suffragette literature was in premises along Roman Road, while the Women’s Hall opened on the Old Ford Road. The significance of the topography of the women’s movement has never adequately been analysed, but it has become clear that the eastern areas of London lent power and authority to it. During the First World War, a Distress Bureau was opened on the Old Ford Road for women who, with their husbands’ income gone, had been threatened with eviction. A co-operative factory, organised by Sylvia Pankhurst, was established in Norman Road with a day nursery within it. A free clinic and nursery was opened on the corner of Old Ford Road and St. Stephen’s Road; it had once been a public house, known as the Gunmaker’s Arms but was renamed the Mother’s Arms. It was this double movement, of caring feminism and the female adoption of male working roles, which steadily advanced the moral and social position of women in the city.

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There are still women wrestlers in Shoreditch; the inmates of Holloway Prison have been characteristically convicted of cruelty to children, prostitution, or drug trafficking. There are still many poor women whom the city has beaten into submission. From the latter half of the twentieth century there are records of hostels and refuges for “sick women and battered women.” There is a truth about London here; the pattern of relative misery remains recognisable and unaltered, while surging above it are broad general movements of change. So, for example, the latest statistics suggest that female labour in London has increased by over 6 per cent in the ten years from 1986, while that of men has declined. It is now estimated that 44 per cent of the women in London are in paid employment. So the city has become friendlier to women, and they permeate all of its structures and institutions; there are female taxi-drivers and female executives. Just as the early twenty-first-century city is becoming lighter and more open, so after two thousand years it is discovering its feminine principle.