On This Day, 8 June 1929

Margaret Bondfield in August 1919

On this Day, 8 June 1929, Margaret Grace Bondfield was appointed Minister of Labour in the Labour Government, becoming the first female cabinet minister, and the first woman to be a Privy Councilor(a body that advises the head of state of a nation, typically, but not always, in the context of a monarchic government) in the UK.

Margaret Grace Bondfield was a British Labour politician, trade unionist, and women's rights activist.

At the beginning of her career, while she worked as a shop assistant in Brighton and London, she was shocked by the working conditions of shop staff and became an active member of the shopworkers' union. In 1898 was appointed an assistant secretary of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks (NAUSAWC).

In 1923 she becomes the first woman to chair the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

Later, she became famous in several women's socialist movements and in 1906 helped to found the Women’s Labour League (WLL). She favored extending the vote to all adults regardless of gender or property.

In 1908 Bondfield worked as organizing secretary for the WLL and later as women's officer for the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW).

After the fall of the Labour government in August 1931, Margaret Bondfield remained active in NUGMW affairs until 1938, and during the Second World War carried out investigations for the Women's Group on Public Welfare.

Broadly speaking, I learned to recognize sin as the refusal to live up to the enlightenment we possess: to know the right order of values and deliberately to choose the lower ones: to know that, however much these values may differ with different people at different stages of spiritual growth, for one's self there must be no compromise with that which one knows to be the lower value. - Margaret Grace Bondfield