[11] Her apprenticeship complete, she worked as a living-in assistant in a succession of Brighton drapery stores, where she quickly encountered the realities of shop staff life: unsympathetic employers, very long hours, appalling living conditions and no privacy.

[n 4] For months she travelled the country, distributing literature and arranging meetings when she could, with mixed outcomes in the face of apathy from shop staff, and outright opposition from shopowners.

Macarthur, the daughter of a wealthy Scottish draper, had held staunchly Conservative views until a works meeting in 1901 to discuss the formation of a NAUSAWC branch transformed her into an ardent trades unionist.

[46][n 6] The strains of her duties and constant campaigning began to undermine her health, and in 1908 she resigned her union post after ten years' service, during which NAUSAWC membership had risen to over 20,000.

[63] The sudden death of Mary MacDonald in September 1911 added considerably to Bondfield's workload; the strain, together with internal animosities within the WLL, led her to resign her position in January 1912.

[64][n 7] From 1912 Bondfield was a member of the WCG's Citizenship Subcommittee,[66] where she worked with Margaret Llewelyn Davies investigating minimum wage rates, infant mortality and child welfare.

[25] Bondfield spoke at the ILP's mass anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square on 2 August 1914, organised by George Lansbury; other speakers included Keir Hardie, Henderson, and the dockers' leader Ben Tillett.

[74] Suffragist militancy having largely lapsed after the outbreak of the First World War, in October 1916 a Speaker's Conference[n 9] was convened to consider the issue of women's franchise and make proposals for postwar legislation.

[25] In the following months she travelled as a TUC delegate to international conferences, in Bern and later in Washington DC, where she expressed the view that the peace terms being imposed on Germany were unjust.

[80][n 10] A few months earlier, Lansbury had visited the incipient Soviet state and had been most impressed after meeting Lenin, whom he judged to be "symbolic of a new spirit", "the father of his people" and "their champion in the cause of social and economic freedom".

[56] Among various public activities, Bondfield joined the governing body of Ruskin College, the Oxford-based institution founded in 1899 to provide higher education opportunities to working-class men.

[77] Bondfield spent much of her time abroad; in the autumn she travelled to Canada as the head of a delegation examining the problems of British immigrants, especially as related to the welfare of young children.

[115] As the cost of unemployment benefits mounted, Bondfield's attempts to control the fund's deficit provoked further hostility from the TUC and political attacks from the opposition parties.

Instead, seeking a cross-party solution, the government accepted a Liberal proposal for an independent committee, eventually set up under Sir George May, to report on how public expenditure might be reduced.

[108] She never returned to parliament; she was adopted as the prospective Labour candidate for Reading, but when it became obvious that the election due for 1940 would be delayed indefinitely by war, she resigned her candidacy.

[122][124] Her main wartime activity was leading an investigation by the Hygiene Committee of the Women's Group on Public Welfare, into the problems that arose from the large-scale evacuation into the countryside of city children.

[126] Although not a candidate herself, Bondfield campaigned for Labour in the general election of July 1945—a reporter found her instructing a meeting in Bury St Edmunds on the benefits of nationalisation.

[130] The book had an indifferent reception; in The Observer, Harold Nicolson described it as "ill composed and badly proportioned", with too much space devoted to inconsequential meetings while truly important events were hurried over.

[131] The Manchester Guardian's reviewer also criticised the work's confused structure and unselective detail, but found it "a useful, direct and honest" account of Labour's early years.

Bondfield wrote that her religious convictions gave her "strength to meet defeat with a smile, to face success with a sense of responsibility; to be willing to do one's best without hope of reward [and] to bear misrepresentation without giving way to futile bitterness".

[135] In his biographical sketch for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Philip Williamson depicts Bondfield as "physically short and stout ... with sparkling eyes, a firm, brisk manner, and effective, sometimes inspired, public speaking".

[25] She had the self-confidence to exist and thrive in a male-dominated world,[87] deriving inspiration from a childhood that, though materially impoverished, her obituarist has described as "of great spiritual and mental wealth".

[140] A more recent and sympathetic account of her life by Tony Judge sets her career more in the context of her championing of women's political and workplace rights, and her role in the 1931 crisis more as a hapless victim of MacDonald's machinations.

[144] By temperament a realist, she based her actions in government on economic facts rather on party or sectional interests;[106] thus she became "caught between the opposition claims that she was soft on the unemployed, and her own backbenchers' jibe that she had abandoned the workers".

[87] Her stance, and her seemingly equivocal attitude towards MacDonald's apostasy, reduced her standing in her own party for decades, so that when Barbara Castle was appointed as Minister of Labour by Harold Wilson in 1968, she insisted that the ministry's name be changed to "Department of Employment", for fear of association with Bondfield's term in office.

[145] Castle refused to contribute a preface to a Fabian Society booklet celebrating Bondfield's life, because she considered her predecessor's actions close to political betrayal.

[147] Bondfield was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Bristol, and in 1930 received the freedom of the borough from her home town of Chard,[4] where in 2011 a plaque in her honour was fixed to the Guildhall wall.

[148] Many years after her death, streets and apartment buildings were named after her in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Barking;[149][150] and Islington, small block of flats built to replace the house lived in by Dr H.H Crippen, destroyed by German bomb in 1940.

[152][n 14] Cox and Hobley draw attention to Thatcher's early life as a shopkeeper's daughter, and contrast her account of those days with Bondfield's experiences half a century earlier.

[153] Despite the changes that have taken place in the retail industry since Bondfield's day, Cox and Hobley believe that, were she alive, "she'd still be champing at the bit, trying to coax shop assistants to join a union, and fiercely championing shopworkers' rights to better pay and conditions".