BONDFIELD, Margaret Grace, & Kathlyn Oliver.
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Shop Workers and the Vote. Domestic Servants and Citizenship. First edition of these two essays on women's rights. Both authors were heavily involved in the trade union movement: Oliver as the founder of the first union for domestic servants and Bondfield as "the leading women trade unionist of the 1920s" (ODNB).Bondfield (1873-1953) became a shop assistant at the age of 14 in Brighton and later in London, where she was expected to work up to 100 hours a week and live in squalid conditions with no privacy. "Repelled by the long hours and poor pay of shop work and by the moral unhealthiness and the oppressions of its prevailing 'living-in' requirement, she joined the National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks, and using the name Grace Dare contributed to its journal, Shop Assistant. In 1896 she was recruited by the Women's Industrial Council for covert social investigation, working in a series of West End shops to collect information for campaigns for shop work reform. She presented evidence on shop work in the Economic Journal, and before the 1901 House of Lords select committee on early closing of shops and the 1908 departmental committee on the Truck Acts" (ODNB).Like Bondfield, Oliver (1884-1953) was forced to enter employment early in life, in her case domestic service. Following a discussion in the correspondence pages of Woman Worker, in 1910 she founded the Domestic Workers' Union of Great Britain and Ireland. An early advocate for the intersectionalit
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