When you look at some of the demands made by the earliest trade unions for domestic servants, you get a glimpse of what life must have been like for young girls employed in the big houses. One item on the list was that employers should not be able to tell them what to wear on their days off.
Another was that the servants should be addressed by their own names.
Of course, if you'd asked the employers they'd no doubt have been able to make a case against such reforms. If a maid was seen out and about inappropriately dressed during her leisure time, who would that reflect badly on? Why, the lady of the house, that's who! And surely anyone can understand that it's a lot more convenient for Madam to call all her skivvies Jane, rather than having to learn a new name every time there's a change of staff.
One of the most important figures in the long struggle to unionise domestic staff was Jessie Stephen, who was born in London on 19th April 1893 and raised in Edinburgh, Dunfermline and Glasgow. She was good at schoolwork and even managed to get a scholarship to stay on after the age of fourteen and train as a pupil-teacher. But her father's tailoring work began to dry up, and Jessie had to leave education forever to work as a servant.
The one big advantage of being "in service" was that your bed and board were necessarily provided by your employer, allowing girls like Jessie to send more money home to support the rest of the family. Jessie Stephen was already heavily involved in political activity with the Independent Labour Party, but an incident at work, when she was sacked by a titled lady for having suffered a twisted ankle in the course of her duties, can only have reinforced her beliefs.
She seems to have been a natural born organiser - at just sixteen she was vice-president of her ILP branch - and with help from party members she set about laying the groundwork for the launch, in 1913, of the Scottish Domestic Workers’ Federation. Clearly she was a good negotiator, too, as she won two of the servants' key demands: all uniforms to be provided by the employer, and all staff to get two free hours during their sixteen-hour working day.
Stephen was equally active in the suffragette movement. She later wrote about being given the task of dropping acid bombs into pillar boxes; a teenage girl walking along a street in a maid's uniform was essentially invisible. Such was her renown in the suffrage movement that at the age of nineteen she was appointed to a "work-women's" delegation to lobby MPs. The women were attacked outside parliament by a gang while the police stood around observing placidly. Like many working-class and socialist campaigners, she broke with the main body of suffragettes over their enthusiastic support for the Great War, while her work for sexual equality continued for the rest of her life.
The war also meant that women had more job opportunities, standing in for absent men, so recruitment of servants - and therefore recruitment to their union - became difficult. Stephen, meanwhile, was blacklisted by employers in Glasgow. The Scottish Domestic Workers’ Federation merged with a similar organisation in London, and Jessie moved to the capital where she became a full-time organiser for, variously, Labour, union, suffrage and peace organisations.
Her life down south was no less eventful. During the war she attended a church meeting for peace in Southgate. The local press encouraged people to protest against the peacemakers, and they did so by storming the church, splashing it with petrol and setting it alight. Outside, as Stephen and the others fled the flames, an ambush awaited them: they were pelted with stones, their hair pulled out, their clothes ripped off.
She was not easily scared though, and impossible to silence. In a long career as an organiser, local councillor and campaigner, she was noted for having a rare ability to capture audiences with her oratory. Not that she left things entirely to chance. Having been heckled and attacked once too often in her suffragette days, she asked a couple of hefty dockers to attend her speeches in future. The men who had been bravely barracking her suddenly remembered urgent appointments elsewhere. Another of Stephen's tricks involved getting two comrades to stage an argument in front of her platform over what she was saying. As the row developed into a boxing match, curious crowds would gather.
At the end of the war Stephen was elected to the Board of Guardians, the body that had oversight of the workhouse in Bermondsey. Since the whole point of the workhouse system was to punish and shame the poor for the crime of being poor, it wasn't long before Jessie was laying into the board's more conservative members. Inmates were required to rise to their feet whenever a Guardian entered the room. Unmarried mothers were segregated in the maternity ward so that their immorality should not infect the married. But as she says in her unpublished memoir, Submission is for slaves, it was when she learned that the unmarried women were interviewed about their wickedness by panels of male Guardians, that she really saw red.
If the girls needed interrogating, she insisted, it should be done by women: "One of the men objected, telling us these sordid cases might cause pain to the delicate feelings of women members. I laughed outright. 'What you really mean, sir, is that men prefer to wallow in the sordid details." Unsurprisingly though, she soon found out that "the women interviewers were as bad as the men."
During world war two she moved to Bristol where she stayed until her death in 1979, becoming well-known as a union organiser, city councillor and co-op activist. Local lore insists that her last words, at the hospital where she died, were “You’ll have to change my tablets. I’m going to a women’s conference.”
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Sources:
Ada Salter by Graham Taylor (Lawrence & Wishart, 2016)
https://wcml.org.uk/blog/jessie-stephen-scottish-working-class-suffragette/
Sylvia Pankhurst by Katherine Connelly (Pluto Press, 2013)
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/remembering-life-and-work-jessie-stephen
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx254k14k4qo