The first demonstration in Hyde Park by women workers took place on this date, as tens of thousands of London laundresses turned out to demand an end to poor wages and poorer conditions. It was also the park's first joint protest between male and female unions, sharing each other's platforms and supporting each other's causes, the other half of the indivisible whole being the railwaymen. (Also present, according to Punch, were "Cabmen, Journeymen Tailors, Gas Stokers, House-Decorators, Carpenters, &c., &c., all with resplendent banners and hired bands".)
The washerwomen's chief demand was that the Factory Act be extended to cover laundries, which had been excluded from the original Act supposedly because in Ireland (which was then part of the UK) most laundering was done by convents, who objected to interference from secular authorities. As a result, sixteen hour days continued to be common in the laundry trade.
Joint work between female and male trade unionists - the men being in the throes of their national campaign for an eight hour working day for all - continued throughout this period and with considerable success, as laundry strikes were won in various parts of the country.
But it wasn't only the unions that supported the laundry workers - they were also backed by a strange, largely forgotten organisation run by radical Methodists, known as the Sisters of the People. Founded in 1887, the group was made up mainly of well-to-do and educated women who were eager to find a meaningful activity outside the home to make their lives a little less boring.
A cross between amateur social workers and not-necessarily-religious nuns, they ministered to the poor of West London, their projects including a hospice, a dispensary, a creche, and a refuge for prostitutes. One of the Sisters set up the astonishingly-named, to modern ears, Guild of Brave Poor Things to work with disabled children.
You couldn't just join the Sisterhood: for a start you had to be a woman of "leisure, culture, refinement and devotion," and would only be accepted after rigorous selection interviews and a three-month probation period.
They addressed each other as "Sister," and wore a black uniform, and a long, grey, nun-like veil hanging from their bonnets. This wasn't a sectarian body, though - as well as Methodists, the Sisterhood included women of other religions, and of none, and it did not preach. There was no rule of celibacy, and many of the Sisters married.
If it all sounds slightly comical and jolly-hockey-sticks, we shouldn't overlook the real dangers that the Sisters of the People faced - they were working daily in areas of the most extreme poverty, surrounded by deadly diseases - nor the good they undoubtedly did, often being the only outsiders the women of the slums had ever encountered who were willing to talk to them like human beings, and listen to them as if their lives actually mattered.
By the turn of the century, the Sisters had split, as a minority, horrified and galvanised by what they witnessed during their mission, became increasingly allied with the growing socialist movement, looking for political rather than charitable solutions. The majority meanwhile drifted to the right, and the work of the Sisterhood became more conventional and less challenging of the status quo. But genies are proverbially hard to return to bottles, and a select generation of radical women, formed by their experiences in the Sisterhood, went on to play crucial roles in the labour movement.
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Sources:
Ada Salter by Graham Taylor (Lawrence & Wishart, 2016)
New York Times 28 June 1891
www.wattpad.com/16333-punch-or-the-london-charivari-volume-100-june-27
English laundresses a social history by Patricia E. Malcolmson at https://tinyurl.com/4cex5dy5
https://dmbi.online/index.php?do=app.entry&id=2494
www.northamptonshirequakers.org/index.php/9-articles/84-life-of-ada-salter-a-remarkable-lady-from-raunds