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Matchwomen’s strike remembered

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matchwomen, factory workers, major strike, festivalIt was ‘an inspiration to other groups of workers up and down the country’.

In the summer of 1888, 1400 women walked out on strike over management bullying and appalling, hazardous working conditions.

The strike was caused by the poor working conditions in a match factory, conditions including fourteen-hour work days, poor pay, excessive fines and the severe health complications of working with white phosphorus, such as phossy jaw, but it was sparked by the dismissal of one of the workers.

The women and girls were workers at Bryant & May’s match factory in London’s East End and they shocked the world, and ultimately changed it.

Working-class women at this time were supposed to be seen and not heard, especially if, like many matchwomen, they were of Irish heritage.

Instead, the matchwomen paraded in the streets of the East End, singing songs and telling the truth about their starvation wages and mistreatment by the firm.

Then they marched to Parliament.

Their strength and solidarity won them better pay, safer conditions, and the right to form the largest union of women and girls in Britain.

They were an inspiration to other groups of workers up and down the country. The modern movement for workers’ rights had begun, and the matchwomen were at the forefront of it.

The first Matchwomen’s Festival was held to mark the 125th anniversary of the Matchwomen’s Strike. It was a brilliant day, with around 700 visitors including the late Bob Crow, and was one of Tony Benn’s last public engagements.

This year’s festival was dedicated to the memory of Jo Cox MP, and donations made to the White Ribbon Alliance, a charity for which she served as a director, which campaigns for safe births for women and babies worldwide.

The speakers at the 2016 Festival were Shami Chakrabarti talking about life after Liberty; bestselling authors Rachel Holmes (‘Eleanor Marx’) and Sunny Singh (‘Hotel Arcadia’); author Sarah Jackson co-author of East London Suffragettes on ‘Suffragettes – not just posh white women!’; Nikki Dancey on the science of sexism: the experiments that prove it’s not ‘all in our minds’; Esther Parry on maternal feminism and building a network of mum activists; GMB organiser Nadine Houghton, on organising women; Class War’s Lisa Mckenzie on fighting back – and getting nicked for it (!); Terry McCarthy on the betrayal of women war workers; Nesta Holden asked Who made your shoes? and looked at home work and what it means for women; and Freedom Programme ‘graduate’ Nina, spoke about her own experiences, and the way domestic abuse affects Asian women.

Louise Raw, founder of the Matchwomen’s Festival, also spoke about the book she wrote about the matchwomen.

In her book, ‘Striking A Light’, she revealed the incredible true story of the matchwomen and the summer of 1888 for the first time.

She provided unequivocal evidence to show that the matchwomen greatly influenced the Dock Strike of 1889, which until now was thought to be the key event of new unionism, and repositions them as the mothers of the modern labour movement.

She looked at the stories of the women themselves and interviewed members of their families, and the result has been heralded as an important new angle to the strike’s history which challenged existing accounts of the strike itself and radically altered the accepted history of the labour movement in Britain.

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