Necessity and Rage: the Factory Women's Strikes in Bermondsey, 1911

Abstract

The Bermondsey factory women's strikes of August 1911 arose from the adverse economic and social conditions of the south London riverside borough. Poverty derived mainly from the low earning capacity of male and female unskilled labour in Bermondsey, where women were predominantly engaged in the food processing industries and the men in dock work. Demand for wage increases motivated the spontaneous outbreak of strikes by women factory workers with no previous experience of collective organization or militancy. Their action was stimulated to some extent by the London dockers’ strike, and there was some background support from Ben Tillett, the dockers’ leader. More significant were the guidance and co-ordinating skills of union organizer Mary Macarthur, who came in to support the strikers after they launched their protest. Marches and rallies, in which Mary Macarthur and her associates and the factory workers collaborated, helped to pressurize employers into granting the strikers’ wage demands. The Bermondsey strikers have consequently been viewed as forming the vanguard of the militant unions. But the details of the factory workers’ action suggest that the strikes represented an independent, localized protest, supported by women trade unionists, but still separate from the wider industrial unrest of the time.