Abstract
In 1945, the Labour Government changed the face of Britain. Ellen Wilkinson had helped shape the programme, co-writing the Labour Party manifesto. Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, appointed her Minister of Education, the first woman to be appointed to such a post and the only woman in the Cabinet. This chapter examines how she put the 1944 Butler Act into practice, how she brought in free school milk, raised the school-leaving age and helped those who aimed to go to university. She was only in the post for a short time because she died in 1947; Attlee did not appoint another woman to his Cabinet. The chapter concludes with an assessment of her role in politics.
Some of this material is from Paula Bartley’s Ellen Wilkinson : From Red Suffragist to Government Minister, Pluto 2014.
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Bartley, P. (2019). The First Female Minister of Education, 1945–1947. In: Labour Women in Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14288-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14288-9_5
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14288-9
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