Unionised Women Teachers and Women’s Suffrage

Abstract

This year, 1911, is emphatically the women’s year in the history of our professional Associations’, exclaimed Mr Croft, suffrage motion mover at the Aberystwyth National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference.¹ For women elementary teachers the heyday inside the profession, in local and national instances, and outside, in the women’s movement, was the decade from 1910.² The fact that this year, for the first time in history, every Union of Teachers, including those having a male membership, has a woman as its president, is a sign of the times and a proof that men recognise the merits and qualifications of women’, enlarged Christabel Pankhurst.³ While Isabel Cleghorn (b. 1852, Sheffield Council School Headmistress)⁴ became the NUT’s first woman president, Miss Eveline Phillips had become President of the mixed National Federation of Assistant Teachers (NFAT). A ‘frenzy of delight’ and ‘feminine enthusiasm’ greeted Miss Cleghorn’s election as NUT Vice President for 1910 at the Plymouth Conference. ‘Ladies could now feel that their functions in the Union were not merely those of paying subscriptions’, she stated.⁵ Women were coming to the fore in many local associations. Isabel Cleghorn had been elected Sheffield Association President in 1908, as was Kate Hogan in the East Lambeth Association.⁶ Liverpool delegate to the NUT Conference since 1897, Miss Essie Conway (b. 1865) was elected President of the Liverpool and District Teachers’ Association and member of the NUT Executive for 1910 and President of the powerful 10 000 member-strong Lancashire County Association (second only to the Metropolitan district) in 1911.⁷