ALONG with thousands of other women, I joined the Processions 2018 march in Edinburgh on Sunday June 10. 

It was a fantastic day, with colourful and imaginative banners, bringing women of all generations and communities together, with memories of the past and hopes for the future.  

Visitors to the city of Edinburgh that day stopped us to talk, to tell us stories of other struggles for the vote, and we all challenged each other to recall correctly our history. 

It really wasn’t possible for this to be a “non-political” event. Women rediscovering their own history and taking strength from each other is in itself political experience. 

Banners celebrated lives of women who had in the past remained fairly invisible. Marchers brought images of their own mothers, grandmothers and earlier generations.

The Jessie Stephen group in Edinburgh includes members and friends of Stephen’s family, researchers and trade unionists. 
It has given us an opportunity to shed some light on Stephen’s Scottish connections and each week more information emerges about this remarkable woman.

Stephen was born in London in 1893, moving as a baby to Edinburgh where her father worked as a tailor, living in a tenement flat in Dalry. 

The oldest of 10 children, Stephen recalled those early years as hard times, as her father struggled to find enough work to keep them all.

When she was eight, the family moved to Dunfermline and then to Glasgow. 

Stephen’s father was actively involved in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and she too became involved, becoming vice-president of the Glasgow Maryhill branch at the age of 16. 

Having done well at school (North Kelvinside) Stephen obtained a scholarship to go on to do teacher training but was unable to continue with her studies with her family struggling to survive.

She found work in domestic service in the West End of Glasgow.

Various copies and versions of her unpublished autobiography exist and provide amazing insights into the life of a young woman in Glasgow at that time. 

One copy is in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. Descriptions of the working days of domestic servants and the constraints imposed by many employers give a clear picture of what Stephen faced as she sought to improve their lot. 

With practical support from some Glasgow Labour councillors in providing tea room spaces for meetings and through an advert and a sustained letter-writing campaign to the Glasgow Herald, she organised a public meeting in the Christian Institute in Bothwell Street in Glasgow.

“We got the biggest surprise of our lives. It was packed with girls who had come from all over the city and they were even overflowing into the corridors outside.”

By 1913 the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers was formed, with members across Scotland, and links with the Union for Domestic Workers in England and Wales, which had been formed in 1909. 

The demands of the union were clear, including campaigning for two free hours out of the 16 normally worked each day, for a minimum rate of pay, no dismissals of young women who became pregnant and no employer interference in what servants wore on their day off — Stephen describes how employers decided on all clothing, how hair should be done and every aspect of the women’s appearance. 

Meetings were also held with the employers in Glasgow, which Stephen described as well attended and some progress was made. 
Simultaneously to organising this trade union, Stephen was an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the ILP in Glasgow. 

Along with many other women, Stephen saw no contradictions between organising in the workplace and also campaigning for the vote for all women. 

Quite the opposite in fact — to achieve significant change in employment opportunities and working conditions for women would require a voice in the law-making institutions of the country. 
Stephen was one of the youngest women to be included in the numerous delegations to London to present the case for the extension of the franchise and was also involved in the militant actions of the WSPU, including letter box fires, as often quoted from her autobiography.

By the time Stephen was 20, she was effectively “blacklisted” in Glasgow, unable to find employment, and she moved to London to work full time as an organiser.  

There she worked also with Sylvia Pankhurst and Ada Slater in the East End of London. Subsequently Stephen’s trade union and Labour activities took her to Bristol, and a long and active life was recognised in different ways, including receiving the TUC Gold Medal in 1955 and an OBE in 1977.

The foundations for this had been shaped by her childhood, her family and her experiences in those first 20 years of life in Scotland. 

It is a powerful reminder of how intertwined the struggle for a voice and the vote was with the struggle for basic decency in working conditions, and a living wage for women and their families as a minimum. 

And for Stephen and many of her trade union sisters the campaigning on women’s suffrage continued through to the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1928, with a commitment to the trade union and women’s movements for the rest of their lives.  

The desire for a union for domestic servants remained among some rank-and-file activists and the Trades Union Congress archive contains letters from local trade unionists enquiring of Trades Union Congress headquarters as to the existence of such a union. 

In 1930 moves were made by the standing joint committee of industrial women’s organisations, again supported by Stephen, to establish a Domestic Workers’ Charter, approved by the National Conference of Labour Women in 1931.