Introducing Margaret Llewelyn Davies

 

Margaret deserves to be remembered not only for her campaigning, but also for her work to empower thousands of working class women who had previously been without a voice.

 

She came from a remarkable middle class family with a strong tradition of working for women’s rights and social reform. As a young woman, unmarried and comfortably off, she was determined to combat the poverty and injustice she saw around her. After discovering the Women’s Co-operative Guild (part of the Co-operative movement, which was hugely important in working class communities at this time), Margaret was elected Guild General Secretary in 1889.  So began her life’s work.

 

The Guild was still relatively new and small when she joined.  Most members were home-based working class wives and mothers and, though they were not the poorest, life was still more than hard for many. At the beginning it could be difficult to get out to Guild meetings:  as some outraged co-operative men  complained,  ‘Who’s to mind the children?’  and ‘Let her stay at home and wash my moleskin trousers!’

 

When she took over, Margaret insisted that Guildswomen could play an active part in the world outside home and family and initiated a programme of education, discussion and campaigning.  In the years that followed, this attracted and empowered women in their thousands.  As one member put it: ‘From a shy, nervous woman, the Guild made me a fighter’.

​

Known for her energy, warmth and charm as well as for her political skills, Margaret was a much-loved leader, re-elected annually for over thirty years. With her at the helm, Guild membership expanded to over 50,000 countrywide and it became a force to be reckoned with: a major public voice for working class women.

​

Margaret initiated many Guild campaigns, which were often ahead of their time. Together with Guildswomen, she fought not only for votes for women but for easier access to divorce and decent maternity care and benefits, while  also lobbying co-operators to adopt ethical trading policies,  open the movement up to the poor, and adopt minimum wages for their workers. It was much thanks to her that by 1914 the Manchester Guardian declared the Guild to be ‘probably the most remarkable women’s organisation in the world’.  

​

After she retired in 1921 Margaret continued to support movements for peace and international co-operation. She died in 1944, at the home she shared with her colleague and life companion Lilian Harris. 

 

Margaret was gradually forgotten in the decades after her death. But from the 1970s, when a reinvigorated feminist movement ignited interest in past women’s lives, this began to change.  Virago republished two collections of Guildswomen’s writings which Margaret had edited, and she appears in several subsequent histories of the Guild. Of recent years there has been more. In 2017 a plaque was erected in Kirkby Lonsdale, where she lived for some years. And in 2020 a biography finally appeared: ‘Margaret Llewelyn Davies:  with women for a new world’.