Nan Sloane

A groundbreaking biography of Margaret Bondfield, the remarkable political pioneer and working-class woman who rose to become the first female Cabinet Minister in the 1929 Labour government. Rising from modest semi-rural, semi-industrial origins in the West Country, and years of apprenticeship in shops in Brighton, Bondfield became the first woman to chair the TUC, one of the first female Labour MPs, the first woman to hold government office (1924) and in 1929, the first female Cabinet Minister. Most of her life was lived in the public eye, but what lay behind her public achievements? In this remarkable book, historian Nan Sloane looks beyond the public façade to reveal Bondfield's hidden personal story, from her complicated personality with a difficult background, a private life which was either secret or non-existent, and a lifelong struggle with imposter syndrome. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material, including Bondfield's own diaries, this is a fresh and vitally needed reassessment of Margaret Bondfield’s influential life and contribution. A vital and timely biography that restores Bondfield to her rightful and prominent place in British political history.

Uncontrollable Women is a history of radical, reformist and revolutionary women between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Very few of them are well-known today; some were unknown even in their own day. All of them contributed something to the world we now inhabit. At a time when women were supposed to leave politics to men they spoke, wrote, marched, organised, asked questions, challenged power structures, sometimes went to prison and even died. History has not usually been kind to them, and they have frequently been pushed into asides or footnotes, dismissed as secondary, or spoken over, for, or through by men and sometimes other women. In this book, they take centre stage in both their own stories and those of others, and in doing so bring different voices to the more familiar accounts of the period. These women and many others played a part in developing political ideas and freedoms as we know them today, and some fought battles which still remain to be won or raised questions that are still unresolved. These are their stories.