Women of St Luke’s - Labour, Exploitation and Voice

by the St Luke's Heritage Group for Futures Past

Struggle for equality and emancipation, Totterdown 1867 - 1918

As we have seen elsewhere in our project, the impact of the 1867 Voting Reform Act was felt in St Luke’s among the newly enfranchised male builders working along the road (see Edwin Bennett).

But this act also bookends the struggle for representation for women up to the 1918 (first) Voting Reform Act. Work on the building of St Luke’s Road began in 1867, so it is apt to follow the progress of reform for women via the generations who lived and worked cheek by jowl along the road up to 1918.

The 1867 act provoked a renewed encouragement for further political reform - if parliament had succumbed to pressure from artisans, then why not women? This period saw an upsurge of protest and organization. In 1868, the inaugural Bristol and Clifton branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was formed.

All of this was not yet really felt in Totterdown, as women continued to be the subject of exploitation and repression. Nearly all the suffragette activists were rich women with time on their hands, but slowly this changed as female role models began to inspire women through out the city to work for change.

One such person was Maria Colby who worked tirelessly in St Philips among working class women, struggling against men who believed that a woman’s place was in the home.

St Luke's - Women's Sweated Trades Project

Mary was so disheartened by the assumption that the primary duty of a woman was to darn socks that she had published a slightly sarcastic poem in the Bristol Mercury, July 1886.

Wanted –

A postman to marry, who walks with might,

Or policeman on duty by day or night,

Or telegraph racer with heels of horn,

Who’ll bring me daily some stockings to darn