Let me state upfront that I am a feminist. I make no bones about that, I don’t hide the fact. Being a feminist does NOT make me anti-men.
Everybody should be a feminist because feminism, fundamentally, is about equality. Equality between sexes – equal pay for equal work. Equal opportunities regardless of sex (I won’t say gender because gender and sex are too wildly different things).
I could bang on about it for an eternity. I won’t.
This post is about another kind of inequality. It is a little known, little-researched piece about one woman who didn’t even believe in feminism. Despite that, she is someone that I admire enormously; someone who I look up to.Let’s do a bit of background history here.
In 2005 the outgoing Secretary of State for Work and Pension noted just 13% of women compared to 92% of men were entitled to the basic state pension.[1]
Read that again – 13% against 92%.
This was less than ten years ago. [a]
Adair Turner, chair of the Pensions Commission pointed out: "Current female pensioners receive much lower levels of occupational pension because during working life they had much lower levels of employment, a greater tendency to be in part-time work, lower average earnings, and a greater tendency to work in service sectors where pension provision was less prevalent."[2]
Wind this back to just over a hundred years ago and not much has changed.
In that time women faced the same challenges in old age as women are facing today due to the same reasons.
Then, as now, women tended to outlive men.
Then, as now, women in old age are poorer than men due to the reasons that were given by Adair Turner.
Then, older women in poverty were probably widowed whereas today it is more likely to be caused by the ending of a partnership.
Britain introduced the state pension in 1908. Yes, you read that correctly, 1908. We think of the welfare system as being a product of the post-war years but state pensions have been around longer than we think. In fact, our government was considering it way back in the 1870s. The idea of having a state-guaranteed compulsory saving scheme was scrapped because…women didn’t earn enough to fund it.
Instead, a non-contributory pension was introduced in 1908. Single men and women were paid 5s a week, married couples got 7s 6d (on a sliding scale). But here was the rub. In order to toddle off to your local post office and claim your pension, you had to live to the ripe old age of 70 and it was means tested. In order to qualify, the worker had to be earning less than £31.50 annually. Encapsulated within this was also remnants of the Poor Law – so those applying had to pass strict rules such as proving they were not drunkards or showing that they had worked to their full potential. In essence what it meant was, there was plenty of scope for the government to deny people this basic pension (which in itself didn’t satisfy the Rowntree poverty line).
The age of 70 was no coincidence. The chances of staying in work under the conditions the poor lived in were slight. Most people were employed in heavy, manual labour, and were unfit for work by their 60’s. Women, especially, fell foul of the ‘worked to their full potential’ caveat as they were more likely to take on the care of family members thus placing themselves out of the workforce for prolonged periods of time.
By 1925 the pension landscape had been altered with the inclusion of the National Health Insurance Scheme (introduced in 1911) to supplement the state pension.
This new amendment not only created even greater inequality between the sexes but created a whole new area of inequality between women.
The introduction of a widows’ and orphans’ pension generated hostility due to the fact that it would only pay out to the widows of insured men who, at the time of their death, had children under the age of 14. “What about the older widows?” was the cry. This was ‘solved’ in 1929 by giving the widows of all insured men a pension at 55.
Sadly, this created a new divide between women.
What about those that didn’t get married.
Now, it’s easy for us, modern women and men to think that marriage isn't the be all and end all of life. Back then, it kind of was. Marriage was a state to aspire to. Marriage is what ‘you did’. Women had an expectation of getting married, of having children. It may be imagined that with a non-contributory pension to look forward to and the ability to work unhindered by having to stop to raise children, unmarried women would fare better. Not so.
Single women had to pay lower contributions to the National Health Insurance Scheme and they received lower benefits from it (through some idea that they had fewer responsibilities –i.e. they weren't a man and the main breadwinner of a family!!).
Unmarried women faced restricted opportunities in the job market, were paid lower and the chance of saving for ‘old age’ was out of their reach. Even if they were lucky enough to have parity in education, opportunities due to the patriarchal structure of society were beyond them. If they gave up work to care for parents. If they were sick. If anything happened to disrupt their contributions, their entitlement to state-assisted aid was forfeited and they had to work until 70 to obtain their means-tested state pension.
So getting married, as it had always been, was almost a necessity for women. It sounds mercenary and maybe it was but mostly it was about survival.
After World War One, almost two million women found themselves single. A lost generation of men, killed in battle, maimed in war, meant that husbands were in short supply.
The desire, the need, the want to get married went unfulfilled.
So…and I'm so glad that if you've got this far, you have borne with me…I get to the source of my post.
Florence White was born into abject poverty in the back streets of Bradford in 1886. She was wildly intelligent, formidable, strong-willed and stroppy. At 13 she followed the usual route of her class and went to work at the local wool mill.
She was politically active within the local Liberal movement in Bradford. She met and became engaged to Albert Whitehead. Sadly, Albert died during the First World War and it was her bitterness and her rage against married women that drove her on.
I think the thing that comes out very strongly about Florence was the fact that she isn’t an altogether likeable character. She was irascible, sharp of tongue and she could be shockingly manipulative (witness the fact that she practically forced her sister to give up her own boyfriend – out of jealous? Spite? Both?). But equally, she displayed extraordinary kindness – making dresses for the poor girls down the street. Caring for her sister Annie – a shocking hypochondriac – and sending her mother to stay a boarding house belonging to a friend when her health deteriorated.
She was neither a saint nor a sinner but one thing she was, she was driven. So driven.
She persuaded the MP for Bradford South Herbert Holdsworth to assist her in her quest for pension parity.
She was calling for all women, married or spinster, gain their pension at 55.
Her argument was thus:
Women, for numerous reasons, were forced into involuntary retirement earlier than men.
Women suffered from poor health.
Discrimination against post-menopausal women.
Women giving up work mid-life to care for ageing relatives.
Okay, so number two looks contrary to what was said in earlier arguments about women living longer than men but, you know, there are, undoubtedly a number of factors, that are non-life threatening, that affects women due to physiology, that just don’t affect men.
With the backing of Herbert Holdsworth and the influence he could exert, a meeting was ordered inviting interested parties to gather. Not expecting more than a few to turn up, Florence was astounded when over 600 people gathered to her speak. She went down a storm. A natural and persuasive orator, she had the backing of those who heard her and thus was born the National Spinsters’ Pension Association. It went on to become the single largest women’s reform movement of the early twentieth century.
Florence White, with her incisive mind, and mercurial temper, was an unlikely leader but it was this drive, tenacity and sheer bloody-mindedness that made her the voice of hundreds of thousands of women who had previously fallen by the wayside when it came to benefits in old age. The penury they faced in later life due to what she perceived to be unfair pension rights and the bias shown towards married women and widows by successive governments.
Soon, branches were springing up all over the country and they employed, not the type of violence seen by the suffragette movement, but logic, positive argument and peaceful demonstration. Envelope stuffing in the small, cramped office over the confectionery shop run by Annie, was the norm. Continuous streams of letters to MPs asking them to back the cause. In '37 she organised a mass mail out of an NSPA Christmas card to Kingsley Wood, Conservative Minister of Health and vocal and fierce opponent to Florence’s cause. They were delivered to his office by the sackload.
And she took it all the way to the steps of Parliament. In 1937 she headed a march on Parliament of thousands of women from all over Britain. Here she handed over a petition to James Guy, a 'friendly' (as Florence dubbed those MPs who backed her cause), containing over a million signatures, demanding equal rights for spinsters. It was the turning point of her campaign.
By 1938 she had the respect and backing of a number of MPs. She also had an equal number who opposed her. William Leach, a Labour MP for Bradford Central had, in 1929, voted against the cause. But turned by Florence's persuasive words, he now found himself on the side of pensions for all women at 55.
On 16 February 1938, William Leach put forward a motion for a committee to be set up to look into the claims of the NSPA. In a vote, the motion was carried but then the MPs forced a division and MPs were forced to vote on the issue.
The vote was carried:
The Speaker at the time is recorded in Hansard as declaring:
The ayes to the left one hundred and fifty. The noes to the right, ninety-eight. So the Ayes have it. The Motion is resolved. That, in view of the widespread feeling that unmarried women have legitimate grounds for complaint against their treatment under the National Health Insurance and Contributory Pensions Acts, this House is of opinion that a committee should be appointed to inquire into the justice and practicability of acceding to the claims made by organised spinsters for a pension of ten shillings per week at fifty-five years of age and the inclusion in a contributory pensions scheme of all those who do not come under the Acts in question.
The committee was headed by Charles Thomas Le Quesne, a Liberal MP and barrister. His Report of the Committee on Pensions for Unmarried Women found great substance in the arguments put to them by Florence White and other members of the NSPA and was greatly concerned by the sheer number of women left in poverty (especially due to caregiving). It was proven that unemployment rose amongst spinster over the age of 45 and the chances of these women re-gaining employment after forced absence was much harder than men.
Florence didn’t achieve her dream of parity. The committee found against a universal pensionable age for women of 55. However, they did bring in a state pensionable age for all women. It was 60. So, if you were ever left wondering why men retired at 65 but women at 60, now you know. It was down to the work of Florence White.
Still, the amount of pension was still low and it still affected women more than men. A second means test was introduced in 1940, known as Supplementary Assistance. One-third of all pensioners who qualified for this were women.
I found Florence after picking up a copy of a book called Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson and I was hooked on her story. For several months she consumed me. I would sit for hours reading up on her and it wasn’t easy.
Go on – go and Google (or whatever you do) Florence White….I’m here, I’ll wait for you.
Yeah…did you put in Florence White NSPA? Because, if you didn’t you don’t get far. And if you do, she commands one single page of links….one page.
This amazing, strong, stroppy, driven, bitter, incisive, determined woman gets one page of links to her work.
So, I wrote 55. I found an unpublished biography, which sits in the Wakefield archives, and used that as my basis. I then immersed myself in the tales of factory workers in the 1800s, wool mills, the pamphleteering of Florence’s father James White (who died in Newcastle prison), Hansard, back-to-back housing in Bradford, I looked on Google street view so I could see where she lived and the route she had to walk to the factory. I breathed spinsters for months.
I had this dream of seeing my output – three episodes of 55 minutes each, that tackled her life from when she started at the factory through to just before the Le Quense Committee – on BBC1 in the 9 o’clock Sunday night slot with Imelda Staunton as Florence, Julie Waters as Annie and Richard Armitage as William Leach. Yeah, I know, what are us newbie scriptwriters like?
I converted it to a radio play and contacted the bods at Radio 4. You know what the man said: 'We like contemporary stories and, besides, women’s issues have been done to death’
No, they haven’t and they never will be ‘done to death’ all the while we live in a world where feminism is a dirty word to some, and women still have inequality to deal with.
That is why I’m a feminist.
Further information on the Scandal of Womens Pensions can be found here:
[2] As above
[a] From original post date
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