International Women’s Day – remembering Minnie Pallister

To celebrate International Women’s Day Alun Burge examines the life of Minnie Pallister, an exceptional Welsh advocate for women’s rights.

Minnie Pallister is one of the foremost feminists to emerge from Wales in the 20^th Century – albeit until now unrecognised.

A socialist and pacifist, Minnie Pallister was unconfined by gendered constraints in a society and labour movement dominated by coal miners and steel workers. Her intellect, oratory and personality catapulted her to become President of the Monmouthshire Federation of the Independent Labour Party, which had 19 branches, while still in her twenties.

One of the most prominent women opponents of the Great War who was twice accused of sedition, this Brynmawr school teacher was Welsh secretary of the No Conscription Fellowship, supported the Women’s International League, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation and the Women’s Peace Crusade.

Marginalisation of women 

From 1917, her gender-based analysis challenged the male domination of South Wales valleys society. Rejecting the marginalisation of women and the prioritising of class over gender, she challenged the structural bias against women. She argued that women’s economic dependence on men’s earnings, their tendency to marry early and unpaid and unrecognized domestic work amounted to ‘drudgery little short of slavery’.

From 1918, as the first full time woman labour organizer in Wales, she placed the role of women, gender issues and relationships at the heart of the the Independent Labour Party’s programme of social transformation, declaring them to be as important as the nationalisation of industries and economic transformation. At a time when the Labour Party accepted the gendered division of industrial and domestic work and confined women largely to marginalised and subordinated Party structures, Minnie Pallister consciously challenged male dominated left politics, rejecting the deferential position of women.

A woman, she said, is a person in her own right – not merely someone’s wife, mother or sister. She went to miners’ union meetings arguing for pit head baths, to laundries to improve women workers’ conditions and took up the causes of shop assistants and domestic workers.

Family allowances

Her socialist vision of a woman in Wales saw her become an early adopter of the cause of family allowances, which she advocated for decades, to help women achieve a degree of economic independence from their husbands, and called for women to affect change through their votes and by standing for public office. As Labour Party agent in Aberavon from 1920-1922, she was key to winning over local women to get Ramsay Macdonald back to Parliament, to become leader of the Labour Party and hence its’ first Prime Minister.

Suggested as a Parliamentary candidate for Llanelli in 1919 (– preposterous when the first woman Labour MP elected in an industrial seat was not until Ann Clwyd in Cynon Valley, 65 years later -) the South Wales Daily News said that Wales was so backward that ‘One of the Most Brilliant Woman politicians’ would have to look beyond Wales for a Westminster seat.

Candidate for Bournemouth in 1923 & 1924, at a time when she was considered the best labour woman orator in Britain, she was perhaps the first person [not just woman] ever to make a political broadcast on BBC radio in 1924. Very charismatic and with a huge popular following in the labour movement, as President of the Wales ILP from 1921, Minnie Pallister was to Wales what Jennie Lee was to Scotland and Ellen Wilkinson was to England.

Journalist

A prodigious writer and successful journalist for the Daily Mirror and Daily Herald (the biggest newspaper in the country with over 2 million readers), over decades she gave a feminist slant to articles, pamphlets and books and later radio scripts, tackling gender imbalances head-on, particularly in working class households. For 40 years, in print and over the air, she criticised the pernicious role of (apparently harmless) women’s magazines.

Her sustained assaults on fashion and the commodification of beauty, which projected images of unattainable aspirations to promote women’s consumption of goods within a consumer culture, were worthy of the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, still decades away, as was her 1950s dismissal of beauty pageants as ‘sordid…revolting, vulgar and disgusting’) while language such as ‘sex kitten’ sent her into a ‘blind flaming rage’ and gave her ‘sick loathing’.

A woman’s body, she said, was her own affair – and all this broadcast on the 1950s BBC. Her 1920s writings later provided inspiration to the women of Australia’s labour movement, which used them for guidance on whether to establish a separate women’s party.

Woman’s Hour

In more than one hundred broadcasts Minnie Pallister challenged Woman’s Hour’s fare of light entertainment and domestic assurance, providing a sharper focus and a cutting edge to the programme’s three million listeners. Consistently challenging boundaries, she used domestic roles to subvert as much as affirm, linking them to the economic and to the workplace.

Frequently taken off air for being too radical, whether for her feminism, her pacifism or her socialism, so compelling a figure was she that her life story was serialised on Woman’s Hour over one week during her lifetime. A household name, and one of the programme’s guest editors, her popularity as a broadcaster gave her a tremendous personal following.

At hundreds/thousands of meetings of the Women’s Institute and countless other women’s organisations, she delivered her radical messages on gender, social justice and peace. An exceptional advocate of women’s rights for over 40 years, both through her actions and her coherent feminist analysis, she was a forerunner of the 1970s women’s movement. Woefully missing from our history, she is an outstanding feminist of the twentieth century.

(PS For good measure in 1938 and 1939 she went to rescue Jews from Nazi Germany and in the 1950s provided Spike Milligan with the inspiration for the Goon’s Show character Minnie Bannister.)

Minnie Pallister: Voice of a Rebel by Alun Burge was published by Parthian in September 2024.

It coincided with the inauguration in Brynmawr of a mural and the unveiling of a purple plaque to ‘Minnie Pallister: Fearless Rebel’. Alun will be giving a lecture about Minnie Pallister to the Welsh Women’s Archive on Wednesday March 12^th.