Women, Trade Unions and Immigration during the Second World War

The role of women in the trade union movement during World War II remains under-researched. Sarah Boston, Miriam Glucksmann, and Pamela Graves have examined women as workers and their relationship with the trade union movement. They have also traced women’s struggles to gain equal rights with their male counterparts. Judith Baumel, Randall Hansen, Kushner & Knox, Panikos Panayi, Katherine Paul, and Laura Tabili have approached this period from a social history perspective. This paper adopts a different perspective, examining the role of women in the trade union movement vis-à-vis making accommodation for the growing refugee and immigrant situation in Britain caused by World War II, and how the experiences and treatment of refugees became a gendered construct. It reveals that women were the major force behind negotiations with the government concerning immigration policy, and that this issue helped bring women and female trade union groups to the forefront of political negotiation. Drawing on a variety of government, party-political and trade union material at London’s Public Record Office, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Trade Union Congress Archive, and collections of the Conservative Party, it traces the nature of negotiations between the trade union movement and central government concerning the position and status of refugees in wartime Britain. It explains the challenges, opportunities and threats that this brought the nation to show how Britain’s changing demographics facilitated rapid transformations in the nature of policies vis-à-vis foreigners, and how trade union women were a major force behind these changes.