From Australia’s Jewish Past
Marion Phillips – Australian-born British Labour Party Politician and Member of Parliament
Marion Phillips
Marion was born on 29 October 1881 at St Kilda, Melbourne. She was the youngest of seven most industrious children of Philip David Phillips, a lawyer, and his wife Rose. Her brother was Morris Mondle Phillips. Her mother believed that girls should have the same opportunities as boys. She was, therefore, educated at home and then at Presbyterian Ladies’ College for her matriculation year and went on to the University of Melbourne, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in 1904. During her university studies, in 1902 she won the Cobden Club medal for political economy, the Wyselaskie Scholarship in political economy and history in 1903, exhibitions in logic, philosophy and history and the final honours scholarship in history.
In July 1904, Marion travelled to England, where a fifty-pound scholarship enabled her to study economics and history with Graham Wallas, an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, and co-founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her Doctor of Science (Economics) degree was awarded in 1907 for a thesis published in 1909 titled A Colonial Autocracy, New South Wales Under Governor Macquarie 1810-21, which, although severe towards Governor Macquarie, was reviewed as a ‘conscientious and detailed analysis of his administration’ written in a ‘direct, perspicuous and … extremely condensed’ style.
In 1906, Marion was recruited as a research assistant by Beatrice and Sydney Webb, who were also sociologists, economists, and co-founders of the London School of Economics. Her project was to investigate the position of widows and their children for the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. Marion became immersed in the working-class and women’s movements through her membership in the Fabian Society (a British socialist organisation whose purpose was to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism). She was a member of the Independent Labour Party, the Women’s Labour League, the Women’s Trade Union League, for which she was briefly an organiser, and several suffrage societies. She joined the Women’s Labour League in 1908, becoming its secretary in 1912. With the onset of World War I, she was elected to the Labour Party’s War Emergency Workers’ National Committee to organise the working-class response to the War. In 1916, Marion was present at the inaugural meeting of the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organisations and became its secretary between 1917 and 1932. She negotiated the terms on which the Women’s Labour League was incorporated into the reconstituted Labour Party in 1918 and became the party’s chief woman officer. Under her leadership, the women’s section became one of the fastest-growing and liveliest of the party’s constituent organisations. She published books pamphlets and reports and edited The Labour Woman. She served on the government’s Reconstruction Committee from 1917 to 1918, on the consumers’ council of the Ministry of Food from 1918 to 1919 and as secretary of the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organisations (a female version of the Trades and Labour Council).
In 1926 she was nominated by the Durham Women’s Advisory Council and the Monkwearmouth (the historic area of Sunderland) Miners as a prospective candidate for the multiple-member constituency of Sunderland in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament. She was successful in the 1929 election, the first in which women under the age of thirty, were eligible to vote. In July 1928, Marion wrote to all women in the Sunderland constituency, stating that ‘FOR WOMEN ESPECIALLY, THIS NEXT ELECTION WHICH WILL TAKE PLACE IN 1929 IS VERY IMPORTANT’. Unfortunately, Marion was unsuccessful in the 1931 election.
Marion was the first Australian woman to win a seat in a national parliament, and the only one to have been elected to the House of Commons. Although born into an eminent Jewish family, she was an atheist, having also rejected her Australian experience as crude and uncivilised. Her preference was European intellectual artistic, and cultural life of Europe; her religion was socialism, and the power of organisation for women and the working class. A Liberal colleague, Violet Markham, wrote of her: ‘Like everyone who worked with her, I learnt to value not only her first-class brain, but the human qualities and warm heart she never cared to reveal to the casual acquaintance. Marion Phillips did not suffer fools gladly but had … deep feelings for suffering and injustice and a crusader’s spirit for their redress’.
Unlike prominent suffragettes, her vision was not concentrated on extending the franchise, she wanted state interventions in the free market to be better informed by considerations of life outside the workplace. She was a leader of the Women’s Labour League she described its role as “keeping the Labour Party well informed of the needs of women and providing them with the means of becoming educated in political matters”. As a result, she provoked about a quarter of a million housewives to take part in the labour movement helping to promote issues such as equality for women in the workplace, school meals, clinics and playgrounds for children, the fundamental value of mothering, a more humanitarian, safety-conscious, approach to the design of homes for ordinary families, and eradication of needless drudgery and squalor from home life.
Together with Labour politician, Margaret Bondfield, Marion “worked tirelessly within the WLL to raise the political consciousness of women and encourage their participation.” It has been noted that “although there was some tension between the two at the start, they eventually worked in harmony and shared an essentially social class-based approach to women’s emancipation. They both served as Labour MPs together in 1929. At a public meeting on the need for adequate bathing and washing facilities in new housing projects, Marion remarked: “If Labour Councillors do not support us on this demand, we shall have to halt all municipal housing until we have replaced all Labour men by Labour women”. In an address to the women of the English coastal town of Hartlepool, she emphasised, “There is still a great deal of educating to do and we are going to begin by educating ourselves”. As Chief Woman Officer of the Labour Party, she reportedly gave women extra confidence to engage in politics, and by 1925, the Women’s Section was firmly established.
Unfortunately, Marion would have liked to have achieved a great deal more but illness took over and she was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died in London on 23 January 1932 aged fifty. She never married and left a meagre estate to her long-time friend and companion in politics Charles Wye Kendall. As the first Jewish, and thus first non-Christian woman MP, her family were extremely proud of her. In September 2019, a plaque was unveiled at the Sunderland Labour Party’s former Committee Rooms. It reads “Sunderland’s first woman MP had an office here 1929-1931. Activist and academic, she lobbied for the rights of woman and working people. The Labour Party’s Chief Woman Officer (1918-1932)”.
The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:
Australian Dictionary of Biography – Beverley Kingston; Wikipedia, Jewish Women’s Archive, Australian Women’s Registry, National Library of Australia, British Jews in the First World War
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