JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

-.- '.LOUlE BENNETT 37While there is little doubt that in this respect BenneU mirrored conventional opinion, the views weremoderating in their impact. 48 .It was Bennett's traditional views on women working that dominated the IWWU contributions tothe debate on equal pay for equal work. Her persistent claims that there was a fundamentaiprincipleof equal rights and opportunities for all citizens rang hollow against her more negative assertions. 49This was particularly the case in the debates about the tailoring trade in the 1930s and 1940s. The majorunion involved was the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers (NUTGW), composedprimarily of men, because men dominated the key operations like cutting, fitting, trimming, shaping,basting, alterations, pressing by hand or by machine, passing or viewing, packing and dispatching. Thecheapness of female labour threatened what had traditioria:ily beeha male preserve. In 1936 and againin 1941 the union, with the backing of the ITUC, approached the Minister for Industry and Commerce,Sean Lemass, with the view to having him introduce regulations, under section 16 of the 1936Conditions of Employment Act, restricting the access of women to the above-named operations. 50 TheMinister refused and was denounced loudly by the NUTGW; Mrs. Purtell, from that union, agreed withher male colleagues that women, particularly married women, should not be employed over men,especially when so many men were unemployedY Interestingly, only Bennett dissented. 52 Yet, if wetake Bennett's comments in 1942 in the context of her expressed scepticism of the value of women'swork, it seems clear that equal pay for equal work was a means of eradicating the 'advantage' thatwomen had over men, and thereby forcing them out of the labour market. This does notignore the.fundamentally progressive notion, but it does suggest a more traditional perspective from whichBennett and the IWWU were working. Indeed, both the concept of equal pay and that of noninterferencein male jobs reveals a deep rooted conservatism; likewise, the 1936-37IWWU AnnualReport opposed the shift system because it added 'seriously to the difficulties of the housekeeper andtends to disrupt home life and family relations' .53 Thus, working women were an aberration of modemsociety. While the union would represent their interests - and those areas which it defined as appropriatetargets it pursued relentlessly and progressively - it would not, nor did it ever, challenge the traditionaldual role of women as workers and as mothers' or the sexual division of labour.The IWWU, as Bennett saw it, was not an instrument of class power. Rather she suggested that theIWWU would be part of a larger women workers' federation which would draw together womenworking in all fields, both individually and industrially, under three general headings:'1. Women workers in industries which are quite clearly women's industries, or where the men'sorganisations do not admit them, or where their interests or desires are likely to be bestcserved by apurely women's organisation - to be organised as in the IWWU;2. Groups of women a1rea~y organised in craft or industrial unions with men, loosely affiliated with thewomen's federation, in order to work for better general conditions for work - women as a class - to paysmall affiliation fee; - .3. Individual women workers, professional, commercial or industrial ... they should have no control over·the actual trade union business of the Federation nor over its constitution. '54Initially, there were two key sections of the union/federation - nurses (who by 1920 had been formedinto the Irish Nurses' Union under the aegis of the IWWU) and domestic workers. Thedomestics hadpreviously been organised by Helena Molony who had been Secretary of the Domestic Workers'Union; the Irish Citizen of August 1919 noted that its membership stood at about 15,000. 55 Bennettthen concentrated on the printing trade and the laundries. There is little additional evidence of anyfurther progress towards fulfilling the schema that Bennett had mapped out for the IWWU as outlinedabove. It does illustrate, however, her belief that women were a body in society which shared certaincommon interests and abilities, and that one of these was their 'humanising' quality wiihout whichsociety was all the poorer. 56 While at other times she did articulate the sentiments abOut the 'labourclass' or the 'working people', she shared little sympathy with socialist or labourist notions of Class or