The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist by Laura Beers (review)

Laura Beers' biography of Ellen Wilkinson, nicknamed "The Mighty Atom" because of her small size and energy, is perceptive, well-informed, and clearly focused upon Wilkinson's vital contribution to the emergence of socialist politics in the early 20th century in both a British and an international context. Beers places Wilkinson's activities firmly within the wider and conflicting politics of her age and provides the impressive associational context. Indeed, her book is a very important addition to the previous biographies. It is decidedly more critical than Betty D. Vernon's Ellen Wilkinson: A Biography (Brighton: Croom Helm, 1982), which presented Ellen as a worthy founding pillar of the Labour Party, and challenges Paula Bartley's more recent biography Ellen Wilkinson: From Red Suffragist to Government Minister (London: Pluto, 2014) by suggesting that Wilkinson was less consistent and more pragmatic in her principles than Bartley assumes. On the other hand, it rather endorses Matt Perry's excellent biography "Red Ellen" Wilkinson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), which sees "Red Ellen," referred to as such because of the colour of her hair and her fiery temperament, as a transnational figure operating in the world of international socialism and greatly affected by the various socialist and Marxists she met, including Robert Blatchford, Keir Hardie, Rajani Palme Dutt, Lenin and Trotsky – the lionesque figures of their day.

Famed for her support for the Jarrow march of October and November 1936, when more than 200 men marched from Jarrow to London to present a petition to Parliament for jobs, it is often forgotten how involved Ellen was in myriad other socialist organizations and activities between the eve of World War I and her death in 1947. Though by no means the dominant socialist of her age she was, indeed, one of the ubiquitous figures in the history of the British labour movement. Ellen Wilkinson was indeed a most unusual radicalized woman. She was one of the first women to go to the University of Manchester and was active in the Manchester Independent Labour Party and the Clarion movement. She was organizer of the women's section of the Amalgamated Union of Cooperative Employees after World War I. A lifelong feminist fighting for women's rights in Britain and throughout the world, she began her work with the Manchester Women's Suffrage League before being active in numerous feminist organizations and campaigns. When World War I displaced suffrage from the agenda, she was a pacifist, although perhaps less directly involved in its activities than many others she was a member of the International Committee for Women for Permanent Peace in 1915. However, the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s led her to support the National Government's move to increase spending on armaments. By that time she had become deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War where she became fervently anti-fascist. As a trade unionist she investigated, with Frank Horrabin, a married man and later member of Parliament for Peterborough with whom she had a relationship, the organization and activities of the General Strike of 1926. Initially Marxist in her thinking, and a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, she left it in 1924, feeling that its leadership was weak and divisive, with more communists out of the party than within it, to focus upon her career in the Labour Party. An inveterate attender of meetings and member of investigative commissions, she also became involved in an examination of the brutalities of the Irish Civil War and of British brutality in India against the Indian independence movement. To these activities might be added a flirtation with Guild Socialism through her association with G.D.H. Cole, Margaret Cole, and the National Guild League. She was deeply concerned and outraged with the social conditions of poor families in Britain, and particularly the high levels of unemployment in inter-war Britain. She was member of Parliament for Middlesbrough (1929–1931) and for Jarrow (1935...