The forgotten pioneer: Who was Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first female Cabinet Minister?

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The forgotten pioneer: Who was Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first female Cabinet Minister? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 132

20 Feb 2026

Image © Bloomsbury

Why is Britain’s first female Cabinet Minister largely forgotten? Historian Nan Sloane discusses her new biography of Margaret Bondfield, the trade unionist who became the first woman in the British Cabinet. Rising from harsh shop-floor conditions to national prominence, Bondfield took office as Minister of Labour in 1929 at the onset of the Great Depression. As economic crisis split the Labour Party, her reputation never recovered. Was she a pioneer, pragmatist, or unfairly judged?

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Why is Britain’s first female cabinet minister almost invisible in our political memory?

In this episode we are joined by historian and author Nan Sloane, whose new biography of Margaret Bondfield has just been published, to uncover the remarkable and largely forgotten story of this pioneering figure.

Bondfield – a working-class trade unionist – became the first woman to serve in the British Cabinet yet is rarely mentioned alongside figures such as Nancy Astor or Ellen Wilkinson.

She did not enter politics through the suffrage movement. Instead, she rose through the male-dominated trade union movement, often as the only woman in the room. Born into a large working-class family in Somerset, she left school at thirteen to work in shops where staff were legally treated as domestic servants and endured punishing conditions. Driven by a fierce commitment to social justice, she became a powerful organiser, accomplished public speaker and a leading national figure within the labour movement.

Elected to Parliament in 1923, she made history in 1929 when she was appointed Minister of Labour, becoming the first woman to serve in the Cabinet and the first female Privy Counsellor. But it was, as one colleague put it, the worst job in government. In the grip of a deep economic crisis, unemployment was soaring, the national insurance system was stretched to breaking point, and painful decisions had to be taken. By 1931 the crisis had split the Labour Party and brought down the government. Bondfield lost her seat and never returned to Parliament.

Rather than being remembered as a trailblazer, her legacy was overshadowed by economic crisis and party division. Was she a pioneer, a pragmatist caught in impossible circumstances, or a woman judged more harshly than her male colleagues? In conversation with Nan Sloane, we explore Bondfield’s character, her relationships and international networks, and the political choices that shaped both her career and her reputation.

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Our guest

Nan Sloane

Nan Sloane

Nan Sloane is a historian, author, speaker and trainer with an interest in the role of women in the public space, particularly in politics and the Labour Party. Her latest book, Margaret Bondfield: Britain’s First Female Cabinet Minister, was published by Bloomsbury this month. She is also the author of Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries (2022) and The Women In the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History (2018). She worked for the Labour Party as Regional Director for Yorkshire and the Humber, and then in 2006 set up the Centre for Women and Democracy. Since then, she has become a leading member of the Labour Women’s Network, and has trained MPs, councillors and candidates for public office in the UK as well as promoting political development and leadership skills in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa. She lives in Leeds and is a committed supporter of Leeds United Football Club.

Resources

Personal website
Margaret Bondfield: The Life and Times of Britain’s First Female Cabinet Minister, Bloomsbury, 19 February 2026
Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries, IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2022
The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History, IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2018
Women in Westminster: In conversation with Nan Sloane, interview in PoliticsHome, 2025
Labour Women’s Network

Transcript

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And we're delighted to welcome into the Parliament Matters studio, Nan Sloane, who's a historian and author, and who's just produced a biography of an almost unknown political figure, Margaret Bondfield, Britain's first female cabinet minister.

Ruth Fox: Well, we'll come on to Margaret in a moment, Mark. But I think, I think to describe Nan as just a political historian is to rather understate things. I mean, I've known Nan for many, many years now and she's got a long history of activism in the Labour Party. She was a regional director of the Yorkshire Labour [00:01:00] Party for many years.

But more importantly, I think she has run training for women candidates in the Labour movement for years. And I think probably single-handedly is more responsible than anyone for getting more women MPs into the parliamentary Labour party and also runs, I think, Nan this is right, you run the training program under the Jo Cox Memorial Program.

Nan Sloane: I lead a team on it, yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Lead a team on it. Modesty itself. Welcome to the podcast.

Nan Sloane: Thank you.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, we are talking today about one of the pioneers for women in the House of Commons, a very appropriate subject. Margaret Bondfield was not only one of the early women MPs, but the first woman cabinet minister, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, Nan, why she's not better known.

I mean, everybody knows, who knows anything about Parliament, that Nancy Astor was the first woman MP to take her seat, everybody who does pub quizzes knows that Constance Markievicz was actually the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons, [00:02:00] even though, as an Irish Republican, she didn't take her seat.

But Margaret Bondfield is almost invisible in that history. Why is that?

Nan Sloane: Well, I think it's a combination of reasons. There's the obvious one of her involvement in... Full transcript →

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