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20 February 2007
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Ellen Wilkinson (1891 - 1947)

Ellen Wilkinson
Ellen Wilkinson ©
Wilkinson was a Labour Party activist and MP in the inter-war years and was minister of education in Attlee's post-war Labour administration.

Ellen Wilkinson was born into a working-class family in Manchester on 8 October 1891. She won scholarships to grammar school and then to the University of Manchester. Here she became active in the campaign for women's suffrage and supported women's trade unionism. Her union ties helped her become Labour MP for Middlesbrough in 1924, and then, from 1931, for Jarrow.

As the youngest and most vivacious of the few women in Parliament in the 1920s, Wilkinson's combination of passionate socialist politics and striking appearance made her stand out. Like many Labour women MPs, she often put her class before her gender, arguing that the best way to offer security for working-class women was to ensure jobs for their menfolk. Indeed, she accompanied the unemployed men on the 1936 'Jarrow March' to London. In that decade she was also a prominent critic of fascism, and a supporter of the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

In Churchill's wartime coalition government Wilkinson was appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister of pensions, and then went to work for home secretary Herbert Morrison. In 1945 she became minister of education in the Labour government, the first woman to hold the post. She was faced with the task of implementing the 1944 Education Act, a major challenge, given this was a time of financial stringency and shortages of teachers and building materials.

Left-wing critics have condemned Wilkinson for failing to base the reconstruction of secondary schooling on non-selective comprehensive education, arguing that her acceptance of a tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools was incompatible with the party's egalitarian principles. In fact, few in the Labour Party in 1945 objected to Wilkinson's preference for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome. However, Wilkinson's relatively conservative approach to the reorganisation of secondary education reflected a more general failing of her political powers and physical strength. She died on 6 February 1947 after an overdose of sleeping pills.



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