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Woman of the Day feminist author and activist Helen Blackburn born OTD in 1842 in Valentia Island, a small island off the coast of Co. Kerry. She campaigned for “the equality of men and women both as regards the right of liberty and protection” and against the “unjust restrictions on one sex alone.” Helen edited the feminist periodical Englishwomans Review from 1890 until 1903, wrote many pamphlets about the working conditions of, and restrictions on, women in Victorian England and established a reputation for her methodical approach. She represented the British National Union of Working Women at the TUC conference in 1881 and in 1889, founded the Freedom of Labour Defence League with Lincolnshire suffragist Jessie Boucherett to try to block unfair legislation for women factory workers. In 1903, she and her co-author Nora Vynne published Women Under the Factory Act, a detailed critique of proposed legislation that would treat women “as if they had not the intelligence of animals.” If you relied on a certain online resource, you might be puzzled as to why Helen and Nora “argued that women should be allowed to take risks with their health in the workplace or they may find themselves always in need to protection as if they were incapable.” It sounds as though they were in favour of women behaving like mavericks at work, dicing with injury or death just to prove they were not the weaker sex but, as ever, their arguments were a good deal more nuanced than that. Women faced invisible divisions and tariffs in the workplace that were entirely sex-based and paid no heed whatsoever to responsibility, skill or merit. They were a way of justifying lower pay, longer hours and poor conditions for women. Here are just a few examples: A female machinist was assumed to be a seamstress even if she was not, and paid accordingly, while a male machinist was classed as akin to a mechanic. Female box-makers were assumed to work with cardboard, which was child’s play, but male box-workers with wood, which was skilled. The responsibilities of a butler and those of a pantrymaid differed in just one way: he was permitted to answer the door. The difference in pay however was considerable. Footmen sat and cleaned the silver; kitchenmaids got on their hands and knees and scrubbed the stone floors. Chefs were male and therefore skilled; cooks were female and let’s face it, all women are born with the innate ability to cook so it can’t possibly be classed as a skill, can it? It stands to reason. The same thinking applied to teaching: women taught domestic science and needlework, both natural womanly traits, while men taught language and typing. Guess who was paid more? These are not products of my imagination but facts derived from analyses of census returns between 1891 and 1911. This is the sort of thing Helen Blackburn and Nora Vynne argued against. They believed that “what women wanted were more and not fewer opportunities of earning their living." Helen died in 1903, the same year that her book was published. She was 61. She could never have imagined that it would take 65 years and a strike by sewing machinists Rose Boland, Eileen Pullen, Vera Sime, Gwen Davis and Sheila Douglass and the other 182 women at Ford Dagenham to force the issue of equal pay for women. Nor could she have imagined that it would take a further 18 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970 before shipyard cook Julie Hayward of Birkenhead could bring the first successful case proving that her work had equal value to that of a man in the same employment. Women’s rights were hard-won in piecemeal fashion and only after relentless lobbying, campaigning and lawfare, rather like today, in fact. They can be easily lost - and as we all know, they very nearly were. Never cede a single one. Ever. We owe it to the women who came before us and we owe it to the women yet to be born.