My new biography of Margaret Bondfield, the remarkable political pioneer and working-class woman who rose to become the first female Cabinet Minister in the 1929 Labour government, will be published by Bloomsbury on 19 February 2026. It can be pre-ordered here.

Rising from modest semi-rural, semi-industrial origins in the West Country, and after years of apprenticeship in shops in Brighton, Bondfield became the first woman to chair the TUC, one of the first female Labour MPs, the first woman to hold government office (1924) and in 1929, the first female Cabinet Minister. Most of her life was lived in the public eye, but what lay behind her public achievements? This book looks beyond the public façade to reveal Bondfield’s hidden personal story, from her complicated personality with a difficult background, a private life which was either secret or non-existent, and a lifelong struggle with imposter syndrome.

For various reasons, which I explore in the book, she has frequently been underestimated, ignored, and dismissed from the pages of her own life. My book restores her to her rightful place in history.

Pre-order Margaret Bondfield here.

Uncontrollable Women: Radicals, Reformers and Revolutionaries, was published by Bloomsbury (IB Tauris) on 27 January 2022. It’s a history of radical, reformist and revolutionary women between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Very few of them are well-known today; some were unknown even in their own day. All of them contributed something to the world we now inhabit.
At a time when women were supposed to leave politics to men they spoke, wrote, marched, organised, asked questions, challenged power structures, sometimes went to prison and even died. History has not usually been kind to them, and they have frequently been pushed into asides or footnotes, dismissed as secondary, or spoken over, for, or through by men and sometimes other women. These women and many others played a part in developing political ideas and freedoms as we know them today, and some fought battles which still remain to be won or raised questions that are still unresolved.

Uncontrollable Women was the Guardian’s Book of the Week in February 2022.

You can order the book here.

The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History tells the story of the founding and the early years of the Labour Party, but with women added back in. Between 1900 and 1918 women were active in the suffrage movement, but they were also trade unionists, socialists, pacifists, public speakers, organisers and campaigners. Some campaigned for universal rather than limited female suffrage; others took an economic rather than a political view of how women could be liberated.

The story includes familiar names such as Millicent Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst and Keir Hardie, but also less well-known women including Margaret Bondfield, Mary Macarthur, Marion Phillips and Margaret MacDonald. It paints a vivid picture of the activism of a diverse range of women in the early twentieth century, and illuminates their involvement in the birth of the Labour and trade union movements.

Copies of the book can be ordered here