For life was made for joy not woe': the literature and politics of the Woman Worker

The pre-war period was one of significant industrial unrest, which saw a rapid expansion of the radical press as print was increasingly understood to be essential to successful agitation.
The Woman Worker was unique in this proliferation as the first, and at the time only, women's trade union magazine written for, and often by, working class women rather than their middle class supporters.
In a press landscape where even publications more committed to gender equality such as the Labour Leader assumed female disinterest, instead instructing the male reader to direct their 'mother or sister, wife or sweet-heart' to the women's column 'from time to time', the Woman Worker provides a valuable insight into the impacts of intersections of gender and class in the radical press.