Margaret Bondfield was a political trailblazer and a woman of many ‘firsts’. She was a founding member of the Adult Suffrage Society (ASS) in 1904 and the Women’s Labour League in 1906. She became the first female President of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in 1923, following a long tenure in the Shop Assistant’s Union. She was a lifelong socialist and pacifist, committed to improving women’s social and political workplace rights alongside a deep ideological conviction motivated by her own experience in the workplace and her commitment to trade unionism. She was also motivated by class and experiences of poverty. But it was as a minster in the second Labour Government, when she became the first woman to be appointed a cabinet minister and the first woman privy counsellor, that her political career reached its pinnacle.The full version of this landmark is written by Jacqui Turner