Cicely Fisher

Cicely Fisher, the daughter of Charles and Marie Corbett, was born at Danehill, Sussex in 1885. Cicely and her older sister, Margery, were educated at home. Charles Corbett taught the girls classics, history and mathematics and Marie taught them scripture and the piano. A local woman gave them lessons in French and German.

At the age of fifteen, Cicely, Margery and a group of friends formed a society called the Younger Suffragists. In 1904 Cicely went to Sommerville College, Oxford to study Modern History. While at Oxford she was an active member of the local branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

Disappointed with the poor record of the Liberal Party with respect to women's suffrage, Cicely and her sister Margery broke away from the Women's Liberal Federation and formed the Liberal Women's Suffrage Group.

Cicely Fisher at Oxford University

After completing her university studies, Cicely went to work with Clementina Black at the Women's Industrial Council, an organisation that campaigned against low pay and bad working conditions. By 1910 women made up almost one third of the working population. The vast majority worked in jobs with low pay and poor conditions. Cicely was also an active member of the Anti-Sweating League and in the years preceding the start of the First World War, she organised several conferences on the subject. At the time sweated labour was defined as "(1) working long hours, (2) for low wages, (3) under insanitary conditions". Most sweated labour took place in the homes of workers.

Children employed after school hours in the home were also victims of sweated labour. Cicely Corbett's conferences often included speeches and demonstrations of sweated labour by women from industrial towns and cities.

In 1913 Cicely Corbett married the radical journalist, Chambers Fisher. After the First World War Cicely Corbett Fisher was active in the Labour Party and the Women's International League. Cicely Corbett Fisher died at Danehill in 1959.

(1) Cicely Corbett, speaking at a East Grinstead Liberal Association meeting at the Queen's Hall (Wednesday, 7th February, 1912)

Women are often forced out into the labour market because men either could not or would not earn their living for them, and yet when a minimum wage was fixed for government employees, women were not included in it, and that decision had led to worse sweating of women than before, which would never have been possible if women were included among the voters.

(2) Cicely Corbett Fisher, a representative of the Women’s Industrial Council, gave a talk on sweated labour at East Grinstead in May 1912.

Sweated labour may be defined as (1) working long hours, (2) for low wages, (3) under insanitary conditions. Although its victims include men as well as women, women form the great majority of sweated workers. The chief difficulty is combating this evil abuse is that nearly all sweated work is done in the homes of the workers. During the recent strike of Jam makers in Bermondsey the wages of the girls only just sufficed to provide them with food, and left no margin whatsoever for the purchase of clothes, for which they were entirely dependent on gifts from friends… Chief among these evils of sweated labour is the exploitation of child labour. Children of six years and upwards were employed after school hours, in helping to add to the family output and even infants of 3, 4 and 5 years of age work anything from 3 to 6 hours a day in such labour as carding hooks and eyes to add a few pence per week to the wages of the household.

Selina Cooper explained that she started work when she was only ten years of age and for eighteen years was employed as a weaver. She said women needed to do on a collective basis what they could not do individually for themselves. As an industrial worker, and since as a wife and mother, she realised how much legislation concerned her… women had expert knowledge to enable them to deal with great reform. Take the housing problem, a woman was far more likely to detect anything lacking in a house than a man was. They needed women’s idea of economy and her grasp of detail.