Ada Nield Chew

Ada Nield Chew (28 January 1870 – 27 December 1945) was a British campaigning socialist, writer and suffragist.

Her only sister had epilepsy, and Nield left school aged 11 to help her mother take care of the house, look after the family and to support her through her constant childbearing. Nield's childhood experiences shaped her views that, for women to lead individual lives and gain economic independence, housework and childcare should become professionalised.

Career When she was in her 20s she worked in a shop in Nantwich then as a tailoress in the Compton Bros clothing factory in Crewe, Cheshire. She was dismissed from her factory job after writing a series of letters to the Crewe Chronicle in 1894 under the pseudonym "A Crewe Factory Girl" which criticised working conditions for women and girls in the factory. She highlighted issues such as the unfairness by which work was allocated and the practice of charging workers for their tea breaks and the materials they required to do their work. The factory employed 400 women and 100 men but paid the women a fraction of the men's wages for their roles in making uniforms for soldiers, police and railway workers. She argued for a living wage for women rather than a "lingering, dying wage".

Her letters had attracted the attention of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who offered her employment if her identity as the Crewe Factory Girl was discovered. When her identity was uncovered, she became active in the ILP. By the end of the year she had been elected as a Nantwich Poor Law Guardian (one of the first working-class female Guardians) and was working with the local Trades Council. In 1896, she toured the north-east of England in the Clarion Van organised by Julia Dawson to publicise the ILP's policies.

In the years leading up to the First World War, Chew became an active supporter of the movement for women's suffrage. According to her daughter, Chew as a working class woman sometimes felt patronised by the middle-class leadership of the movement. This was reflected in a lively correspondence with Christabel Pankhurst in the pages of The Clarion during 1904. Chew became a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and worked for this body as an organiser from 1911 to 1914. The main focus of her work was in winning support for the cause through contacts in the labour movement, but she also wrote for Freewoman, the Englishwoman and the NUWSS paper Common Cause.

Archives An oral history interview between Brian Harrison and Doris Nield Chew, about her mother, Ada, is held by The Women's Library, now housed at The British Library of Political and Economic Science, and available online. It is one of over 200 interviews made between 1974 and 1981 as part of Oral Evidence on the Suffragette and Suffragist Movements: the Brian Harrison interviews.

Posthumous recognition Ada Nield Chew's daughter, Doris Nield Chew, published a collection of her writings in 1982. In this production, Ada Nield Chew was played by Diane Fletcher.

The 'Statue for Ada' campaign, run by Cheshire Women's Collaboration, has appointed artist Hazel Reeves to sculpt Ada Nield Chew. It will be cast in bronze and installed in Crewe.