Match Girls’ Strike

Match Girls’ Strike, walkout in the summer of 1888 by women making and boxing matches for the Bryant & May matchstick company in London to protest the company’s low wages and poor working conditions. They secured several labor rights for themselves and inspired workers in other industries to unionize and demand changes.

Working conditions of the Bryant & May factory

The Bryant & May factory was located in the East End of London, where in the late 1880s many immigrants and impoverished people lived and worked. Most of the company’s workers were young, uneducated Irish women, whose poor pay and dangerous working conditions were publicized by British social reformer Annie Besant in an exposé published in her weekly newspaper The Link. After interviewing a few of the matchstick workers in June 1888, Besant wrote about how employees worked 14-hour days and could have their pay, which was already very low, docked for offenses such as dropping matches, using the restroom, and talking. The workers also risked contracting necrosis of the jawbone, called “phossy jaw,” a disease that was caused by exposure to the white phosphorus used to make matches. Meanwhile, the owners and shareholders were receiving large dividends. About the workers, Besant wrote:

Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on to the streets provided only that Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent, and Mr. Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks?

Strike and resolution

The company owners reacted to the article by demanding that the women deny the allegations. The women refused, and the owners fired a few individuals who they believed were the whistleblowers in retaliation. This action led to some 1,400 women walking off the job to strike. The strikers earned substantial public support, including from newspaper editor William Stead and suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst, who used their positions to publicize the strike. Besant successfully used her newspaper to solicit donations for the workers. Meanwhile the workers held demonstrations and brought their grievances to Parliament. They also organized the Union of Women Match Makers, with Besant as the leader. By the end of the year it had become the Matchmakers Union, and men were allowed to join.

About three weeks into the strike, representatives from Bryant & May met with the workers and agreed to rehire the dismissed women. They also agreed to stop fining the workers for minor infractions. Happy with the concessions, the women returned to work. However, the use of the dangerous white phosphorus that led to many health problems in workers continued throughout the industry until it was banned in the White Phosphorus Matches Prohibition Act (1908).

In popular culture

In 2022 English Heritage, a charity whose mission includes installing historical plaques at significant locations in England, unveiled a marker at the site of the Bryant & May factory to commemorate the strike. That same year the Netflix film Enola Holmes 2 familiarized audiences with the strike through a fictionalized storyline about the lead-up to the walkout.