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completed this, James set up a series of "Working Girls' Clubs", providing lectures, physical drills, social meetings and citizenship classes. These proved popular, and in 1899 the WIC founded the Clubs
Industrial Association to formalise this activity. Among the young women who attended her classes was
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to win a strike among chocolate makers in 1890, but the union faced high levels of opposition from employers and a highly mobile workforce, leading to its decline and dissolution in 1892. Thereafter, James focused her efforts on trying to organise box-makers. Lilian
Gilchrist Thompson paid the WTUA
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The WTUA was refounded in 1894 as the Women's
Industrial Council (WIC), and James remained active within it, serving on both its investigation and organisation committees. However, with her sponsorship having concluded, Thompson instead paid for her training as a gymnastics teacher. Once she had
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James eventually left the Clubs
Industrial Association, founding the rival Working Girls at Play organisation, which by 1909 organised 22 regular clubs across London. She began suffering from poor health and had to give up teaching, retiring to
44:(WTUA). As a result, she was sacked from her job, but the WTUA helped her find work as a typist, while she volunteered as an organiser and assistant secretary of the WTUA. Its activist
40:, James's parents died when she was young, and she was brought up by a former employee of her father. She found work making confectionery, and in 1889 she joined the
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James and Hicks were the only two women to give evidence to the 1891 Royal
Commission on Labour. James also served as a delegate to the
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Through the WTUA, James founded the
Confectioners' Union, and served as its general secretary. She worked with
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83:. There, she served as a parish councillor, and ran a holiday home for working girls from London.
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provided her with accommodation and legally adopted James as her daughter.
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60:£70 a year for two years to employ James as an investigator.
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22:(30 October 1866 – 10 August 1954) was a
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114:Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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42:Women's Trade Union Association
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152:British women trade unionists
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167:Women councillors in England
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157:People from Canvey Island
142:Trade unionists from Kent
16:British trade unionist
65:London Trades Council
162:Councillors in Essex
147:People from Deptford
109:James, Clara Grace
73:Margaret Bondfield
20:Clara Grace James
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53:Clementina Black
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137:1954 deaths
132:1866 births
126:Categories
87:References
57:John Burns
46:Amie Hicks
36:, then in
34:Deptford
32:Born in
24:British
55:and
38:Kent
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94:^
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