Smart Olga

Olga Smart

A leading London Communist Party activist in the textile industry in the 1940s and 1950s, Olga Smart probably worked in the East End where such establishments were numerous.

She had joined the Communist Party, she said, “after my husband had been for months out of work. I was anxious about the question of war. The average working woman's life is a very drab one. At eight o clock in the morning I get to the factory, with the foreman bawling at me – and all the women doing exactly the same thing, at dinner time trying to do some shopping and clocking out at six o’clock and facing the same problems at night. When we listen to what women are saying, on the question of prices, how they are going to pay for food, and whether they can go to the pictures, we realise what it means to have a double job of being in a factory and doing a home job as well. When a woman gets married she thinks of life as something glorious, but before you know where you are, life has become a habit and no adventure."

Michael Walker

World News & Views 14th March 1953