Feminism and the Politics of Working Women

The Women's Co-Operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War

Gillian Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135360306
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Based on extensive research, this text provides a critical investigation of the development of the Women's Co-operative Guild from the 1880s to World War II. Charting the rise and fall of an exceptional feminist political organization, the author assesses the political significance of the movement during the decades of its greatest influence and examines the causes and circumstances of its demise. Advancing a fresh perspective on working-class women's organizations, this book combines historical narrative, biography and political analysis.

Chapter One
Beginnings

The Women’s Co-operative Guild grew out of the English consumers’ Co-operative movement. As Margaret Llewelyn Davies wrote, ‘it is through Co-operation that the married woman living at home finds her work and place in the Labour world.’¹ On the face of it the late 19th century Co-operative movement might seem an unlikely location for a radical women’s organization. Generally regarded as a leading institution of working-class self help, its success and dynamism as a trading enterprise was accompanied by a reputation for political moderation and social conservatism. To understand why it should have spawned the Guild project it is necessary to appreciate both the size and scope of the movement, and the unusual opportunities that it afforded its female membership.

The Co-operative movement originated in the aspiration of the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’² in the 1840s to contest the ways in which private retailing exploited working people. Half a century later it consisted of hundreds of self-governing Societies (retail shops), grouped into two federations—the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), for supplies, and the Co-operative Union (CU), with its structure of sections and districts, for education and propaganda purposes³—and was set on a course of continued expansion that would not peak until the Second World War. In 1880, it had 600,000 members and share capital of £2,246, 000; in 1900, 1,780,000 members and £23,256,000.⁴ By 1920 the Co-operative Societies ‘accounted for 18 per cent to 20 per cent of the total national sales of groceries and provisions’, and from 1914 to 1938 membership doubled to 6.5 million,⁵ with total capital at £229,605,509 in 1935.⁶ Although growth in its share of retail trade slowed between the wars,⁷ wartime registration for rationing further strengthened the movement, and by 1944 about one in five of the British population belonged to a Co-operative Society.⁸

While Co-operation thus became ‘an intrinsic part of working-class life’, and the movement’s vision of a Co-operative Commonwealth clearly implied some kind of socialism,⁹ labour historians have formed rather different judgements about the movement’s commitment to, and capacity for, socialist transformation. On the one hand, its typical relationship with capitalism has been seen as one of peaceful co-existence rather than mutual antagonism, with active Co-operators defining themselves as social reformers by trade rather than as class warriors. According to this line of argument, increasing prosperity brought to the fore ‘men who were chiefly preoccupied with the practical details of successful commercial trading…the belief that the movement would peacefully put an end to the competitive system,’ and create the Co-operative Commonwealth, while ‘never formally abandoned, became more and more a pious hope’, divorced from routine business.¹⁰ Alongside its formal position of political neutrality ran strong Liberal sympathies, while the retail and wholesale Societies had their own tricky labour relations to manage, and a far from shining record in regard to the Co-operative trade unions.¹¹ In times of adversity, such writers concede, the Societies functioned as a ‘line of defence’¹² for working people, providing credit during strikes, for example, but at least until the First World War the movement was detached from working-class politics, and ‘almost wholly neglected by Socialist propagandists and theorists.’¹³

Yet there have also been moves to reinterpret the significance of Co-operation, emphasizing the movement’s achievements as a unique form of working-class association¹⁴ whosestrength lay in its capacity to combine sound business practice with an ethos of mutuality and social justice. From the outset, as well as supplying wholesome food, Co-operative Societies were run on democratic lines, allocating one vote to each member regardless of the number of shares they owned, and distributing their trading surplus as a dividend (the ‘divi’) proportional to purchases not investment.¹⁵ With its huge trading operations, and large undertakings for combined services that spanned banking, insurance, social, educational and propaganda activity, Co-operation was conceived by many as ‘a new economic system in embryo’,¹⁶ that would in time supersede the old competitive system because it was more rational, more efficient, and more democratic. Far from being ‘a pious hope’, this argument runs, the Co-operative Commonwealth was a real ambition for many active members.

Certainly, and whatever its status as a blueprint for a future good society, actually existing Co-operation held out possibilities for women that were not to be found elsewhere in the working-class movement. The sexual division of labour which relegated women to a peripheral place as direct producers, and, therefore, as trade unionists, necessarily ensured that they would be active in an association of consumers: the stores were dependent upon the trading loyalty of the working-class housewife for their survival and growth. Buttressing this reality was the movement’s historic commitment to sexual equality, a legacy of its Owenite past.¹⁷ Women had never been excluded from the terms of its constitution and, in theory, enjoyed membership, including voting rights and access to educational provision, on the same terms as men.

The practice did not always match these egalitarian principles. In line with the mores of the respectable working class, Co-operative managers and officials generally agreed that women should be in their proper place—at home—and that the feminine virtues did not include a capacity to deal with facts, figures, and policy-making. Very few women actually attended Co-operative meetings, even fewer spoke at them, and in many working-class families, although it was the wife who shopped at the store and collected the ‘divi’, it was the husband who held the membership of the society.

Yet the movement was a sufficiently broad church for some active female Co-operators to feel entitled to challenge the gap between rhetoric and reality, and to press for their own organization. ‘What are men always urged to do when there is a meeting held at any place to encourage or start Co-operative institutions?’ asked Mrs Acland,¹⁸ the Guild founder. ‘Come! Help! Vote! Criticize! Act! What are women urged to do? Come and Buy! That is the limit of the special work pointed out to us women. We can be independent members of our Store, but we are only asked to come and buy…’. In the same breath, however, Mrs Acland made it plain that she was not proposing a major assault on the sexual hierarchy. Why ‘should not we women do more than we do?’, she reasoned.

Surely, without departing from our own sphere, and without trying to undertake work which can be better done by men, there is more for us women to do than to spend money. Spend money at our own Store we must, that is a matter of course; but our duty does not end here, nor our duty to our fellow creatures. To come and ‘buy’ is all we can be asked to do; but cannot we go further ourselves? Why should not we have our meetings, our readings, our discussions?¹⁹

In response to this appeal, at a special meeting at the 1883 Co-operative Congress, the Women’s League for the Spread of Co-operation was launched (changing its name the following year to the Women’s Co-operative Guild), with a membership of 50.²⁰ In the first instance its aim was relatively modest—to foster Co-operative principles among women—and sufficient male associates were convinced of the value of the project to guarantee its success. For progressives like Samuel Bamford, the editor of Co-operative News, who from 1883 included a regular ‘Women’s Pages’ in the paper, greater opportunities for women was an inherently good thing. More pragmatically, for those whose first concern was trade, there was the possibility that the women might recruit more customers, and in 1886 the Co-operative Union awarded a grant of £10, in recognition of the Guild’s educational and propaganda value to the movement.

Despite an encouraging start, the Guild remained a delicate plant in the 1880s, uncertain about its purpose, and the extent and propriety of its claims on the Co-operative movement. Signs of organizational vigour began only with the arrival of a leader who had the vision and the confidence to exploit what the movement had to offer. ‘Members have not yet half realised’, Margaret Llewelyn Davies wrote in the 1892 Report:

all they may get and give by means of the Guild. Self governed, free from outside patronage, with money at its back, it ought to become a very powerful instrument for bringing all kinds of help to women in their different capacities, and for forwarding the cause of labour generally. There is a good deal yet in the lives of women that is not exactly rose-coloured, and changes are not very likely to occur without determined action on the part of women themselves.²¹

Davies’ first priority as General Secretary was to place the Guild on a sound organizational and financial basis. Until 1890 it consisted only of a Central Committee and free-standing branches. Consequently, the centre was overloaded, there was no stimulus to growth, branches were isolated and often collapsed, while lack of funding was a major constraint on new initiatives. In the early 1890s Davies and her assistant Lilian Harris tackled these problems through a major restructuring. The constitution which they devised, modelled on that of the CU, established the Guild as a federal organization to which branches affiliated on the conditions that members belonged to a Co-operative Society and subscribed to the Guild Central Fund. Following the CU model of sections and districts, and maximizing the points of contact between the Guild and the wider movement, branches were clustered into districts, and districts into sections, each tier with its own elected officers, and federated, by means of subscription, to the national office which carried out educational and propaganda work. This structure facilitated steady growth, efficient administration, and an effective exchange of ideas and information. In 1892 a national WCG Festival was held, and from 1893 an annual delegate Congress, to agree policy which was then implemented by an elected Central Committee (CC), with the General Secretary and office staff undertaking routine tasks.

Painstaking work, and the employment of a full-time paid organizer, soon yielded results. Between 1890 and 1894, membership went up from 1,640 to 7, 511, and branches from 54 to 170. But this growth was not without cost. In the same period expenditure jumped from £19 to £245,²² exposing the central difficulty in building an organization of mainly unwaged housewives. As the Annual Report noted, ‘the addition to our income from new branches can never equal the increasing outlay necessary upon the growth of the whole work of the guild.’²³

To make up the shortfall, forceful arguments were mobilized to unlock funds from the wider movement. The Guild was working to the ‘aims and policies of the Co-operative Union’, the 1894 Annual Report pointed out, and was convinced that there were ‘unutilised forces’ which they could put at the disposal of the Union ‘but for lack of funds’. Was it fair that while the Guild struggled with debts, many Societies’ education budgets were underspent? Surely, it was ‘a little hard that women should not only give their services, but should have to pay for the privilege of working by subscribing to our funds, while men have money thrust upon them.’²⁴ In May, the CU Central Board received a Guild deputation on finances. When asked to indicate the amount required, Davies replied that ‘they did not want to make an undue claim upon Union, but last year the Board was good enough to vote the sum of £50. This year she hoped the Board might see its way to double that amount. [Laughter]’.²⁵ The grant was duly increased to £100, and through subsequent increments took account of expanding membership, more than doubling the income from subscriptions, and making possible national initiatives that would otherwise have been out of the question.

Locally, too, there were valuable resources to be tapped. Ideally, but subject to negotiation, a Guild branch could expect from the Society an annual grant, free use of a meeting room, some or all of the cost of printing programmes, and assistance with sectional and district conferences.²⁶ Where such facilities were not forthcoming Guild officers were ready with their objections. ‘I should very much like to know’, wrote Mrs Carr, the Northern Sectional Secretary, in 1896:

out of the 11,357 members there, how many are women; or, if any: and if there are not among them any women members, to ask the men this question, “Who makes the dividend—is it the men?” I am inclined to think the £94 spent for educational purposes is not a fair proportion of the £84, 884 net profits made during the year. Do not the women deserve a small share of this?²⁷

Persistent reminders of the movement’s reliance upon its female membership steadily unlocked the funding necessary for sturdy growth. By 1897 the Guild had 223 branches, 10,555 members, an extremely busy head office,²⁸ and was well on the way to becoming a standard feature wherever the movement was active. As Davies shrewdly put it in 1904: ‘It has been the aim of the Guild, to arouse women to a sense of the basket power which they specially possessed.’²⁹ While the Guild was never lavishly resourced, women’s role as consumers had none the less been used effectively to acquire the means by which to build an organization whose basic constituency was housewives without money of their own.

As well as gaining material security from the trading movement, the WCG also benefited significantly from the highly developed democratic and broad church culture of Co-operation. The movement’s organic unity was defined by membership of the trading societies, by a commitment to democratic procedures, and by a common concern with the spread of ‘Co-operation’, which itself conveyed a range of meanings from ethical retailing through to Owenite socialism. As an auxiliary body of what was arguably the mo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Information about the WCG
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Beginnings
• Chapter Two: Vision
• Chapter Three: Identity
• Chapter Four: Campaigns
• Chapter Five: Conflict
• Chapter Six: Labour
• Chapter Seven: Rules
• Chapter Eight: Compromises
• Chapter Nine: Endings
• Bibliography