Rent and its Discontents

A Century of Housing Struggle

Neil Gray

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786605764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, along with similar campaigns across the UK, catalysed rent restrictions and eventually public housing as a right, with a legacy of progressive improvement in UK housing through the central decades of the 20 th century. With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago. Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, this book asks what housing campaigners can learn today from a proven organisational victory for the working class. A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.

Part I

HISTORY AGAINST THE GRAIN

Chapter 1

‘A Wondrous Spectacle’

Protest, Class and Femininity in the 1915 Rent Strikes

Pam Currie

The 1915 rent strikes were a central event in a turbulent period in Glasgow’s history. This period saw Edwardian suffrage, militancy and emergent trade unionism, subsequently developing into ‘Red Clydeside’—a city in revolt against the suffering of World War One and against bosses, landlords and the state. Such imagery has a powerful resonance to this day in the labour movement, no more so than in the stories of the rent strikes and of ‘Mrs Barbour’s army’ of working-class women and children who stood up to the greed of the landlords, defied the factors and forced the government to implement rent controls. The nature and extent of women’s activism during this period of rent strikes, suffrage, industrial organizing and the Women’s Peace Crusade (WPC) has been documented in a number of accounts (Melling 1983; Liddington 1989), but there has been less exploration of the overlaps and interconnections between these movements or indeed of the period after the war (though see Hughes and Wright, this volume).

Events such as the rent strikes, which drew significant numbers of working-class women into political activism, are often presented as a temporary outburst of anger over distinct and localized issues (McLean 1983; Castells 1983), in contrast to men’s coherent, sustained organization through rank-and-file trade unionism in Glasgow’s engineering industries. Smyth (1992, 187) acknowledges the overlap in women’s wartime campaigns but argues that ‘a direct line of continuity between the prewar militant suffrage campaign and the militancy of the rent strikes . . . cannot be substantiated’, and that the connection is limited to just one woman, the formidable Helen Crawfurd, Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) member and future Communist Party stalwart. In this chapter, I seek to challenge this assertion, arguing that the discourses, imagery and methods of the rent strikes allow us to see them not as an isolated outburst but as part of a wider continuum of women’s political activism and radical social change in this period. The discourses and imagery created by and about the women involved are of particular interest, ‘staking a claim’ to identities through simple physical presence, acts of ‘militancy’ and new forms of gendered discourse (Stainton Rogers 2003).

In placing the rent strikes within a continuum of women’s activism from approximately 1906 to 1918, and indeed with relevance beyond this to the modern day, it is important to acknowledge that ‘class’ and ‘gender’ were far from straightforward concepts. As Hannam and Hunt (2002) argue, the positions adopted by women activists questioned the use of sex and class as unproblematic, unified and opposed categories. From the start, for many Glasgow activists, issues such as rent controls were not just an end in themselves but also a critical component of the radical social change they sought—a struggle in which class and gender clearly intersected. This interaction was clear in the socialist movement in Glasgow, broadly divided between the ‘ethical’ Christian socialism of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the smaller, more explicitly Marxist groups such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). In the prewar period, this struggle ‘with and against men at one and the same time’ was expressed in activist meetings in the form of the ‘Woman Question’, the nature of women’s oppression in a class-based society (Smyth 2000, 156). This was extensively discussed in the ILP, which appears to have had some success in orienting towards women, particularly in the cooperative movement (Gordon 1991). Many of the leaders of the rent strikes were ILP members, and the ILP enjoyed particularly close relations to the WSPU in the prewar years, with WSPU activists regularly contributing to the ILP newspaper Forward (King 1978).

Suffrage in Glasgow: Setting the Scene for Wartime Activity

What was the nature of the suffrage campaign in Glasgow in the prewar years and to what extent did it shape women’s activity in the rent strikes? Was it inherently middle class or did activists seek to engage broader support in working-class districts? Did the demand for the vote disappear in wartime activism, subsumed into more immediate struggles around housing and consumption, or can a meaningful connection be drawn between the two? The role of the ILP is critical here. The ILP enjoyed close links with the WSPU from the latter’s establishment on Clydeside in 1906 (Leneman 1991), and this link helps to frame the nature of the WSPU in Glasgow and subsequent influences during the rent strikes. Young (1985, 104) claims that the suffrage movement was inherently middle class, relying on high-profile ‘militancy’ in the form of window-smashing and attacks on property and the public outrage that these generated. But such tactics came relatively late to Glasgow (Leneman 1991), and in the meantime, organizations such as the Women’s Freedom League (formed in Glasgow in 1907) developed wider working-class support for suffrage and a more inclusive—yet still radical—campaign.

The militancy of the WSPU was significant not only in its impact upon society but also in transforming the lives of individual women. Joannou and Purvis (1998, 10) claim that the movement represented a ‘deliberate and self-conscious attempt to break the traditional patriarchal mould of British politics and to discover new, radical and often collective ways of working’, and in Glasgow this, together with the principle of women-organized and -led campaigns, can be seen to have laid out both a conceptual and a practical framework for the rent strikes. A report of the Women’s Labour League conference held in the city early in 1914 argued that the movement had generated an understanding that women, ‘like the men . . . must think and work collectively’ (Labour Women, February 1914). Such sentiments prepared the ground for a wave of wartime activism, most notably the rent strikes. Echoing many of the contradictions of suffrage, they sought to ‘legitimize’ militancy—including physical resistance to the landlords and factors—through strategic appeals to natural justice and women’s ‘instinct’ to protect her family and home. This militancy found expression for many working-class women on the housing question, an issue on which women’s participation was not only sanctioned but also actively encouraged by a labour movement at times uneasy with suffrage (Forward, 26 June 1914). Housing was perceived to have the potential to unite the collective interests of (male) organized labour, acting as a material base from which working-class women, under the direction of male activists, might engage in collective action on a mass scale (Forward, 18 January 1915).

Rent Strikes and ‘Militancy’

Women activists during this period negotiated the complexities of class and gender not only in theoretical and political discourse but also in their activism and lived experiences. Their ‘presencing practices’ alternately used and challenged gendered expectations and boundaries, ranging from meticulously planned ‘militancy’ to carefully choreographed ‘spectacles’ of protest in suffrage, imitated to varying degrees in subsequent movements. Although the rent strikes present a different context to the prewar suffrage campaign, the actions of the women in building political and physical resistance to the factors demonstrates a conscious strategy of direct action and a vehement resistance, which exceeded, at least on occasion, that sanctioned by suffrage leaders (Govan Press, 29 October 1915; Forward, 30 October 1915; Crawfurd, n.d., 145). While this challenged expectations of ‘respectable’ working-class women, it was situated in discourses of protection of the home and family, creating a legitimacy which lessened the perceived breach of gendered social norms (Robertson 1997).

Across all of the movements, from suffrage to the rent strikes and wartime activity, women struggled to create political identities within competing discourses of gender ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ and of ‘separate spheres’ (women’s perceived role within society), specifically her domestic role within the family. Activists alternately drew upon this role to engage women as ‘reformers’ and struggled against its limitations, debating whether women’s capacities were a natural given, which created inherent conservatism, or whether women’s consciousness was constructed and constrained by society.

Idealized assumptions around women’s ‘innate values’ and of ‘woman-as-mother’ informed not only the suffrage movement—and particularly what women would do with the vote once enfranchised—but also recurred in the rent strikes and beyond. The demand for sex equality appeared to many to be integral to the vision of the socialist commonweal (Forward, January 12 1907), but it was tempered by a vision in which ‘orderly and virtuous’ homes were to be built upon rigid gender roles and women’s domestic labour (Wells 1907). This approach was not entirely shared by women on the Left. Writing in Forward in 1912, one correspondent sought to downplay the argument of biological ‘difference’ in favour of the commonalities of class. Presenting the interests of women and men as those of fundamental ‘sameness’, she acknowledged differences of experience, arguing that enfranchisement would turn attention to ‘women’s priorities’. Difference here, therefore, is interpreted as a positive contribution to the movement and to a future society, rather than an inevitable inequality.

In considering these contradictory discourses of gender and class, there are useful contributions from later feminist writing on the politics of reproduction. Federici (1975) reframes women’s unpaid domestic labour as a ‘pillar’ of capitalism, central to the reproduction of male labour. In the context of the rent strikes, the home was central both to the reproduction of labour for the shipyards and wartime industries but also to the war effort, with frequent references to the sacrifices of soldier’s wives and children (Forward, 4 December 1915). Dalla Costa and James (1972) argue that domestic responsibility has been made a general material fact of women’s role, regardless of her class, but that it is the role specifically of the working class housewife, which is central both to capitalist production and to the wider position of women in society. All women are ‘housewives’––in that all women share the burden of domestic responsibility and the position of all women in society is shaped by this––and it is the isolation of women in unpaid domestic labour which forms the key element of their exploitation and the ‘myth of female incapacity’ that must be challenged collectively in the very material location in which this exploitation occurs (Dalla Costa and James 1972, 12).

For the rent strikers, concepts of class had a complex and potentially contradictory interaction with those of gender and ‘womanliness’. Although reforms promised women’s political equality and power, they were imbued also with ideas of morality and ‘respectability’. Crawfurd disparaged middle-class ‘charitable ladies’ but saw the suffrage movement as an attempt to ‘raise the moral, material and spiritual standards of the country’ (Crawfurd, n.d., 70). A similar, quasi-religious discourse of ‘decency’ and ‘crusades’ is found in different forms in the housing and peace movements; in particular, it can be seen in concerns over the welfare of military dependents, left vulnerable by the absence of their wage earners. Describing the appalling condition of working-class tenements, Crawfurd (n.d., 141) wrote that many women would ‘suffer ill health and die prematurely, or become sluts and drunken, broken-down derelicts, a plague to their families’. Failure in the domestic sphere, the disintegration of home and family in the face of poverty, was thus the worst failure imaginable—failure as a ‘mother’ and as a woman.

Activists such as Crawfurd fought for the emancipation of women, but they did so in a context which placed responsibility for the domestic sphere firmly on the wife and mother. The overcrowding and poor quality of the housing stock in the communities where the rent strikes took hold were a constant source of tension, and women faced ‘a constant round of cooking, cleaning and washing’ to ward off dirt and disease, a routine reinforced by local sanitary inspectors who policed tenements for illicit overcrowding or neglect of shared facilities (Clark and Carnegie 2003, 14; Damer 2000b). The rent strikes provided a focus for resistance which was immediate and accessible. As Dalla Costa and James (1972, 20) argue, ‘struggle demands time away from housework, and at the same time it offers an alternative identity to the woman who before found it only at the level of the domestic ghetto.’ The forced proximity of the tenements reinforced opportunities for collective action, facilitating contact between women and overcoming the isolation of the housewife to create a collective identity in struggle (12). Ross (1983) argues that the impetus for collective action came also from a vested interest in defending the reputation of their street and district, providing mutual aid and ‘survival networks’ at a time of crisis.

Robertson (1997) discusses the discourse of women’s collective organizing in the rent strikes in comparison to the Highland Clearances, an era which had a lasting impact on working-class consciousness and attitudes to landlords. Disputing the ‘dichotomy’ of gendered protest in the Highlands, with women’s resistance as a question of ‘moral economy’ and men’s protests as emergent class consciousness, he argues that women acted with the support of their menfolk, absent at sea or seeking work, an imagery that resonates strongly with the 1915 rent strikes. With or without the support of their menfolk, women’s wartime protests were perceived within class and gender norms, which contributed to the perceived ‘legitimacy’ of women’s activism and the actions available to women in pursuit of their cause (Forward, 16 December 1911). The decision to withhold rent was presented by activists such as Sylvia Pan...