Dreamers of a New Day (27 page)

Co-operation provided a way of creating socialized services to supplement women’s domestic activity. Replacing the back-breaking,
time-consuming family wash day was an obvious starting point: Glasgow set up a co-operative steam laundry in the late 1890s, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild helped to provide the impetus for others.
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In the US, although there was no national organization comparable to the Women’s Co-operative Guild, similar examples of domestic cooperative services were to be found. In her history of American housework,
Never Done
, Susan Strasser describes how in the early 1900s women hitched housework to ‘HUSBAND-POWER’:

Some Midwestern dairy co-operatives utilized the water supplies and steam plants already operating in the creameries to do laundry for the co-operating families. At the Milltown Cooperative Creamery Company in Wisconsin, fifty families’ loads of clothes could be washed in forty-five minutes, dried, and ironed with mangles.
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Ideas crossed back and forth across the Atlantic. Ethel Puffer Howes, the American champion of co-operative laundries, kitchens, bakeries and cafés, along with self-help forms of co-operative housekeeping, was influenced by the British Fabians and co-operators – who had in turn been inspired by mid-nineteenth-century US co-operative housekeeping. Howes, herself a working mother, was able to reach a wide audience by writing in the
Woman’s Home Companion
about examples of Co-operative Home Services. Her articles publicizing each new experiment demonstrated that alternatives were possible, and her sustained efforts shaped co-operative housekeeping as a cohesive project.
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Co-operative forms of domestic activity were also initiated through the labour movement as needs arose among women activists. Seattle women co-operators expanded pragmatically; in 1915 they established a mutual laundry, not only to do their washing but to provide secure employment for union militants. Labour activist Lola Lunn established a Women’s Co-operative Guild in Seattle on the British model in 1919, and the following year co-operative women also created a Women’s Exchange which sold or gave away goods donated by members.
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Combining charity with mutual aid, exchanges had been common systems of direct redistribution and recycling among American women throughout the nineteenth century. By the early 1890s some had developed beyond the ‘bring-and-buy’ stage to act as co-operative retail outlets. One commentator, Alice Rhine, described how in 1891
low-paid graduates from New York art colleges could take their work to such exchanges and be guaranteed a fair price, instead of earning a pittance from department stores. Kathleen Waters Sander characterizes the exchanges as providing a ‘humanistic counter-movement to the industrial workplace’.
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There were, however, drawbacks to these co-operative alternatives, for they required effort and time to run and did not always reduce housewives’ labour. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who had acquired a horror of co-operative housekeeping from communal living as a child, preferred private entrepreneurship and commercial services. But, since workers were unlikely to be able to afford these, labour movement women favoured transposing aspects of private domestic activity into social consumption by providing municipally funded services. In the early 1900s the
Clarion
journalist, Julia Dawson, explained in her
Pass On
pamphlet that under socialism ‘Experts will come into our homes to do the cleaning as regularly as we get drains flushed by the local authorities now and a good deal oftener.’
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A similar utopia of housework as a public service resurfaced in a 1923 pamphlet by the Labour MP Herbert Morrison,
Better Times for the Housewife: Labour’s Policy for the Homemaker
. This promised a socialist future in which a man or woman employed by the local authority would arrive at one’s home on a motorbike with a sidecar full of utensils such as municipal vacuum cleaners and washing machines and, at a low cost, help with the housework. Morrison also envisaged working-class and lower-middle-class housewives sending a postcard overnight to their local council, to order meals which would be freshly cooked and delivered the next day.
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While private housework would prove difficult to transfer into social consumption, better progress was made with housing. Social housing schemes were devised by philanthropists, co-operators and the state. Because these required a large capital outlay, they stimulated new kinds of administrative and financial structures. In Britain, when the Ruskinian Octavia Hill persuaded the rich to invest in philanthropic housing ventures she formulated a system of housing management that would be later adopted in council housing. In the US, philanthropic housing associations were established on similar lines to Hill’s, and rich women also created model communities. Mary Beard was able to report in 1915 how improved tenements had been built with the help of Mrs W. K. Vanderbilt in New York, while in Los Angeles club women had financed the construction of model cottages with gardens which
they hoped would replace the shacks of Mexican immigrant workers.
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In Britain, several kinds of co-operative finance were devised to build housing. Co-partnership schemes in model villages, garden cities and suburbs enabled members to buy a share, sometimes paying in instalments, and end up as joint owners.
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Another option was for the co-operative movement itself to build houses, using co-operative sources of finance. When in 1908 Oldham council timorously proposed twelve council houses, but failed to act, the resolute Liberal suffragist Sarah Lees formed a co-operative building society among the better-paid mill workers. Within six years they had built a garden suburb of 150 three-bedroom houses, each with a bathroom, offered at rents which were affordable to working-class families.
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Co-operative capital and labour power were regarded as a means of enabling a co-operative alternative to grow within capitalism.

Liberal and Labour women elected as councillors also agitated for women’s basic housing needs, including those of the very poor. The feminist Margaret Ashton campaigned in Manchester for homeless women to be housed, a cause also taken up by Sarah Lees’s friend Mary Higgs, who went on the tramp herself to highlight the lack of homes, and in 1910 wrote
Where Shall She Live?
in an effort to secure more women’s ‘lodging-homes’.
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The real impetus for state housing provision came during World War One. Before the war, councils had been given discretionary powers to build, but it was the need to relocate war-workers which provided the incentive for government intervention. The Ministry of Munitions employed Raymond Unwin, who brought his garden city ideas into the design of one of the ministry’s projects – a township at Gretna for munitions workers.
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Hence ‘council housing’ developed as a beleaguered utopia out of the exigencies of the war effort, and the government’s apprehensions about industrial and community-based unrest.

In the United States, some innovative financial counter-institutions were developed by African Americans. Largely outside the orbit of white reformers and labour organizers, in a period when racial hostility and prejudice was intensifying, black Americans devised mutual self-help projects to accumulate capital. They used the funds collected to alleviate social needs and create employment. Because access to credit for small loans was so important for poor women, African-American women created myriad small savings societies to help them through hard times, as well as investing in the larger mutual benefit societies which had grown up within black communities. In Atlanta in 1903, the Working Women’s Society sidelined the moneylenders by providing members with interest-free loans, covering their costs by charging weekly dues.
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Maggie Lena Walker, a former washerwoman from Richmond, Virginia, proved especially inventive. Her aim was to withdraw black spending from white-owned businesses, a species of resistance she called killing ‘the lion’ by not ‘feeding it’.
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Instead Walker advocated black economic and social alternatives. When she became secretary of a friendly society, the Independent Order of Saint Luke, in 1899, the Order was in decline. Her first step was to gather around her a group of women she could trust, to form a Penny Savings Bank in 1903. Many of the depositors were poor women, but their pennies grew into the large, black-owned Consolidated Bank and Trust Company.

Sarah Lees (Oldham Local Studies and Archive Centre)

Oldham garden suburb (Oldham Local Studies and Archive Centre)

Maggie Lena Walker believed in convincing people about alternative approaches to economic life through lived experience; her motto was ‘First by practice and then by precept.’
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She was a social innovator who linked needs, ideas and money-making projects. In 1898 she founded a female insurance company, and in 1905 a department store to create employment for women and provide good-quality products. The Order of Saint Luke also included a youth section, offered an educational loan fund for young people, and ran a weekly newspaper. Walker encouraged a campaigning approach, advocating both education and the suffrage; what is more, her Order took a strong stand against segregation and lynching, initiating a boycott of streetcars long before the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus in America, black purchasing power was closely linked to black resistance; it could be mobilized to foster alternative kinds of products, shops or financial services and to boycott white businesses.

The tactic of the boycott had deep roots in America’s history, from the War of Independence through into the anti-slavery movement, and it was used by many campaigns and movements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It featured, for instance, in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s crusade against drink in the 1870s and 80s. The WCTU’s approach combined the external pressure of the boycott with exhortations directed towards drinkers to effect an inward change in consciousness, in order to change their way of life.

Some middle-class social reformers likewise decided that an inner sense of moral responsibility should guide their own consumption patterns. Helen Campbell’s work among poor women in the 1880s made her feel that she ought to pare back her own requirements. ‘How can I bring more simplicity, less conventionality, more truth and right living into home and every relation of life?’
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During the mid-1880s, this ethical anxiety materialized into external action when a group of middle-class and working-class women reformers in the New York Working Women’s Society, pessimistic about the possibilities of forming effective unions in the clothing factories employing low-paid women, proposed a consumer boycott to improve working conditions. The Working Women’s Society, which also campaigned for women factory inspectors, put great faith in personal contact, believing that if women consumers met those who made their garments they would be willing to pay a fair price. Expressing a Ruskinian vision of the economy as an interconnected organism, they declared: