Dreamers of a New Day (28 page)

Maggie Lena Walker (Courtesy National Parks Service,
Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site)

It is the
democratic demand
for cheapness that keeps alive this sad condition of things. It is
our
needs and our desires that regulate a large part of production. In our eagerness to make our little money go far, are we not careless about the claims of those who make for us, or stand behind the counter which we face? When a neatly made garment is offered to us as a ‘cheap’, do we stop to ask at whose expense is the cheapness?
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The Working Women’s Society laid the basis for the New York City Consumers’ League, which was formed in 1891. Consumers were encouraged not only to boycott, but to shop ethically. In 1891 the New York League drew up a ‘White List’ of department stores which met fair standards on wages, hours, physical conditions, management–employee relations and child labour. Middle-class concern about the conditions in which goods were produced united altruism with self-interest. The growing awareness of hygiene and sanitation, and a fear of the spread of infectious diseases, contributed to support for the reform of the low-paid, labour-intensive ‘sweated trades’; Josephine Shaw Lowell, the first president of the New York Consumers’ League, was also active at a national level on the US Sanitary Commission. The Consumers’ Leagues, which began to spread in many cities and towns in the US during the 1890s, varied in their political emphases and in the alliances they made locally. While some League members were moved by ethical feelings of responsibility towards the weak, and others by concerns about
public hygiene, those with a more radical perspective pushed for an alliance between consumers and producers. Florence Kelley argued that the Leagues should oppose sweated labour by adopting the idea of a ‘trade union label’ to prove that unionized labour had been used. She also advocated working alongside the unions. In 1899 Kelley became secretary of the National Consumers’ League, which under her leadership evolved into a significant lobby for the state regulation of consumption and production.
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Organization around ethical consumption provided a context in which cross-class alliances could operate. When in 1910 the New York Consumers’ League set up its own Label Shop on West 28th Street, selling only ethically-produced goods, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ journal – the
Ladies’ Garment Worker
– urged working men and women to support the venture. ‘Here you will find all kinds of waists and dresses bearing the union label, and the woman wearing a waist with a union label can feel well dressed in a new and larger sense than that term usually implies.’
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By 1913, however, the journal was noting that consumer power was hitting some unforeseen cultural obstacles; the wives of trade unionists were not automatically committed to trade union goods, while the middle class tended to associate the trade union label with less expensive goods.
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Some working-class communities did adopt consumer pressure as an ancillary to trade union action. Members of the Women’s Card and Label League in Seattle pledged themselves to buy from stores with the union label. In 1920, when the Seattle Central Labor Council decided to support the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by declaring a boycott of the Bon Marché department store for using non-union labour, the Women’s Card and Label League along with the local Women’s Trade Union League, the Consumers’ League and several other women’s groups, resolutely shopped elsewhere.
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Although the boycott was unsuccessful, the Seattle trade union and co-operative movement acquired a complex understanding of the political economy of consumption. Purchasing power and the boycott were very much part of the culture of American protest and were adopted by black communities, moral and social reformers, and trade unions to affect how things were made and distributed.

In Britain no comparable organization to the National Consumers’ League emerged, though spasmodic attempts were made to link producers and consumers. When in 1886 Clementina Black became secretary
of the forerunner to the Women’s Trade Union League, the Women’s Protective and Provident League, she had been so shocked by the bad pay and conditions of women workers that she set up a Consumers’ League to complement their action as producers. However, Black quickly turned to the local authorities for backing. In 1890, as a representative of the Women’s Trade Union League, she persuaded the Progressives on the London County Council to include women clothing workers within the fair wages ruling that the Council already imposed on its suppliers. Leaving nothing to chance, she proceeded to tell the Council how a ‘fair’ rate should be determined – ‘a rate at which the women employed can live in health and reasonable comfort’.
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A significant precedent had been set: the local state was being drawn into determining what the pay of workers should be through contract compliance. Though difficult to apply in practice without any system of monitoring or strong trade union organization, in challenging the unrestricted right to profit from cheap labour Black’s hybrid of ethical consumption and public buying power gave institutional legitimation to the idea that a ‘living wage’ was an entitlement.

In the 1900s Black was active in the cross-class grouping which researched and lobbied on behalf of women workers, the Women’s Industrial Council, as well as in the Anti-Sweating Campaign which sought to regulate homework and the low-paid trades. Both groupings advocated ethical consumption as a means of complementing legislation. Ethical choice was also promoted by the labour movement through trade union labels and the Co-operative Movements’ shops. ‘By dealing at our Co-operative Stores, you strike at the great evil of sweating’, claimed an advertisement in the
Syndicalist
in 1913.
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Nevertheless, in her book
The Consumer in Revolt
(c. 1912), the socialist feminist Teresa Billington-Greig argued that the links between labour and consumers needed to be strengthened. She regretted that the attempt to create a Consumers’ League on the American model had been ‘short-lived’, and expressed admiration for the American Consumer Leagues.
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By 1912 rising prices were making consumption a pressing issue, and the high cost of living was provoking strikes among many workers who had been outside the organized trade union movement. While one section of the labour movement was preoccupied with parliament, an extra-parliamentary left completely rejected gradual reform through the state. With talk of ‘direct action’ in the air among networks of dissidents and insurgents, workplace militancy extended into proposals for direct
action in the community. Margaretta Hicks started to urge direct action around prices within the Marxist British Socialist Party. Identifying with the approach of the labour wing of US consumer organizing, Hicks saw consumption as integrally linked to production, and regarded consumer pressure as a form of gendered working-class resistance: ‘Women have power as consumers. They are pre-eminently
the
purchasers. A strike for better terms is of no utility if the price of bacon and cheese, milk, coal and rent goes up.’ Citing a case in the new working-class London suburb of Edmonton, Hicks noted how women had ‘struck against the rise in the price of milk, and used condensed until it came down’.
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Hicks was excited by the immediate potential for action, stating that resistance over prices could develop into organization to stop the adulteration of food. She proposed ‘co-operative clubs’ or a ‘trade union of housewives’ to help women to understand the need to link up with workers to challenge capitalism. In 1914 she described working women organizing around consumption as ‘the fellow-half to the trade union movement’, adding, ‘Each half must support the other to obtain the necessities of life.’
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In contrast, Teresa Billington-Greig rejected the expectation that consumption was women’s particular concern, along with the dichotomies defining the male as worker and the female as consumer. Billington-Greig pointed out that male producers also bought goods, while women worked not only in paid employment but by administering, cleaning, preparing and cooking food in the home. She maintained moreover that it was gender bias to equate ‘the status of women’ with ‘the status of wives’. What about the ‘femmes soles’ [
sic
] who supported themselves?
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For Billington-Greig, consumption had to be seen as a significant issue for both sexes.

Both perspectives can be corroborated in the differing forms of consumer action which occurred in practice. In the early years of the twentieth century, consumption would become at once a key arena for a gendered form of class resistance, and an issue which could activate working-class men alongside women. Partly in response to inflation, but also in relation to mass strike action and ideas of economic and social justice, food and rent protests erupted in both North America and Britain. In New York, women’s role as consumers was made dramatically visible by a series of collective protests against high prices and rents. Such revolts were characterized by a complicated mix of spontaneous direct action and organization. In 1902, Jewish immigrant women in New York broke into butchers’ shops and fought with the police after
a rise in kosher meat prices. They also organized a boycott, and set up co-operative stores along with the Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association. In 1910 Jewish women in South Providence picketed shops to persuade people not to buy meat until prices fell, and in 1914 Italian immigrant women were in revolt over high prices.

Women’s key role as purchasers was a decisive factor in the family economy. What they could buy affected the whole family’s standard of living. Consumption was a legitimate sphere of female action, and consequently women saw themselves as taking action on behalf of their families. However, the New York food protests also coincided with militant action in the clothing industry; ideas spilled over from the workplace into the home. As the wife of a cloakmaker, Mrs Levy, declared: ‘Now, if
we women
make a strike, then it will be a strike.’
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Collective action around consumption could thus be seen as a kind of ‘women’s strike’, which combined what women were assumed to do with new ideas of what women might do.

The pre-war politicization of daily life continued during World War One, when rapid inflation provided the stimulus for protests against both food prices and rents. Kosher meat riots broke out in 1917 on the Lower East Side and spread to other areas of New York as well as to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, St Louis and Cleveland. The anarchist Marie Ganz has left a graphic account of the 1917 food rebellion, in which a spontaneous female-led type of direct action converged with an awareness of class exploitation: ‘At the height of the conflict Mrs Teibel Shimberg, while beating a peddler’s head with her shopping bag, caught sight of me. “Look, women,” she cried, “here is Marie Ganz. She will show you how to fix the bloodsuckers.”’
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When the socialists ‘rushed out’ of the Forward Building and tried to lecture the women, they were swept aside. Instead, Marie Ganz proposed appointing a committee and going to City Hall to make ‘the city do something to bring us relief and to make possible the purchase of food at prices within our means’.
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But at City Hall the women were confronted by police on horseback and Marie Ganz, who was known as an anarchist, was arrested. Driven to take desperate action because of prices, the immigrant working-class women who participated expressed a sense of an entitlement to a livelihood. They were exercising power previously denied to them in the land of promise.

In Britain during wartime consumers also protested about their standard of living. Though these protests took differing forms from
the upsurges in America, a similar interconnection between spontaneous action, organization and political involvement can be seen. In 1914 the Minute Book of Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of the Suffragettes details various proposals to meet the acute distress caused by rising prices. While some members argued for getting members onto distress committees, a Miss Patterson was in favour of ‘shopping for food at ordinary prices till it is refused, get others to back us and take the food’.
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High rents also provoked rebellion. The ELFS paper the
Woman’s Dreadnought
reported in the same year that women in Leeds were on strike and ‘marching about the streets brandishing pokers, rolling pins and toasting forks, to show that they intend to protect their homes’.
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In 1915 a rent strike in Glasgow encouraged resistance on a wider scale, in which women political activists played a key role. When Glasgow landlords raised rents, the anger of working-class housewives was channelled through the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association (GWHA), an organization which included the middle-class socialist feminist Helen Crawfurd and Agnes Dollan, a former factory worker and telephone operator. Both were active in the anti-war movement and in the Independent Labour Party. Dollan was also in the Women’s Co-operative Guild, the Women’s Labour League and the Clarion Scouts. Mary Barbour, who played an important role in the rent strike, was in both the Housing Association and the Kinning Park Women’s Co-operative Guild; she would go on to be active in the Independent Labour Party and the peace movement.
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Glasgow in this period was an intensely politicized labour city, with its network of radical Sunday Schools, newspapers, Clarion choirs and Clarion theatre. Socialists and feminists of differing persuasions, as well as syndicalists and anarchists, were in contact with one another informally through families and through workplaces. They were, moreover, able to mobilize less politically minded neighbours and workmates when grievances became acutely felt. While women took a leading role in the Glasgow rent strike, Billington-Greig’s point that men were consumers too was borne out by the presence of men on demonstrations. Like the cost of food, housing was not exclusively a women’s issue; it affected the standard of living of the whole family. Indeed the injustice most bitterly resented was the threat of eviction to families with men at the front. The placards photographed in the
Glasgow Herald
stress their patriotism: ‘Partick Tenants Strike. Our Husbands, Sons and Brothers fighting the Prussians of Germany. We are fighting the Prussians of Partick. Only
alternative Municipal Housing’ and ‘Defence of the Realm. Government Must Protect Our Homes from Germans and Landlords or the People will Protect Themselves’.
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After six months the government, fearful of civil unrest, did introduce rent restriction. The war encouraged changed expectations of the state and fostered proposals for social control over consumption.