Dreamers of a New Day (29 page)

A similar connection was evident in crowd action over wartime food distribution in Glasgow. Again, these rebellions linked men and women; the Parkhead shop stewards supported the women’s community-based demonstrations, telling Glasgow Corporation ‘that unless food supplies were so regulated that the workers’ wives would be saved from the queues, the workers were prepared to get out into the street and stand in the queues’.
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The militant work-based shop stewards movement which grew up during the war recognized the significance of the relationship between consumption and production; the issue of food prices was taken up by shop stewards in Barrow, Manchester, the Clyde, Birmingham, Coventry and Sheffield in 1917–18. In Coventry and Sheffield (where the leading shop stewards had close links with women campaigning for suffrage), men left the munition works to help their wives in the shopping queues. This was not simply a response to hardship. The more political shop-steward leaders like J. T. Murphy were deliberately trying to connect workplace struggles to those of tenants and women in local neighbourhoods.
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Wartime working-class collective direct action around prices and rents was accompanied by pressure to reorganize consumption from very different sources. Both the National Food Economy League and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies mobilized around consumption before the state intervened, while the Women’s Institute movement was started in 1915 in response to the food crisis. Its original aim was to supplement the work the Women’s Land Army was doing to replace men in agriculture, by recruiting married countrywomen to grow vegetables, bottle the fruit from their gardens and keep chickens, pigs and rabbits. The Women’s Institutes multiplied rapidly, reaching a membership of 50,000 by 1918; it continued during the post-war years to encourage the production and preservation of home-grown food.
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During the war, voluntary efforts were often combined with involvement in the many government committees busily regulating daily life. The Labour Party women’s leader Marion Phillips sat on the Consumer Council, while Nellie Cressall, a laundry worker and suffragette from
Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London group, served on the Food Control Committee. The Women’s Co-operative Guild similarly worked in the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee, exerting pressure on the government with regard to prices, food distribution and rents.
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Margaretta Hicks listed the extraordinarily diverse consumer network which crystallized during wartime: the Fabian Women’s Group, the London Kitchen Gardens, the Women’s Branch of the Printers, Warehousemen and Cutters Trade Union, the National Aid Corps, the National Food Fund, Childcare Committees, Railway Women’s Guilds, Girls Club Dinners, the Food Reform Association and the East London Federation of the Suffragettes.
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They campaigned for milk depots, cost-price restaurants and school meals, and took up the issue of high prices and food shortages.

The strong wartime pull towards demanding state intervention was accompanied by efforts to ensure women’s participation in decision-making. The ELFS maintained its own community services through the clinic at the Mothers’ Arms, along with a cost-price restaurant, mixing these self-help projects with calls for government control over the food supply to guarantee equal distribution. The vision which inspired this ad hoc combination of tactics was ambitious: the East London Federation also wanted greater democratic control over pricing. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Sylvia Pankhurst proposed that Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Housewives should be formed. Pankhurst was extending the idea of a Soviet or workers’ council into the community.
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The exceptional circumstances of the war, along with the Russian revolution, shifted the parameters of what could be imagined. The American labour journalist Mary Heaton Vorse was caught up in the euphoric re-imagining of the everyday which briefly flared in the British labour movement in 1919:

Talk flowed up and down England. It swept into the homes of working people through the shop committees and the workers’ committees, from the Guild Socialists, to the trade unions, and to the Women’s Co-operative Guild, over to the study classes of the Welsh miners. There was everywhere a ferment, everywhere a demand for a new world. . . . England had been one great workshop. New social forms had grown up. New kinds of service had been evolved. New ways of thinking, new ways even of cooking and of distributing food.
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These transformatory expectations were not to be realized. Nevertheless, during the post-war years working-class labour activists would continue to make the case for transposing individual consumption into alternative forms of social provision. Women mobilized by war brought changed expectations to peacetime. Among them was trade unionist Margaret Bondfield, who enthused in 1919: ‘Already busy women who are fortunate enough to be in reach of a well-managed communal kitchen wonder how they existed without it for so long – for it means not only release from the actual preparation and cooking of food, but also from the growing burden of shopping and the queue-horror.’
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Bondfield believed that the socialization of cooking would not only save time but be better and more efficient. She predicted less waste and more varied diets. Nonetheless, despite trade union support, the national kitchens and restaurants set up during the war were to decline in the 1920s.

Agitation persisted for working-class women to gain access to municipal resources for washing. Hannah Mitchell, a member of the Manchester Baths Committee during the 1920s, was proud of the ‘really up-to-date little wash house’ that she managed to get built in her area:

Housewives could take their washing there and hire a ‘stall’ as it was called, a deep trough with a boiler behind, plenty of hot water, extractors which left the clothes much drier than the wringing machine at home did, with no expenditure of labour on their part, hot air driers, and ironing tables. A family wash could be done in a couple of hours, and the home kept free of wet clothes and steam.
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The municipal wash houses were greatly resented by the commercial laundry owners, especially when machines were installed. From the 1920s they embarked on a prolonged battle against municipal laundries. The gradual demise of the public wash houses was also due to the fact that many working-class women preferred to do washing at home, finding it inconvenient to take washing out while looking after children and cooking.
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Housing remained a priority in post-war Britain. Labour women put considerable pressure on the state to continue the public housing schemes initiated in wartime, while asserting women’s participation in decisionmaking.
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The Women’s Housing Sub-Committee (WHSC) had been set up in 1917 within the Ministry of Reconstruction to examine the design of new public housing projects, partly in response to pressure
from the Women’s Labour League. The WHSC’s surveys of women’s needs revealed a strong desire for houses with a separate parlour and an indoor bathroom. Witnesses before the Tudor Walters Committee explained that

the parlour is needed to enable the older members of the family to hold social intercourse with their friends without interruption from the children; that it is required in cases of sickness in the house . . . that it is needed for the youth of the family in order that they may meet their friends; that it is generally required for home lessons by the children of school age, or for similar work of study, serious reading, or writing, on the part of any member of the family; that it is also needed for occasional visitors whom it may not be convenient to interview in the living room.
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Labour women also came forward with design proposals which would make houses easier to clean. Many of the WHSC’s demands were adroitly sidestepped by the Local Government Board, responsible for building the new municipal housing, but labour women’s organizations continued to battle for their housing proposals and for democratic involvement. In 1919, women in Welsh mining villages lobbied for representation on housing committees as well as for pithead baths.
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In Manchester the local council set up a housing committee of representatives of women’s organizations, including Women’s Sections of the Labour Party, to scrutinize housing plans.
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In 1923 the Women’s Co-operative Guild Congress ‘urged the appointment of a working woman on every housing committee and the minimum requirement of a parlour in addition to a living-room and scullery, three bedrooms, and bathroom with hot and cold water in every home’. They also looked to the state for finance, calling on the government ‘to institute schemes enabling local authorities to obtain money at a low rate of interest and to eliminate profiteering’.
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The heady ideas of soviets and direct action, along with the shop stewards’ networks, disintegrated in the rapidly changing economic and political conditions of the post-war era. Most working-class women activists shifted pragmatically to campaigning through local councils for democratic rights and distributive social justice. In Glasgow, the former rent-strike leader Agnes Dollan became the first female Independent Labour Party councillor in 1919. She continued to campaign for
municipal control over housing, transport and public health. In 1921, when Poplar Council, led by the left-wing George Lansbury, refused to impose a rate increase set by the London County Council – on the grounds that richer areas should help to bear the costs of relief in poorer parts of the city – the rebels were imprisoned. Among them were several working-class former East London suffragettes, including Nellie Cressall, pregnant with her sixth child.
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The struggle for political rights spilled over into ideas of economic and social rights. Over the course of the 1920s, high unemployment forced action around social consumption onto the defensive, though it flared up sporadically in the desperate outbursts of protest against the harsh and humiliating structures of poor relief which accompanied the industrial disputes of the decade, including the 1926 General Strike.

In the US during the 1920s, despite a powerful cultural and political backlash, economic pressures were less harsh. Women were able to achieve reforms at a local level, where the social vision of municipal responsibility survived. In 1926 Bertha K. Landes ran for mayor of Seattle under the banner of ‘Our Public Utilities, Our Industrial Future, Our Growing Children, Our City’s Good Name’, which echoed the politics of pre-war Progressive social reformers.
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Landes, who had been active in the women’s clubs and the Seattle Municipal League, argued that ‘City government looks after the welfare of the people, or should. It concerns itself with sanitation and public health, clean and safe streets, protection of the home, education, care of the poor and the sick.’ These, she added, were ‘all problems which the mothers of the world have had to deal with in their homes and which, when presented on a municipal scale, are quite as much women’s as men’s problems.’
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However, Landes did not confine herself to motherly reformation. She made a point of tackling issues like the street railway system and the city’s water distribution, as well as dance halls, delinquency, temperance and the milk supply. If women’s special concerns were certainly highlighted in her programme, ‘citizenship’ was presented as gender-neutral. She wanted not simply to add women’s issues, but to change how good governance was defined.

Ideas of social and democratic entitlement were also expressed through working-class consumer organizing. In New York rent strikes had become, as Elizabeth Ewen remarks, ‘an ongoing form of consumer resistance’.
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A former trade union militant in the clothing industry, Clara Shavelson (née Lemlich) constructed a continuing organization
out of this rebellious mood. The Tenants’ Union she helped to create was based partly on the traditional Jewish women’s charitable organizations which immigrants had brought over from Eastern Europe, and partly on the recent wartime memory of Community Councils for National Defense formed by the US War Department’s agents. By 1919 the militant Tenants’ Union was 4,000 strong, leading an outraged judge to describe it as a ‘tenants’ soviet’.
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In the United States wages were higher than in Britain during the 1920s, though by the end of the decade inflation was eating away at the relative prosperity of American workers. Annelise Orleck relates how this erosion of real wages stimulated consumer action: ‘former shop workers, wives, sisters, and mothers of union men – began to adapt union strategies like strikes and boycotts to the problems facing them as consumers.’
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From the late 1920s, Communist women played an important role in this new wave of consumer organizing through the Housewives’ Councils. Clara Shavelson was among those arguing forcefully that the economic and political issues behind price rises should be confronted. This more overtly political phase of housewife militancy focused on the power of the meat trusts, and fused direct action with pressure on the government.
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Post-war consumer activists were operating amidst rapid changes in mass consumption. In Britain the Co-operative movement was still a mighty force selling everything from food and clothing to furniture, pianos and domestic appliances. Their advertisements proclaimed that their workers were contented, their goods wholesome and reliable and their customers satisfied. They also vaunted their modernity: one 1920s Co-operative Wholesale Society poster for the ‘O. K. Wringer’ announces ‘Modern Ways For Modern Days. Ringing the Changes by Changing the Wringers. The “O. K” Wringer Is A Real Joy Bringer.’ Co-operation, moreover, was international in its reach, aspiring to global co-operative trading. However, the Conservatives, having noted how Labour’s women-friendly policies had wooed the new female voters, were developing their own politics of consumption. After their defeat in 1924 they began to target working-class women with cheap foodstuffs from the Empire. The connection between the well-being of the family and imperialism was supported by the popular press and, from 1926, through the Conservative Government’s Empire Marketing Board.
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Meanwhile in America, the manufacture and distribution of mass-market products was burgeoning, and home-ownership was being
encouraged by the building societies and insurance companies, which were accruing extensive financial power. Advertisers were employing new psychological techniques to promote the modern descendants of the cooked food shops – convenience and fast foods. From the 1920s, the business of engineering public opinion had itself become a sector of the economy. Commenting on the rise of promotional spin, Stuart Ewen observes that ‘In a society joined by modern networks of mass communication, the
public sphere
itself was becoming the property of corporate gate-keepers’.
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