Karen Hunt

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Womens Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.

Socialist Women Britain, 1880s to 1920s

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. Socialist Women: On the margins of history 2. Biographies and Political Journeys 3. Constructing the Woman question 4. Mixed sex-politics 5. Socialist Women and a politics of consumption 7. Socialist Women and Internationalism Conclusion

The Politics of Food and Women's Neighborhood Activism in First World War Britain

In 1917 and 1918 violent cost-of-living protests, largely peopled by poor urban housewives, erupted across the world. Although Britain did not experience such dramatic events, a womens politics of food can be found in local neighborhoods that touched the lives of unorganized housewives on the wartime home front. The new local committees created to defend consumer interests in the face of food shortages proved to be permeable to some women, particularly those who already had some experience with womens politics. However, limits were placed on this participation and on the self-organization of housewives by the ambiguous understanding of who constituted a consumer and thus who could speak for the ordinary housewife as she battled the food queues. By exploring the womens politics of food at a local level, it is argued that working-class womens participation in Food Vigilance Committees or in local boycotts may have had longer lasting effects in Britain than the more dramatic cost-of-living actions elsewhere.

Towards a Gendered and Raced Socialist Internationalism: Dora Montefiore Encounters South Africa (1912–14)

So observed one transnational ‘socialistic agitator’ to a meeting at the town hall in Pretoria in June 1912. The speaker was remembered, by a not entirely sympathetic commentator, as a ‘rather masculine middle-aged lady’ with ‘a most aggressive personality’, who was ‘a very forceful platform speaker’ (Boydell n.d.(1947?)). To readers of the South African socialist weekly, Voice of Labour, this English woman was recommended in rather different terms: ‘Wherever she had been – and that meant everywhere – she had been held in high esteem, and done yeoman service in the cause . . . The fight was to her the very breath of life; the cause worth living for, yea, worth dying for’ (VoL 8.3.1912). To a reception held in her honour, this same speaker introduced herself with a similar transnationalist emphasis: ‘She had been used to travel but as an International Socialist she was never homeless. Wherever she had gone she had met with the same kind welcome and found home and fatherland wherever there was work to be done for Socialism’ (VoL 8.3.1912). It is this particular travelling International Socialist and her encounter with pre-First World War South Africa who constitutes the focus of this article. Her experience, and more importantly her narration of it to a range of different audiences, provides the means to explore transnationalism in practice and to tease out the complex nature of the radical diaspora to be found within and beyond the British Empire in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Towards an Archaeology of Interwar Women’s Politics: The Local and the Everyday

In 1924 the suffragist Helena Swanwick observed: It is obvious to anyone who has lived an active political life for the past twenty years that politics are being profoundly modified in precisely the way the Suffragists foresaw. Not that there would be a woman’s party; not that there would be any marked opposition between men and women politicians, but that, insensibly, the actual and potential presence of women in politics affects the thoughts of men. ... They are becoming sensitive to women and women’s side of life work.1 This chapter considers Swanwick’s optimistic assessment of the aftermath of suffrage not in the more familiar national arena but in the place where the new woman citizen went about her everyday life: her local neighbourhood. As Swanwick suggests, once women had achieved enfranchisement in 1918 contemporaries expected that politics would be different.2 Winning the principle that sex no longer disqualified women from formal political citizenship was bound to change the nature and practice of politics, but it was not entirely clear what the shape of that politics would be.