Integrating the Working Class

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the attempts of the national WVS leadership to reach out to working-class female activists, often against opposition from both the established middle-class social leaders in charge of local groups, and the main organizations of working-class housewives. Despite repeated overtures to the Women's Co-operative Guild and the Labour Party, Lady Reading was unable to break down the long-standing suspicion with which Labour women regarded the middle-class women's movement, and such co-operation as there was tended to be grudging and seen by the Labour women as a temporary wartime expedient. While Conservative women sought to reinforce their claims to social leadership by active participation in the non-partisan women's movement, Labour women tended to pursue political influence through strictly policed boundaries of party and class, using the power bestowed by universal suffrage to organize a counter-hegemony on the terrain of local government politics.