The Cooperative Movement and the Education of Working Men and Women: Provision by a Local Society in Lincoln, England, 1861–1914

Abstract

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century the provision of better education for working-class men and women became one of the various and broad-ranging set of preoccupations of the cooperative movement in Britain. Much early cooperation was economic, concerning alternative means of production and distribution. However, local societies also turned themselves toward other forms of societal improvement, including creating the facilities and contexts that would promote and support the education and learning of adults. The archive of the Lincoln Equitable Co-operative Industrial Society offers a rich body of source material for a microhistorical investigation of the expansion and diversification of one local cooperative up to the First World War. The members’ magazine of this local society in particular records the evolution of its purpose—economic, political, social, and cultural. This included achieving progress through various forms of educational provision—although the opportunities for men contrasted with those made available for women. This research illuminates what is a relatively underresearched area—that is, exploration of the complexities, dynamism, and phenomenology of local cooperative adult education and the significance of what it had to offer the development of the labor movement in particular places.