Abstract
This article takes the position that national leaders and national events have a local impact and therefore that social phenomena are more than the products of local conditions. It maintains that a national working-class culture existed a century ago and that a national consensus about appropriate gender roles did as well. It contends that historical evidence must be evaluated in accordance with the perspectives of the people of the past in order to achieve an imaginative understanding of the past. In the case of the Co-operative movement, a failure to attend to the voice of its women's Guild results in historians dismissing the importance of the campaigns for open membership and for bringing Co-operation within reach of the poor. In particular, it minimizes the gender prejudice women in the movement confronted, even in the weaving districts where some historians have argued that gender roles were flexible.
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