The Indoors in the Outdoors

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the female-majority Co-operative Holidays Association, and the ways in which cultures of domesticity provided a means through which men and women in the organisation could assert an imagination of idealised modern futures. Drawing on recent studies that have understood the domestic as a place in which the modern could be imagined and practised, it shows how, for many lower-middle-class men and women in England, domesticity allowed their personal hopes for marriage to be integrated into co-operative politics, as well as a ‘safe’ place in which to court future partners. However, the chapter also investigates the limits to such reformist domesticity and argues that we should understand it as a form of ‘regendering’ early twentieth-century women as modern, but subservient.