The Women’s Guild and Store Life (London: 1892), 1–8

Abstract

[A talented propagandist, Catherine Webb edited a popular early textbook, Industrial Co-operation: the story of a peaceful revolution (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1904), and later published a widely read history of the Women’s Co-operative Guild entitled The Woman with the Basket (Manchester: CWS, 1927). Like activists such as Miss Greenwood, Webb had to struggle from the start against male hostility within the movement, blaming the organisation’s slow initial growth on “‘so-called co-operators’ who tell women that ‘we should do more good staying at home and educating our children’”. Webb’s response to such criticism, voiced at the Co-operative Congress in 1885, was that theirs was “a higher education, that of humanity”. [Gillian Scott, Feminism and the politics of working women. The Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War (London: UCL Press, 1998), 70] Growing up in fairly comfortable circumstances herself thanks to the movement’s growth in South London which enabled her father’s rise, Webb was nevertheless keenly aware of the importance of reaching out to working-class women in their daily lives, educating them as consumers and citizens but learning from them too. [Barbara J. Blaszak, The Matriarchs of England’s Cooperative Movement: A Study in Gender Politics and Female Leadership, 1883–1921 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 105] As we have already seen, she also had the highest aspirations for the movement. Webb’s pamphlet reproduced here demonstrates her understanding of the store as a cultural form with enormous potential to empower female working-class consumers. Webb believed that what she termed “store life” might generate a completely new way of life or culture, which crucially depended on the participation and meaningful involvement of both women in their various roles and also children. The stated intention might be to knit members together into one big family, but Webb’s text points once more to divisions within the movement, this time in relation to female agricultural workers employed by a co-operative society whom she describes as “Poor, rough, faces tanned, and hands hardened by out-door toil, uneducated, uncouth…”.]