Co-operative Guild Research Articles

Participatory Democracy and the British Utopian Tradition: Leonard Woolf's Co-operative Commonwealth in Historical Perspective

Abstract This article examines an understudied chapter in the history of British socialist thought: the consumer-based socialism theorized by the Fabian and Labour Party advisor Leonard Woolf between 1913 and 1920. Exemplifying what used to be referred to in negative terms as “interwar idealism,” Woolf is now widely considered one of the chief architects of imperial and foreign policy for the British Labour Party between 1914 and 1945. Throughout this period, he was also a patient and committed advocate for a cooperative model of participatory, rank-and-file democracy founded on the organization and practices of the Co-operative Movement, whose socialist, transformative aspirations Woolf found most fully realized in the Women's Co-operative Guild under the leadership of Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Woolf's interest in radical democratic templates places him in a line of British utopian thought that looks to small-scale models of popular self-government as test cases for overall social transformation—ranging from Robert Owen's communes, through William Morris's medieval craft guilds, to the guild socialism advocated by G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney. At the same time, in identifying the consumer rather than the producer as the means and ends of social change, Woolf's proposals for a socialist commonwealth emerge as an alternative to most socialist thought, a rarely examined case in a British politics of consumption which, as Matthew Hilton has shown, has traditionally offered itself as a “middle” or “third way” solution to a party political system dominated by the interests of capitalists and workers.

‘I was utterly at my husband’s mercy’: voices from the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1910–1914

ABSTRACT This article uses the Women’s Co-operative Guild’s evidence to the 1912 Royal Commission on divorce to explore working-class women’s views about, and experiences of, marriage and divorce in the early twentieth century. Unlike any other evidence presented to the Commission the Guild’s was directly based on testimony from working-class women. These had been collected in letters from members to the Guild’s General Secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, who testified on its behalf to the Commission. The bulk of the letters were from wives and mothers who generally came from better off sections of the working class. They confirm Guild members’ overwhelming support for some degree of reform to current laws, along with more limited backing for Davies’ radical proposals for divorce on grounds of mutual consent. The article demonstrates that these letters provide vivid detailed testimony of the impact of domestic abuse, of wives’ financial dependence on their husbands, and of the gender inequality enshrined in contemporary divorce laws. It argues that support for reform was often combined with a Christian conviction that marriage should be a ‘sacred bond’, and highlights a common vision of marriage as a relationship of equals.

The Upper Respiratory Tract Microbiome Network Impacted by SARS-CoV-2.

The microbiome of upper respiratory tract (URT) acts as a gatekeeper to respiratory health of the host. However, little is still known about the impacts of SARS-CoV-2 infection on the microbial species composition and co-occurrence correlations of the URT microbiome, especially the relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and other microbes. Here, we characterized the URT microbiome based on RNA metagenomic-sequencing datasets from 1737 nasopharyngeal samples collected from COVID-19 patients. The URT-microbiome network consisting of bacteria, archaea, and RNA viruses was built and analyzed from aspects of core/periphery species, cluster composition, and balance between positive and negative interactions. It is discovered that the URT microbiome in the COVID-19 patients is enriched with Enterobacteriaceae, a gut associated family containing many pathogens. These pathogens formed a dense cooperative guild that seemed to suppress beneficial microbes collectively. Besides bacteria and archaea, 72 eukaryotic RNA viruses were identified in the URT microbiome of COVID-19 patients. Only five of these viruses were present in more than 10% of all samples, including SARS-CoV-2 and a bat coronavirus (i.e., BatCoV BM48-31) not detected in humans by routine means. SARS-CoV-2 was inhibited by a cooperative alliance of 89 species, but seems to cooperate with BatCoV BM48-31 given their statistically significant, positive correlations. The presence of cooperative bat-coronavirus partner of SARS-CoV-2 (BatCoV BM48-31), which was previously discovered in bat but not in humans to the best of our knowledge, is puzzling and deserves further investigation given their obvious implications. Possible microbial translocation mechanism from gut to URT also deserves future studies.

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Introduction: The Interwar Woman Writer: Politics and Aesthetics

This special issue is prompted by a concern to probe the ways in which the claims of literary and political engagement were mutually constitutive for interwar women writers. These women lived through two rounds of electoral reform in 1918 and later in 1928, the opening up of the professions to some women through the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, the reform of divorce law in 1924 and 1937, as well as significant socio-political upheaval, including the first Labour government in 1924 and the 1926 General Strike. As they wrote novels, tracts and pamphlets, women writers assumed a wide range of official roles that were informed by the shifting political world in which they found themselves: Winifred Holtby was a member of the Six Point Group and Independent Labour Party; Sylvia Townsend Warner was a committed communist; Naomi Mitchison stood as Labour candidate for the Scottish Universities seat in 1935; Virginia Woolf had a life-long affiliation to the Women’s Co-operative Guild; Storm Jameson was a co-founder member of the Peace Pledge Union. The essays in this issue draw attention to the nuances of the political commitments of interwar women writers and their writing as a site of reflection on these commitments. The introduction situates this edited collection in terms of recent developments in modernist and middlebrow studies and provides summaries for the chapters that follow.

'A Strong International Spirit': The Influence of Internationalism on the Women's Co-operative Guild.

This article explores the internationalism of the Women's Co-operative Guild (WCG) during the interwar years. Drawing on the records of the national and international Guild, alongside the minute books of a local branch based in Darlington, County Durham, it positions the WCG in the vibrant political culture in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Building on recent literature that has sought to examine the phenomenon of interwar internationalism, this article sheds light on an organization that represented the interests of working-class women. Internationalist in outlook, the association demonstrates how internationalist ideals played out on a day-to-day basis. The article demonstrates that the WCG played a unique and complementary role within both the British and international women's movements.

International Feminism, Domesticity, and the Interview in the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald

International Feminism, Domesticity, and the Interview in the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald Marianne Van Remoortel (bio) The Women's Penny Paper (1888–90), later the Woman's Herald (1891– 93), was the first British feminist periodical to adopt the interview as a regular feature. Launched on October 27, 1888, it published over 160 interviews with famous and lesser-known women during the first four years of its run. This period largely coincided with the tenure of founding editor and prominent women's rights activist Henrietta Müller (1845?– 1906), who edited the weekly paper under the pen name Helena B. Temple. The inquisitive format of the interview seemed to fit well with the paper's ambitions, as outlined in an editorial in the first issue: "[To reproduce] the ideas of the day in their freshest and newest form" and "reflect the thoughts of the best women upon all the subjects that occupy their minds."1 The fin de siècle interview, however, was a key vehicle of the New Journalism, famously dismissed by Matthew Arnold as "feather-brained" on account of its human interest stories, celebrity news, emotive reporting, and mass circulation.2 As such, it seemed, in the words of F. Elizabeth Gray, to be an "unlikely weapon for political transformation," yet that is exactly what Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald became under Müller's editorship.3 This article builds on Gray's argument that the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald wrestled the interview from the sensationalist press to make it "fundamental to the feminist agenda of the paper."4 In doing so, it merges insights from periodical studies with Benedict Anderson's views on community formation and Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to examine how the interview's voyeuristic preoccupation with the domestic lives of individuals paradoxically enabled the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald to establish itself as a clearing-house for emancipatory thinking and to attune the fragmented voices of early British feminism to the nascent international women's movement. [End Page 252] A Wide Array of Interviewees The Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald began publication in the decade before "feminism" entered the British political vocabulary. Indeed, if a full-text search in Gale Cengage's 19th Century UK Periodicals database can be relied upon, the word was never used in the paper until it was absorbed into the Woman's Signal (1894–99). Feminist activism emerged as a distinct political force in Britain from small-scale initiatives and local organizations championing issues such as education, employment, and the right to vote. The Women's Co-operative Guild was founded in 1883. In 1885, the mixed-sex Conservative Primrose League established a Ladies' Grand Council, and in 1886, the Women's Liberal Federation was formed from fifteen local branches of the Women's Liberal Association. Organizations were often divided on the issues they addressed. British women's movements, in Jane Rendall's words, were "fractured, split by differences, allowing fragmentation and choices."5 Female suffrage, in particular, was a site of ongoing discussion. It caused divisions in the Women's Liberal Federation and led to a schism in the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1888. Early support from the Women's Co-operative Guild largely depended on the efforts of local branches. Meanwhile, the Primrose League kept its distance, arguing that it could not "enter into questions of contentious politics."6 Within this atmosphere of conflict and debate, Henrietta Müller established the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald as explicitly non-partisan. An unsigned inaugural editorial, presumably written by Müller herself, announced that the paper would be "open to all shades of opinion, to the working woman as freely as to the educated lady; to the conservative and the radical, to the Englishwoman and foreigner."7 These discussions were spread across the whole of the paper, including the news, articles, book reviews, and correspondence pages—with the Primrose League and the Women's Liberal Association "being placed amicably side by side," as the Scottish Leader noted.8 Yet the policy was most evident in the interview section, where even...

Facing Life as We Have Known it: Virginia Woolf and the Women's Co-operative Guild

This article explores Leonard and Virginia Woolf's early interactions with the Women's Co-operative Guild and supplies a contextualised analysis of Virginia Woolf's preface to Life as We Have Known It (1931). Written to introduce a volume of autobiographical sketches by Co-operative Guildswomen and published in a variant form in the Yale Review, this essay has generated conflicting debate in Woolf studies. In this article I argue that the essay fictionalises Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Guild, concealing her familiarity with Guild activities to better engage an anticipated middle-class readership and promote frank interrogation of class prejudice.

‘Beauty isn't all a matter of looking glamorous’: attitudes to glamour and beauty in 1950s women's magazines

This article analyses representations of glamour in two British magazines during the 1950s: Home and Country and Woman's Outlook, the publications of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) and the Women's Co-operative Guild (WCG) respectively. Both publications shared many traits with best-selling women's magazines of the period but they also had certain distinctive characteristics, such as a relative lack of advertising for beauty products, which make them particularly interesting subjects for a study of glamour. Through its exploration of the diverse and even contradictory attitudes towards glamour evidenced in these publications, the article contributes to continuing feminist debates about women and beauty as well as offering fresh insights into the NFWI and WCG. Its findings demonstrate heterogeneous understandings of femininity, thus challenge the stereotypes of 1950s womanhood that continue to abound, and add another case study to the growing body of revisionist literature on women in the post-1945 period.

Feminist letters

Even if she is very well known as a feminist author, Virginia Woolf 's practical work, and her relationship with British feminists is scarcely known since more attention has been paid to her distaste with signing manifestoes and participating in marches. The book in which she explicitly takes a position on these issues - Three Guineas - is, for reasons unknown, not available in Portuguese, even if most of her works are. Here, I draw attention to some of her work with the Women's Cooperative Guild - and her life-long friendship with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, one of the pioneers in the organization of women workers, whose first book about women workers in England-a kind of feminine version of the Engels's report about the British working class- Virgina Woolf herself published.

Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere by Melba Cuddy-Keane, and: Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy by Holly Henry (review)

356 356 Reviews Reviews I suspect has been firm and skilfulediting, so that the collection as a whole is both focused and vigorous. Madness apart, modernism is here made a little less elusive. UNIVERSITY OFPLYMOUTH ALANMUNTON Virginia Woof, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere. By MELBA CUDDY-KEANE. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. x + 237 PP. ?4o; $60. ISBN:0-52I-82867-8. Virginia WoofandtheDiscourse ofScience: TheAesthetics ofAstronomy. By HOLLY HENRY. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiii + 208 pp. ?40; $55. ISBN: 0-52I-81297-6. Changes in critical direction generally come about slowly; the result of a gradual accretion of research. Only rarelydoes a book appear which suddenly and singlehandedly reworks the critical terrain. Melba Cuddy-Keane's VirginiaWoolf,the Intellectual andthePublicSphere is such a book. Its concerns -class, democracy, and reading-have caused frictionin Woolf studies,but these are topics which call out for this kind of thoughtful,illuminatingscholarshipgiven their centralityto Woolf s thinking. Cuddy-Keane's central concept, 'democratic highbrow', will radically alter the vocabularywith which we talkabout Woolf and class, preciselybecause it negotiates her desire for inclusivityandintellectualism. Class hostility has, of course, always followed Woolf, more or less ferociously. Antagonism towards the Bloomsbury Group and the idea of an intelligentsiastill characterizesBritishreactionsto Woolf. Criticsseekingto counter chargesof elitism have, quite rightly,made much of her involvementwith the Women's Co-operative Guild, the LabourParty,the WEA, and have focused on her own awarenessof her classprivilege,as well as women's complex relationshipto classcategories.But there is often a residual defensivenessin critical discussionsof Woolf and class. Sticking points remain, one of which has been her use of the term 'highbrow'.The crucial move in Cuddy-Keane's book is an uncoupling of the term highbrow from its associationswith 'upper class'. Highbrowism,for Woolf, denotes an intellectualism that is about reading and writingpracticesnot limited or dictatedby classposition. According to Cuddy-Keane, Woolf wanted to see the values of intellectuallife and the practices of dialogic, critical, active reading and writing available to a broad public. 'Highbrow'and the 'common reader'are, therefore,not oppositionalterms. The phrase 'public intellectual' has been used in conjunction with Woolf for some time now. One of the great strengths of this book is its historicized and contextualized account of how and why Woolf took part in public discourse. Cuddy-Keane discusses, for example, the topicality of the terms highbrow and lowbrow, in the context of heated debates about popular cultureversus the role of the intellectualin the modernistperiod. Controversiesin the I920s and I930s about adult and working-classeducation and its relationship to democratic society are also outlined with Cuddy-Keane's characteristicrigour and perceptivity. Woolf s awarenessof and engagement with these debates define her as a public intellectual. Cuddy-Keane focuses, for example, on Woolf s essay 'Middlebrow'as an intervention in the 1932BBC exchange betweenJ. B. Priestleyand Harold Nicolson about high/lowbrowism. Woolf detaches class position from such categories, as well as identifyingthe problem as middlebrowculture, driven by profit and characterized I suspect has been firm and skilfulediting, so that the collection as a whole is both focused and vigorous. Madness apart, modernism is here made a little less elusive. UNIVERSITY OFPLYMOUTH ALANMUNTON Virginia Woof, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere. By MELBA CUDDY-KEANE. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. x + 237 PP. ?4o; $60. ISBN:0-52I-82867-8. Virginia WoofandtheDiscourse ofScience: TheAesthetics ofAstronomy. By HOLLY HENRY. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiii + 208 pp. ?40; $55. ISBN: 0-52I-81297-6. Changes in critical direction generally come about slowly; the result of a gradual accretion of research. Only rarelydoes a book appear which suddenly and singlehandedly reworks the critical terrain. Melba Cuddy-Keane's VirginiaWoolf,the Intellectual andthePublicSphere is such a book. Its concerns -class, democracy, and reading-have caused frictionin Woolf studies,but these are topics which call out for this kind of thoughtful,illuminatingscholarshipgiven their centralityto Woolf s thinking. Cuddy-Keane's central concept, 'democratic highbrow', will radically alter the vocabularywith which we talkabout Woolf and class, preciselybecause it negotiates her desire for inclusivityandintellectualism. Class hostility has, of course, always followed Woolf, more or less ferociously...

Autobiography as Dissidence: Subjectivity, Sexuality, and the Women's Co-operative Guild

This article examines British working-class women's autobiography as a form of political dissidence. Crucial to guildswomen's collective autobiographical practice was writing about the reproductive body within the socio/historical context of class and gender relations from the perspective of women. As revealed in Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915) and in Life as We Have Known It (1931), guildswomen's life writing contested boundaries between political and domestic spheres, shifted emphasis from the individual to a collective identity, and demanded the inclusion of reproductive rights within the domain of human rights.

Martha Jane Bury (1851-1913): A Case-Study of Class Identity

This article explores the interplay of class and gender in the life of one little known working-class activist, Martha Jane Bury. Bury began working in the cotton mills in the Blackburn-Darwen area as a half-timer at the age of eleven. By the time she married in 1882, her class identity had been so profoundly shaped by her experiences that her husband's promotions, which eventually raised their family to middle-class status, did not change it. Her continued identification with working-class women inspired her activities on their behalf within her Congregational chapel and in the Women's Co-operative Guild. She served three terms as the national president of the Guild and confronted its general secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, over such issues as women's suffrage and divorce law reform. Bury thought that Llewelyn Davies' support for adult suffrage and divorce by mutual consent did not serve the best interests of the married working-class women in the Guild. Her work as a Guildswoman shows that Bury con...

The gendered geography of the english co-operative movement at the turn of the nineteenth century

This article examines the gender politics of the English Cooperative Movement between 1880 and 1920 from the perspective of geographic space. It shows which sections of the country were most likely to exclude women from participating in the government of co-operative enterprises and offers explanations for their exclusion. Using numerical data compiled by the Women's Co-operative Guild to illustrate its points, the article finds that male co-operators in the north-west were more likely than those in the south to deny women access to management committees and national offices. It argues that men in the north-west countered women's demands for public roles with an increased insistence on domesticity for wives, and it attributes the more generous attitudes of male co-operators in the south to their need to attract women to their struggling stores as shoppers. In the north-west, Co-operation was prosperous and well established; men there had no need to curry the favor of working-class housewives to guarantee the success of their establishments

Matriarchs of England's cooperative movement: a study in gender politics and female leadership, 1883-1921

Introduction Women in the English Cooperative Movement Women's Space/Women's Place The Woman's Corner of the Co-operative News The Gendered Geography of the Cooperative Movement Angels in the Store The Early Leaders of the Women's Cooperative Guild Margaret Llewelyn Davies: A Woman with a Mission The Dysfunctional Commonwealth Rent at the Seams: Sisterhood in the Women's Cooperative Guild The Battle between the Sexes in the Cooperative Movement Conclusion Contradictions and Conflicts Bibliography Index

SCOTT, GILLIAN. Feminism and the politics of working women. The Women's Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War. [Women's History.] UCL Press, London [etc.] 1998. xii, 297 pp. £40.00.

S<scp>COTT</scp>, G<scp>ILLIAN</scp>. Feminism and the politics of working women. The Women's Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War. [Women's History.] UCL Press, London [etc.] 1998. xii, 297 pp. £40.00.

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, £40.00, xii+297 pp.

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, £40.00, xii+297 pp.

Feminism and the politics of working women: the Women's Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War

Feminism and the politics of working women: the Women's Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War

Eileen Janes Yeo. Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere. New York: Manchester University Press; dist. by St. Martin’s Press, New York, N.Y. 1998. Pp. ix, 229. $24.95 paper. ISBN 0-7190-5244-0.

Eileen Janes Yeo. Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere. New York: Manchester University Press; dist. by St. Martin’s Press, New York, N.Y. 1998. Pp. ix, 229. $24.95 paper. ISBN 0-7190-5244-0. - Volume 31 Issue 4

The mothers' international: The Women's Co-operative Guild and feminist pacifism

The Women's Co-operative Guild (now the Co-operative Women's Guild), founded in 1983 as an auxilliary of the English Consumer Co-operative Movement, became a strong feminist representative of married working-class women. Its ‘social’ feminism stressed women's maternal, domestic role, deriving from it a series of values seen as lacking in male-dominated public life. Politics was to be transformed by means of women's active involvement, including but extending past their acquisition and use of the vote. The ‘female’ values were nurturant and cooperative; internationally, they focussed on international organization and peace. The Consumer Co-operative Movement provided a reformist ideology supportive of women's activism and pacifism, but the Movement itself as an organization was increasingly hostile to the Guild's feminism both within and outside the Movement. Although relatively uninfluential, the Guild thus embodies a tradition of feminist pacifism that is active and increasingly influential today.