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The
Acceptable Face of Feminism The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement
Maggie
Andrews
London: Lawrence
& Wishart (New and Revised Edition),
2015 Paperback.
250 p. ISBN 978-1910448168. £14.99
Reviewed by Pat Thane King's College, London
This is a revised
edition of the book first published in 1997, published to celebrate the
centenary of the Women’s Institute movement in 2015.The first edition was a
surprising revelation that an organisation still active and generally
regarded as conservative and middle
class, popularly associated with jam-making and patriotism, could ever have
been feminist, by any definition. Andrews showed convincingly that many of its
leading figures in the early days were suffrage supporters and an important aim
of the organisation for many decades was to empower rural working-class women
who were least involved in the mainly urban-based women’s movement but endured
some of the worst social conditions and most limited opportunities. An aim of the revised
volume is to defend this interpretation while evaluating what has happened to
feminist history since 1997.Andrews argues that in 1997 postmodernism was in
its heyday, promoting the ideas that feminism and even conventional
history-writing were passé. But they
have survived and gender is now a crucial tool of historical analysis, though she
believes that such work is not widely read outside universities. Also she refers
(p. 26) to ‘the hesitancy by women to define themselves as feminist in
contemporary culture’. I find this surprising given how many women in the past,
even in the heyday of the Women’s Liberation Movement, were reluctant to call
themselves feminist and how, at present, feminist websites developed by younger
women proliferate. Her book was criticised
for defining as feminist an organisation that supported and encouraged women
who were primarily ‘housewives’, not employed outside the home. She strongly
defends her definition and argues, still more strongly and convincingly than
before, for a broad definition of feminism encompassing the diverse ways in
which British women and their organisations through the twentieth century sought
to improve women’s conditions and opportunities. Like others, she rejects tidy
categorisation of the inter-war women’s movement into ‘old’ versus ‘new’, or
‘equal rights’ versus ‘domestic’, feminism, rightly pointing to the overlapping
objectives of many of the organisations involved and the frequent co-operation
between them that research repeatedly reveals. After the initial
defence of her approach and the critique of the current state of feminist
history, the bulk of the book, as before, usefully outlines the history of the
Women’s Institute movement, with some further detail about its early years
during World War 1. The idea was transported from Canada, where countrywomen’s
associations had been established since 1897, by Madge Watt. From 1915 they
quickly established themselves due especially to the expertise of their members
in the economical production and use of food at a time of mounting wartime food
shortage and their contribution, along with other women, to voluntary effort
during the war, sending ‘comforts’ to men in the trenches, helping refugees. But the central aim
of the WIs was to improve the status and living conditions of working-class
rural women, including helping them to use the vote when it was conceded to
most women over age 30 in 1918, and informing them about politics. It is in
this sense that it was feminist, though it was not noisy or militant and hence
was ‘the acceptable face of feminism’. An important aim was to encourage
society, and the women themselves, to value their work in the home as real
work, as important to society and the economy as paid work, through highly
skilled child care and care and feeding which kept men fit for work. The WIs
were not alone in promoting this form of ‘domestic feminism’. It was shared
with other working-class women’s organisations including the Women’s
Co-operative Guild and women in the Labour Party. The latter, like male trade
unionists, demanded the right of women working in the home to improved working
conditions, allowing them ‘eight hours work, eight hours sleep and eight hours
leisure’ each day in place of the relentless toil many endured. Andrews could
have made more of these common objectives across organisations often seen as
very different. They had in common the determination to campaign for better-designed,
better-equipped housing as essential for lessening the burden of domestic work
and improving the health of the population. This was an especially urgent need
for many rural women whose homes lacked running water, electricity or sewage
disposal. Between the wars and on through the 1940s and 50s until improvements
were at last widespread, the WIs campaigned hard for these objectives. They
clearly had some success, though it would have been good if Andrews supplied
clearer evidence of their methods of campaigning and the extent of their
success. Were some local authorities more responsive than others, since housing
was their responsibility? How extensive were the improvements at different
points in time and what was the role of WIs in bringing them about? WIs quickly became
one of the largest of the many inter-war women’s organisations in Britain. They
encouraged women to value and improve their skills of cooking, growing food, dressmaking
and much else, organising local markets to sell their produce, while enjoying activities
such as drama and singing and getting together with other women, giving
non-elite women a stronger presence in rural communities. They networked with
other women’s organisations to campaign on such issues as the appointment of
women police, particularly to support female and child victims of violence and
abuse, and improved health and welfare especially for mothers and young children
at a time when most working-class women lacked free access to doctors and death
rates in childbirth and among infants were high. Many of them supported the
peace movement, anxious not to return to the horrors of the First World War,
until the horrors of Nazism made another war unavoidable. Individuals and local
Institutes varied in the activities they espoused but the range was impressive. Again in the Second
World War rural women’s skills of food production, frugal cooking, jam-making
and food preservation were invaluable and valued. They organised and cooked school
dinners, helped evacuees and, with other women’s organisations, campaigned for
equal pay and for post-war social reforms. They were among the few who noticed
and valued the fact that William Beveridge, in his famous report on social
insurance of 1942, unusually for an elite man, made a point of arguing that
women who worked in the home deserved the same benefits as working men because
their work was equally essential to society and the economy. Later they criticised
the implementation of his proposals, but these were due more to decisions by
the post-war Labour government than to Beveridge. After the war they campaigned
also against the continuation of rationing, still for equal pay (achieved in
the public sector in 1955) and for faster improvements in housing and water
supplies. But living standards generally rose, the National Health Service,
founded in 1948, was transformative especially for poorer women and by the 1950s
the WIs were less obviously political campaigners, though still devoted to
encouraging women’s skills, further education and pastimes. They also led a
highly effective ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign in the 1950s. They have carried on
ever since, more predominantly middle class like much of British society
especially in rural areas, still campaigning on such women’s issues as the poor
work conditions of carers, paid and unpaid, and, as rural dwellers,
increasingly concerned about the environment and climate change, though they
were much despised by the post-1968 women’s movement as not seriously feminist.
They remain a large, active organisation, now with more urban branches, but
neither they nor any other organisation has succeeded in fundamentally changing
society’s valuation of work in the home.
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