Gendered Knowledge Desperately Seeking Acknowledgement

Introduction

How can new knowledge be reckoned with if not through discussion with peers? When new ideas or theories are produced, they have to be acknowledged to become part of the public debate and potentially develop political democracy. However, when ignored, they cannot become ‘knowledge’ at a given moment and place; for knowledge, being a social construction, must be historicised. Unable to convince contemporaries to take new ideas on board even if they mean to contradict them, the producer of such ideas has very little perspective except keeping silent.

This leads to wonder about ‘knowledge’ that is not shared or officialised; is it because it is irrational, absurd, incoherent? And if so, who or which process is to determine or refuse the transformation of ‘new ideas’ into ‘knowledge’? If knowledge provides power, it does seem that ‘power’ also determines ‘knowledge’ especially when knowledge could discredit the forms and figures of political power, here oppositional groups to the current Liberal Government, in 1912. The objective of this chapter is to discuss why a narrative of a consumer gendered theory, The Consumer in Revolt, never reached the status of ‘knowledge’ insofar as it was ignored at the time of its publication: almost nobody named the author or discussed her consumer theory. How such a book could be forgotten from the dominant consumer writing then and later, in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, will be examined from a historiographical approach, questioning at the same time the making of historiography, a basis of knowledge for a long time if not forever.

As often in gender history, the objective is to reclaim from silence and obscurity what was negated: how was it possible that a gendered consumer theory could not be considered at a time when consumers’ politics and women’s suffrage and rights had become central to social and political history? This chapter builds on a body of well-known publications from and on the Cooperative Society, from Fabian and Independent Labour Party (ILP) writers in the 1910s and beyond who took an interest in consumer society and progressive politics, yet did not take on women’s role, not only in the body politic but also as consumer citizens. In 1912, Teresa Billington-Greig published The Consumer in Revolt, the only essay that suggested that because consumers were mostly women, both women and consumers were ignored by consumer theorists and progressive political writers. This chapter aims at assessing why her book was ignored through examining who she was in 1912, which ideas The Consumer in Revolt provided, how it was reviewed, who else had published studies of consumer theories then and would in the following decades building up a historiography without The Consumer in Revolt. As a result, Teresa Billington-Greig’s 1912 book was largely ignored up to Carol McPhee and Anne Fitzgerald’s 1987 publication (McPhee & Fitzgerald, 1987).

A Short Biography of Teresa Billington-Greig (TBG): Her Personal 1912 Context

In 1912, TBG was a well-known figure of the ongoing suffrage campaign and a strong critic of ‘anti-women’ politics. She had left the last of the successive societies that she contributed to set up, the Women’s Freedom League (WFL, which was active from 1907 to 1964). Her book, The Consumer in Revolt, conveyed forceful arguments to the 1912 current issues such as how gendered ideologies underwrote social organisation, how female activism went beyond getting the vote, how women already played a vital role in consumer cooperation and political democracy.

Born in 1876 in a working-class family while her Roman Catholic mother came from a wealthy commercial Manchester family, the young Teresa experienced life in a Preston home divided by financial stress and parental arguments. Educated in a convent, she ran away from home at seventeen to choose her own life, went to an uncle in Manchester who helped her with advice and a temporary home. Thanks to evening classes, she became a certificated elementary-school mistress, a working-class job then. She also attended Manchester Ancoats Settlement where she experienced settlement politics and culture from 1896 to 1902.

In 1903 (at twenty-seven), she became an agnostic elementary school teacher who did not want to teach Anglicanism although it was part of her job. This was how she met Emmeline Pankhurst, then from the Manchester School Board, who supported her application to a Jewish school where she was not expected to teach religion. In the same year, she joined the ILP, of which she became a female organiser, and she was one among the Women Social and Political Union (WSPU) founding members in Manchester in 1903. The following year, she set up the Manchester Branch of the Teachers’ Equal Pay League and became its honorary secretary. In 1906, she became a WSPU full-time suffrage activist and organiser and was sent to London to prepare for a new development, setting up a national WSPU based in London with regional branches. She was nationally referred to as ‘the woman with a whip’ when she refused to leave a Liberal meeting and used her dog whip against the stewards that sexually attacked her and other female hecklers in 1906 (Billington-Greig, 1907, pp. 41–50).

In the spring of 1907, she married Frederick Greig who was able to court her because she was imprisoned several times in 1906, as the story goes. After marrying, both took the name Billington-Greig. In the autumn, the democratic constitution that she had written was refused by the autocratic Emmeline Pankhurst who famously declared she was ‘the commander in chief of an army’. This led to a split from which a new suffragette group emerged, the Women’s Freedom league (WFL) in 1907. The WFL challenged state authority, asserted its belief in a democratic constitution and its refusal of violence; hence WFL members were called the nonviolent suffragettes. She was the main leader writer of The Vote, the WFL weekly that she founded in 1909, and she directed the WFL with Charlotte Despard and Edith How Martyn. Critical of the suffrage movement as a whole, she left the WFL in 1911 to become a feminist journalist.

In 1912, TBG published The Consumer in Revolt. At thirty-five, after almost ten years of intense suffrage activism as a political employee, she had become a freelance writer. Her political experience ranged from a paid organiser with the Independent Labour Party (from 1902 to 1903) and the Women Social and Political Union (from 1903 to 1907) to the secretary of the Women’s Freedom League and a voluntary leader writer for their periodical The Vote (TBG Archive Collection). A talented administrator and organiser, she had developed first the WSPU, then the WFL as well as the WFL periodical, The Vote.

From being a driving force in political organisation, she became self-employed in 1911 after the publication of Emancipation in a Hurry (Billington-Greig, 1911a) and free to debate and write in her own name (McPhee & Fitzgerald, 1987, pp. 18–20). However, she needed to fund her activities beyond her husband’s willingness to do so.1 She designed a leaflet in 1911–12 that offered her services as a ‘lecturer and debater on a wide range of subjects – literary, philosophical, economic, political, feminist, Ethical and Rationalist’. This leaflet was not dated (TBG Archive Collection) but must have been designed after her resignation from the WFL on 11 January 1911 (Billington-Greig, 1911b). In her programme, one lecture entitled ‘The Consumers in Revolt’ echoed or predated the 1912 publication (TBG Archive Collection). She also introduced herself as ‘prominently associated with the industrial reform movement and the women’s movement’ (TBG Archive Collection). ‘Ethical’ and ‘Rationalist’ referred to the Ethical Society and the National Secular Society, both advocating freethinking and debating in societies attempting to neutralise the weight of traditional religion.2 She became an agnostic when she discovered the Ethical Church Movement and Frederick James Gould’s lectures on moral teaching in schools (TBG Archive Collection); she addressed meetings on this topic as in South Place Magazine, in October 1897.

TBG’s Political Analyses in The Consumer in Revolt, 1912

TBG wrote six chapters based on many consensual statements about consumers while stressing women’s presence in Chapters 1 ‘An Economic Divorce’ and 2 ‘The Victimisation of the Consumer’. In ‘Woman the Consumer’ (Chapter 3), she introduced the gendered nature of the consumer and wrote about ‘women’ and ‘females’, whereas in cooperation literature these terms are seldom used to the benefit of ‘housewives’.3 With ‘The Failure of the Labour Revolt’ (Chapter 4), she denounced the political non-participation of women: they were unfairly dismissed as political creatures and reduced to functional tools servicing the family as ‘housewives’. For her, the exclusion of various groups, among whom ‘women’, from political thinking and practices explained why social reformers had never achieved their objective before, to secure a union (Chapter 5, ‘Past Efforts to Secure Union’). When she finally listed ‘The Work to Be Done’ (Chapter 6), she emphasised political education and community development at the local level, for her the true source of political reality, that all the same needed to be built into national representation.

Throughout her book, she insisted on a socio-economic approach that had to be enlarged as well as gendered. In ‘An Economic Divorce’ (Chapter 1), she broadened the definition of producers and workers to those who ‘g[ave] time and brain and muscle to economic or social service in any form’ (Billington-Greig, 1912, p. 4). Thus, producers became both white-collar and blue-collar workers while services including social ones were on a par with economic production. Widening the span of people involved, she paved the way for women workers to be included alongside the traditionally all-male working-class producers: domestic work, catering activities including housewifery as a production site and services in general were thus also encompassed in her revised definition. Having enlarged the scope through which to envisage producers, she made it easier to represent consumers as people who, like producers, were manipulated by ‘profiteers; they control[led] industry through their accumulated wealth, ha[d] diverted the whole economic system from its primary purpose and thrust the consumer and the producer into a false antagonism’ (p. 3). Instead of developing ‘dual activist organisations of consumers and producers’ from localities to national level, antagonism prevents the two groups from collaborating against profiteering interests (p. 22).

Such an antagonism was especially damageable at times of strike when producers seemed to forget that their alter egos, consumers, should not have been victimised:

The price of every strike, whether successful or not, is paid by the consumers. The dislocation of service and supply is paid for by the consumer. The rise of prices comes out of the consumer’s pocket […] the worker is either worse off or no better off as a result of all his industrial effort, only all the time during which he seeks to fight the oppressor single-handed, his yoke-fellow the consumer is being made the scapegoat of all his blunders and experiments, of all his successes and of all his failures. [Billington-Greig, 1912, p. 48]

In the same way, producers making so much of ‘working’ over ‘living’ led them to feel superior and to undervalue women’s work: ‘The present contempt for women’s work within the home is not due to or justified by inferior workmanship’ (pp. 49–50); ‘Man took to strutting in the home and out of it in politics and social life, as well as in industry, as the producer’ (p. 56). Such a belief made public affairs ‘entirely dominated by the producers’ point of view’ understood as all male (p. 57). Women being excluded from formal politics as females were further isolated from mainstream politics as consumers. As women were rejected from politics as unqualified citizens, they were also rejected by producers from the consumer community unless they were producers’ wives, housewives. As a result, women consumers did not cooperate with producers:

A very heavy price has been exacted from humanity for the sex-subjection of women and the economic divorce which it has occasioned. Woman the consumer has been revenged for the degradation of woman the creature of sex. And it follows that the economic re-organisation of the world can only come when woman is active and free. [Billington-Greig, 1912, p. 61]

For TBG, women’s inclusion in the body politic should have been the way towards economic and social reform. If the latter had so far failed, she emphasised that it had been to the sole benefit of the ‘profiteers’ who, playing groups against each other, had managed to keep their profits. The labour movement being essentially a producers’ movement focused on producers’ interests had ignored the rest of the community:

It leaves out entirely the great body of unorganised labourers at the bottom; it leaves out almost all women workers; it entirely ignores the existence of the great consuming classes of home-women; and it has made no appeal whatever to the brain-workers and professional workers of the nation. [p. 75]

She claimed that the current political organisations had not achieved their aims because excluding so many people’s interests made labour representation too selective, thus jeopardising general support (whoever from) to the movement. However, potential broad support from, say, dividend co-operators may have come too little when their main interest was saving thanks to a share of the profits, hardly in keeping with Owenite principles in early cooperation, she stated (p. 84). The fact that these were mostly women did not come as a surprise (pp. 81–82) for TBG. Always pragmatic, she avoided self-delusion because she did not essentialise women or men. Rather, she believed that smaller activist groups would efficiently organise political education for everybody: ‘The Co-operative Union and the Women’s Guild are the educative and ethical parts of the movement, they have come into being because of the sense of partial failure and neglected opportunities and responsibilities’ (p. 85).

Outside Britain, consumers’ leagues represent consumers’ interests; ‘they ha[d] been directed wholly to the protection of producers by the intervention of consumers’. They were undoubtedly producer-oriented but had the potential to become the basis of a regenerated political community in Britain, she believed (p. 94).

Her final chapter, ‘The Work to Be Done’, sounded like a list of resolutions and suggestions to engage in new inclusive dynamics that should be adopted. Her main ideas could be summarised as follows:

• start from consumers’ leagues type of organisation and expand their scope through education;
• explain the original Owenite cooperation;
• redress the imbalance in culture and politics between producers and consumers through activism and political education without merging;
• collaborate with other types of producer-led organisations (unions, parties, socialist societies) if they opened to all, including women and especially housewives;
• create a dual collaboration meaning that both consumers and producers’ interests will be fought at the same time, affecting their objectives and their methods, and making the profiteer less relevant (Billington-Greig, 1912, pp. 96–116).

In ‘The Work to Be Done’ (Chapter 6), TBG prescribed the necessity of political education for already organised consumers who should know about the origins of cooperation while producers should be alerted to the necessity of consumers’ potential collaboration. Activism and political education would make consumer cooperation more attractive to the groups she calls ‘producer-led organisations’ with a proviso that they should also open to women workers and housewives. Once these two groups had become partners, the profiteer category would be losing out on profits and influence and ultimately be economically defeated.

The Making of Consumer Historiography: Reviews of The Consumer in Revolt, 1912

The reception of The Consumer in Revolt will now be traced in reviews even though few reviewers bothered to do so. The London publisher Stephen Swift advertised The Consumer in Revolt to potential reviewers. The book was mentioned in ‘books received’ or ‘publishers’ sections in The Academy, 7 September 1912; The Athenaeum, 31 August 1912; The Freewoman, 26 September 1912; Justice, 19 October 1912; Daily Herald, 27 September 1912 (see Table 1 for their readership profiles). The three last ones undoubtedly progressive weeklies or dailies listed it in their ‘books received’; however, from this list only The Freewoman reviewed the book in its next issue.

TBG’s Consumer in Revolt was reviewed critically and fairly positively in two progressive publications, The Guardian (20 September 1912) and the Fabian and Labour New Age (24 October 1912). The New Age review concluded encouragingly with a wait-and-see sentence: ‘But the suggestion is admittedly tentative, and aims more at arousing public interest in a somewhat neglected aspect of the industrial question than at finding adequate solutions to the problems. So far, it is welcome’.

However, the New Age reviewer could not find any interest in a gendered theory that remained only a feminised version of cooperation, the reviewer wrote. Here was the condescension: the reviewer did not see any interest in introducing women’s activism in cooperation which he called ‘feminising’, denying the relevance of TBG’s gendered analyses that she based on social and political causes. The Guardian also ended with a positive conclusion: ‘But Mrs Greig only regards her book as the opening of a fruitful discussion, and as such we can heartily recommend it. It is pleasant reading and full of ideas’ (The Guardian, 20 September 1912). However, like New Age, the national daily could not see beyond the current state of things and did not grasp what a gendered approach would be like. In both cases, she was criticised although she meant a lot more than just feminising male consumer activism and male political choices; she might not have imagined how difficult it would be to convey her gendered revised body politic even to open-minded writers. In both cases she did consider the financial aspect of the question: she explained why ‘housewives’ could not avoid the desperate need to balance the family budget in a society who denounced them as treacherous consumers to their class. In the same way, women workers’ low wages explained why they were keen on consumer dividends and lower prices.4

The highbrow feminist magazine, The Freewoman (3 October 1912) criticised her ‘awkward’ writing style in condescending class terms while the suffragist Common Cause (19 September 1912) reviewer, too based her criticism on class innuendoes (see Table 1 for their readership profiles). TBG was viciously attacked for her writing style, conveying the idea that she was just an uneducated working-class woman. In both instances, she was compared with other reviewed authors. In the feminist Freewoman, Rebecca West added her to two other suffragist writers, making them all dumb and simplistic. Many readers and writers of this weekly despised suffragist views so much that they sometimes professed a contemptuous anti-suffragism making non-feminist suffragists the reason for anti-suffragist feminists. Indeed, many suffragists would not accept to be called feminists either (Delap, 2009, pp. 30–36). In her review entitled ‘So Simple’, West meant to show that women could not be as good writers as men; although this was a social construction, the result was nonetheless that women victims of self-delusion were always non-geniuses unlike some male writers. With three examples – TBG (64 lines), Olive Schreiner (52), both suffragist writers, and Louise Heilgers (22) – West repeated that they could not be worthy of educated consideration as intellectual elites could not be convinced by these women’s lack of intellect:

There is much ability in Mrs Billington-Greig, but there is little that speaks of it in her book. The first chapter, which says in twenty-three pages what would better have been said in six is devoted to an exposition of the fact that man sometimes produces goods and sometimes consumes them. [West, 1912]

West had no interest whatsoever in a gendered approach; TBG might have attracted more interest from lower middle-class and working-class women and men for its empirical matter-of-fact type of explanations, for instance on the topic of food adulteration. West derided food adulteration (within fourteen lines) as a non-topic to conclude with a last-ditch abrupt and pithy statement that should have been at the heart of her discussion.5 One can wonder why she needed so many lines to discuss food adulteration, except that her witty contemptuous style was fascinatingly humiliating: she did not care to discuss what was at the heart of TheConsumer in Revolt. For TBG, such a review may have been worse than having her book ignored.

In the suffragist Common Cause (see Table 1 for readership profiles), TBG was compared with an upper-middle-class ideally educated suffragist, Eleanor Rathbone, leading readers to understand that TBG was after all only a working-class suffragette. This review could also be read as a belated answer to her preceding book Emancipation in a Hurry (1911) in which TBG scathingly analysed suffragettes and suffragists’ politics as dead-end endeavours.6 Matching TBG’s harsh 1911 criticism of moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) suffragists, Common Cause 1912 review demolished her theoretical position and writing style as uneducated while her book was deemed inferior to the sixteen-page article written by Eleanor Rathbone (Common Cause, 19 September 1912).7 Interestingly enough, in the next issue of Common Cause (26 September 1912), Percy Redfern sent a long letter, entitled ‘The Purchasing Power of Women’, in which he quotes himself writing about the consumer side of cooperation politics before TBG did, ‘three months ago in the co-operative Wheatsheaf’ and ‘three years ago’ in a cooperative article (Common Cause, 26 September 1912). Redfern, a Manchester in-house Cooperative Society writer, answered some issues of The Consumer in Revolt in his 1913 anniversary history of the Cooperation Society without ever naming its author. As will be seen shortly, it was the only book ever that wrote lengthily about ‘women’ and ‘housewives’, the only cooperative writer ever to do so since George Jacob Holyoake, an in-house writer and activist of the Cooperative Society.

The Making of Consumer Historiography: British Consumer Politics and Writings

The political approach to British consumer politics will be assessed in contemporary publications and strategical reprints, sometimes over forty years (1891–1930). The Consumer in Revolt will also be contrasted with contemporary publications, especially the ones of the Cooperative Society. The latter had had to contend with the views of the Women’s Cooperative Guild (WCG) since the 1880s and could sometimes be critical of dividend co-operators, mostly females. Added to this, the Cooperative Society through the Cooperative Union could employ successive in-house writers and could afford reprinting its past publications over several decades while funding outside their organisation selected others with cooperative sympathy usually from the labour movement, e.g. Fabians and ILP members. Beatrice Potter (Webb), the only female writer in this corpus on cooperation theories did so in 1891 when she was still anti-suffragist and contemptuous of the so-called ‘dividend co-operators’, mostly women. The Co-Operative Movement in Great Britain (London, Sonnenschein & Son) was reprinted many times over four decades (1892, 1893, 1895, 1899, 1907, tenth impression and new preface in 1930); in the 1892 second edition preface, she boasted that she had changed very little.8 This permanent reprinting strategy of many Cooperative Society writers and their funded outsiders tended to project an organic timeless vision of the cooperative objectives, while many co-operators had Liberal affiliations before 1912 and World War I, cooperation and co-operators were experiencing Labour integration in the 1920s. With no real gendered vision outside ‘housewifery’, historiography has remained one-sided for most of the twentieth century.

Three ideal types published on cooperation of consumers and producers: in-house writers and activists from the Cooperative Society (IH); university-educated specialists with cooperative leaning, often funded by the Cooperative Society (UE); and ILP writers who wanted cooperation to become affiliated to Labour through producer-led politics (PL) (see Table 2 for publications and reprints on and from mostly the Cooperative Society). In Table 2, a compilation of publications about cooperation actually shows that most publications were by in-house writers or through collaboration with academics, all of them with Labour leanings, mostly ILP or Fabian ones. TBG’s Consumer in Revolt was non-affiliated and did not belong to any other approach; she was the only one of her kind. As a working-class activist who could have been described as a New Liberal before the First World War, her feminist approach was the odd one out whatever the diversity of views involved. Her original proposition competed with books of traditional affiliations where repetitions and reprints had already ruled the market for several decades. On the other hand, she could hardly be supported by the suffragist milieu that, in 1911, she had ruthlessly criticised as almost inept to achieve women’s rights. Her wish to better assert her feminism could not find a way to work with avant-garde feminists either because of her class, education or life experience. The only reaction that she could have had (Redfern, 1913) was not addressed to her; her name was not mentioned as if she had never published The Consumer in Revolt.9

In The Story of the C. W. S.: The Jubilee History of the Co-Operative Wholesale Society Limited 1863–1913, Redfern retraced the Co-Operative Wholesale Society (CWS) history as expected. However, unlike former writers, he emphasised the role of consumers as the basis of a new body politic (Redfern, 1913, pp. 8, 81, 111, 142, 164, 167, 181, 183, 187, 238, 291, 299, 301, 310, 313, 346, 361) outside the labour movement (pp. 238, 291). He reminded his readers how chartists and Christian socialists influenced the history of cooperation (pp. 13, 100,110, 124, 181); and he described the CWS as an employer, both in the text and in the index. Thus, the creation of the Women’s Cooperative Guild (WCG) in 1883 (pp. 23, 362) was presented as a necessity because of the CWS relative failure to take women CWS employees’ wages and working conditions on board. The WCG struggle within the CWS to introduce a minimum wage for CWS women employees as a fight against sweated trade was finally successful in 1912, five years after men employees (pp. 358–64): ‘Miss Llewelyn Davies, leader of the WCG argued that “as the dividend is equalised, wages should be equalised too”’ (pp. 361–62). However, Redfern never named the author Billington-Greig whose main criticism he answered within this in-house 1913 celebration book: he took on board the existence of women workers and women consumers. The following year in Co-Operation for All, Redfern devoted a whole chapter to the role of women: (Chapter 6) ‘A Housewives’ and a Social Movement’ (Redfern, 1914, pp. 88–104), starting with a forceful assertion that the overlooked home market should not be neglected:

Ask any man which is the largest industry in the country and he will reply ‘mining’ or ‘cotton’ or ‘shipbuilding’. […] It is in short, the domestic industry of wives and mothers, an industry so close to life that in the clamour of the world concerning profits, rates, fair prices, protection and the fruits of labour, it is very much overlooked. The census returns for 1911 show that more than one million men and boys are at work in mines and quarries. But considerably more than a million and a quarter of women and girls are engaged in domestic service. And these domestic servants are no more than an auxiliary of a greater army. In England and Wales alone, there are 8 million inhabited dwellings. In the same area there are 7,995,000 married women and widows. And there are 10 million children under 15 years of age. We do not try and sell children, and so we cannot estimate commercially the value which these millions represent. All the labour of night and day, all the care and thought and effort in the home largely through which 600,000 healthy recruits are added every year to the number of direct wage-earners, or to the indirect wage earners at home – this effort cannot be measured by any selling price of the ‘output’. Furthermore, the industry of the 8,000,000 homes has another value.

[…] Leaving out of account 5 million girls and women working for wages, many of whom are housewives in addition, there are 11,450,000 wage-earning men and boys. By how much would all this economic capacity be reduced if, through some unimaginable plague, every home were left empty of its patient servant? No failure in war could ruin us so completely. So, the industry of home-making and child-rearing is of great consequence. Yet it is left almost severely to itself. Most people do not even regard it as an industry at all. We say of a girl or a woman that she goes out ‘to work’ as if all staying at home were for pleasure. Indeed, with a sublime but unconscious humour the census returns calmly classify 6,900,000 wives and widows in England and Wales as ‘retired or unoccupied’. […] but no powerful organisations defend the trade of the housewives. […] The factory workers go in numbers to their work, and talk together over the midday meal, but the woman at home plods along by herself, or with children for company. [Redfern, 1914, pp. 88–89]

In this excerpt, Redfern made it obvious that the home market was the first national market by far through the home production of services and their immediate consumption at home because of its structure, its number of waged workers (domestic servants) and unwaged workers (housewives). And yet this market was ignored (Redfern, 1914, p. 89). Like The Consumer in Revolt, Redfern used women’s role in this home market as another argument to fight for the consumers’ community that he had been zealously defending since 1910, as the editor of Wheatsheaf, the monthly Cooperative magazine (Gurney, 2006). Expanding on consumer politics through women’s role must have reinforced his arguments that the Cooperative Society should exist outside Labour; for him, women’s role had merits on principle and in political terms, whereas it was still mostly absent from Labour organisations and speeches.10 When present, they were usually reduced to ‘housewives’, while women workers were often simply ignored. In The Consumers’ Place in Society (1920), published in Manchester by the Cooperative Union, Redfern did not mention women at all, only consumers who would in an undetermined future play a great role, a sort of consumer ‘commonwealth’ described as a secular Eden-like place: ‘We as consumers are humanity alive in this world’ (Redfern, 1920, p. 89). Humanity had replaced males in his thinking: one has to wonder whether females were part of it.

Beatrice Potter (Webb) 1891 book was reprinted many times until 1930 with no change at all between 1892 (second edition) and 1930, except for a third preface:

This little book was published forty years ago; it has never been revised or brought up to date and yet it persists in being read, and threaten to outlive its author. Moreover, it is still being translated into additional foreign languages despite the fact that the Webbs have published, in 1921, a far more searching and detailed analysis of the Consumers Co-operative movement. [Webb, 1930, p. vii]

This smug remark led readers to believe that 1891 circumstances, social and economic characteristics could still be valid in 1930, as if nothing had been published in between, as if time had stopped. This was particularly obvious with women’s treatment in the book. The Women’s Cooperative Guild still remained only one footnote (Webb, 1930, p. 193) which was already a problem in 1891 (Webb, 1891, p. 193). ‘Women’ appeared twice in the whole book, while ‘housewives’ which was not listed in the index in 1891 as in 1930 was the one term for women. With the first occurrence of ‘women’, she explained that they had had full membership since the beginning of cooperation because they had always been owners of their savings even before the 1884 Married Women’s Property Act (Webb, 1891–1930, p. 72). The second one was the moment women were accused of being deficient in collective spirit:

Moreover, taken as a general fact, the unit of the Co-operative movement – the customer – is a woman; the unit of the municipality and the State – the ratepayer and the Parliamentary voter – is a man. Now, whatever view we may entertain as to the future development of women, few will deny that at the present time they are as a class deplorably deficient of that larger sense of the common weal which secures through association, ultimate advantage to the family. They abandon, for the sake of some seeming expediency of the hour, those larger expediencies which affect the condition of the class to which they belong or the community in which they live. [Webb, 1891–1930, p. 191]

Women co-operators were described by this upper-middle-class woman as selfish, family-centred and inefficient in their race for family survival. Judgemental observations remained after forty years and Webb did not object to them in 1907 nor in 1930. Even more ahistorical, the lack of women’s vote was still presented in 1891 as well as in 1930 in a low key. While Webb was still an anti-suffragist in 1891, she had kept the 1891 excerpt in 1930 when all women over twenty-one were enfranchised in 1928 on the same conditions as men (Webb, 1891–1930, p. 191).11 Low-key in 1891 for an anti-suffragist woman, this passage became surprisingly inept when she defended a consumer democracy in 1930 as in 1891, still disconnected from women’s participation, except that in 1930 the same text had become misogynistic. Why did she not see the problem? Because she must have paid lip service to women’s participation in consumer democracy. The common suffragist argument of training women in citizenship was reused for 1891 consumer cooperation; her fairly generous discussion of women’s ability to learn citizen-like behaviour became condescending in 1930 while anti-suffragists had simply disappeared from the political scene as an organised group since 1918. Her conclusion (identical for forty years) focused on consumers, and not women, something that Redfern amended in his 1913 and 1914 book, probably inspired by The Consumer in Revolt.

When examining later narratives of a potential British consumer movement, women were strangely absent. On the whole, women were not mentioned as a potential political group worthy of integration in a consumer theory. In the 1920s, writers on cooperation tended to integrate consumer power to Labour politics, in the traditional way that was neutralising gender, and mentioning women only as ‘housewives’, a term that by the way never appeared in indexes.12 This move took away the Cooperative Society from the strong Liberal working-class grass roots that characterised the CWS in the 1870s up to the First World War. With the ‘strange’ disappearance of the Liberal Party in the mid-1920s (Dangerfield, 1935) such integration became a success for both Labour and Cooperation. In 1928, at the British Commonwealth Labour Conference, George Lansbury confirmed it:

I often think, as a socialist, that while my colleagues and I are thinking out the means to emancipate the people, the co-operators movement is showing how the work can be done. Difficult as the job is, co-operators are teaching the people in a practical manner that which every socialist believes to be the aim of mankind – the cooperative commonwealth of the world. [Redfern, 1938, p. 495]

In the 1930s, what had then become classical Labour narratives re-enacted the total absence of women from a Labour perspective written in collaboration with the Cooperative Society or by in-house writers.13 Redfern’s 1938 The New History of the C. W. S. 75th C. S. Anniversary, interestingly enough revisited the 1920s and emphasised the increasing numbers and diversity of cooperative women workers at the time. In 1938, women had white-collar jobs as CWS clerks and managers, but still faced male co-operators’ opposition and did not have yet the same wages: they still had to insist on better wages (Redfern, 1938, pp. 224, 372, 407, 449, 454). Although integration to the labour movement was a fact, co-operators still refused compulsory unionisation (Redfern, 1938, pp. 262, 271). And then ‘housewives’ never deserted these publications while ‘women’ hardly appear.

This corpus is a description of the likely writing perspectives of those who wrote on cooperation: the decisive recruitment of university-educated staff for CWS political education and outside advertising also transformed the profile of in-house writers, in the 1930s. Generations of in-house writers followed each other with for instance Jack Bailey in the 1950s and 1960s. Collaboration with Labour-leaning academics and Fabians remain frequent albeit with explanations on the circumstances in which the funding and the collaboration took place for instance in the preface of Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders, Philip Sargant Florence, and Robert Peers to 1938 Consumers’ Co-Operation in Great Britain, an Examination of the British Co-Operative Movement. The Cooperation Society confirmed its increasingly political self-description occupying the whole space of ‘consumers’ with Labour narratives. The strategical reprints of books and pamphlets occupied much of publishing space, making it almost impossible for outsiders with original relevance to be considered in the period 1870 to 1930, the scope of this article. What then could have been the consequences on the relation between power and knowledge?

Provisional Conclusion

Knowledge on consumer theory hardly changed because of that reprint strategy indeed, but also because intellectual challenges seemed to have been too few to mainstream cooperation. Academic writers looked at what existed and wrote relevant analytical comments; they did not propose other avenues unlike what activists could have done. Beyond the integration in the Labour Party which took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, not much else was seen as challenging, which in the long run must have killed the potential interest of other groups such as women consumers. This surely killed off, so to speak, the potentially democratic making of a consumer democracy. Unsurprisingly, it obliterated TBG’s 1912 initiative. Besides, in this period, activists including working-class activists challenged the traditional middle-class writing of social contest. Writing books and press articles became an opportunity for more people, yet reviewing and publishing seemed to have remained safely for middle-class educated minds. Writing about one’s political fight and one’s ideas as TBG did was a challenge that she lost as she never reached the stage of political discussion with those who did not agree with her. The accusation of ‘bad writing’ as opposed to standard middle-class writing was intentional in the two 1912 reviews of TheConsumer in Revolt (Common Cause, The Freewoman): who then was legitimate to voice one’s ideas when they challenged established education, order and knowledge?

In 1912, TBG’s political isolation was total and her best enemies more numerous than ever. She had betrayed her suffragist comrades or associates with her ruthless analysis, as if she had been an outside opponent and not a member of that group. Her objective, becoming a feminist writer, or a political essayist without a political community made it difficult if not impossible as she could never be legitimate for anyone. The very nature of essay writing implied that controversy and polemical arguments should have taken place; TBG’s belief in debating which she expressed at the end of The Consumer in Revolt (Billington-Greig, 1912, p. 114)14 never took off as her invitation was ignored even though Redfern enriched his own female consumer developments for a short while in 1913–14. The gendered political approach to consumption did not take off in the 1910s, nor 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s… and thus deserves further examination with changing ideal types.

Teresa Billington-Greig has been aptly described as ‘a Woman of ideas’ (Harrison, 1987, pp. 45–72). She has produced knowledge that was crushed because of her personal isolation and because her gendered approach may have been too smart to be understood. At the time, gender knowledge was still being thought by feminists while many suffragists kept away from it. Even for willing contemporaries, understanding it and taking it on board would have been difficult. Her knowledge proposition in The Consumer in Revolt was the single alternative to in-house and academic analyses of those decades; she never became a contemporary consumer reference then, and so never entered consumer historiography. This case study is another avatar of the missed opportunities with gendered politics that Labour and unions experienced then. Courageous Teresa Billington-Greig did not stand a chance in 1912.