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ABSTRACT
Drawing on the records of Labour’s annual women’s conference, this article analyses why, how and with what effects women activists in the Labour Party claimed to represent ‘the housewife’ in post-war Britain. Building on longstanding traditions on the left, Labour women saw a politics of housewifery as the most effective means of advancing the interests of working-class women in post-war Britain, and asserted the housewife's need for state intervention, good quality housing, and generous welfare provision. They also recognised that the housewife’s concerns extended far beyond her own home, and were keen to promote her interests in different arenas, including paid work. Yet the success of groups like the British Housewives League meant that Labour women found it increasingly difficult to pursue a left-wing politics of the housewife. In opposition, they began to adopt the language of consumerism, losing sight of the emphasis on gender which had made their politics distinctive. This article thus shows that housewifery was a malleable and contested identity in the post-war period, valuable to those on the left as well as non-partisan women and those on the right. It also provides a new perspective on longstanding debates over the Labour Party’s failure to appeal to women voters.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust for funding an early career fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. I am also grateful to staff at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the London Metropolitan Archives; and especially to Darren Treadwell and Simon Sheppard at the People's History Museum, Manchester. Thanks to Anna Morris who kindly tracked down files that I was missing. Colleagues at the Women's History Network's conference in 2021 and the Social History Society's Conference in 2022 offered useful feedback on these ideas. Thanks to Amanda Langley, Miri Rubin, and those in the School of History's writing group at QMUL, and to Maggie Andrews and others in her writing group, for their support. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer at Women's History Review for thoughtful and precise suggestions. Thank you to Maggie Andrews and Anna Muggeridge for the opportunity to be part of this special issue, and for hospitality, advice and friendship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 She was also chair of the full party that year.
2 Report of the Twenty-Eighth National Conference of Labour Women (hereafter, Labour women’s conference), 1951, 27. Conference reports are available in a variety of locations: I consulted the holdings at the People’s History Museum, Manchester; the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the London Metropolitan Archives.
3 Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 3. The emphasis is Lawrence’s.
4 Pamela Graves, ‘An Experiment in Women-Centred Socialism: Labour Women in Britain’, in Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe Between the Two World Wars eds. Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Pamela Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Christine Collette, The Newer Eve: Women, Feminists and the Labour Party (Basingstoke: Macmillian, 2009).
5 June Hannam, ‘“Making Areas Strong for Socialism and Peace”: Labour Women and Radical Politics in Bristol, 1906-1939’, in Radical Cultures and Local Identities eds. Krista Cowman and Ian Packer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); June Hannam and Karen Hunt, ‘Towards an Archaelology of Interwar Women’s Politics: The Local and the Everyday’, in The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918–1945 eds. Julie V Gottleib and Richard Toye, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2013); Karen Hunt, ‘Making Politics in Local Communities: Labour Women in Interwar Manchester’, in Matthew Worley (ed.), Labour’s Grass Roots: Essays on the Activities of Local Labour Parties and Members, 1918–45 (Aldershot, 2005); Pat Thane, ‘Labour and Local Politics: Radicalism, Democracy and Social Reform, 1880-1914’, in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914, eds. Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
6 Pat Thane, ‘Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare State: The Case of Women in the British Labour Party and Social Policy’, in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, eds Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (eds.), (London: Routledge, 1991); Pat Thane, ‘Women in the British Labour Party and the Construction of State Welfare, 1906-39’, in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, eds. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, (London: Routledge, 1993).
7 Nan Sloane, The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History, (London: IB Tauris, 2018); Lowri Newman, ‘‘“Providing an opportunity to exercise their energies”: The role of the Labour women’s sections in shaping political identities, South Wales, 1918-1939’, in Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? eds. Esther Breitenbach and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 2010); Stephanie Ward, ‘Labour Activism and the Political Self in Inter-War Working-Class Women’s Politics’, Twentieth Century British History 30, (2019).
8 For a summary, see Martin Francis, ‘Labour and Gender’, in Labour’s First Century, eds. Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
9 Graves, Labour Women, Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain Since 1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2015) 114;
10 See especially Steven Fielding, The Labour Governments 1964-70: Labour and Cultural Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) 113-138. Martin Pugh, Speak For Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (Oxford: Vintage, 2010) especially 201, 297.
11 Christine Collette, ‘‘Daughter of the Newer Eve’: The Labour Movement and Women’, in Labour’s Promised Land? Culture and Society in Labour Britain 1945–51, ed. Jim Fryth, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995); Nigel Todd, ‘Labour Women: A Study of Women in the Bexley Branch of the British Labour Party (1945-1950)’, Journal of Contemporary History, 8, (1973).
12 Betty Boothroyd, The Autobiography (London: Arrow, 2001) 28.
13 Joyce Gould, The Witchfinder General (London: Biteback, 2016) 48-52.
14 Joan Maynard, elected MP for Sheffield Brightside in 1974, was present at women’s conference from at least 1954, when she contributed to resolutions on West German rearmament and child labour in agriculture as a representative of the National Union of Agricultural Workers.
15 Collette, ‘‘Daughter of the Newer Eve’’, 48.
16 On challenges to the wave metaphor, see Jo Reger, ‘Finding a Place in History: The Discursive Legacy of the Wave Metaphor and Contemporary Feminism’, Feminist Studies, 43, (2017); Clare Hemmings, ‘Telling Feminist Stories’, Feminist Theory, 6, (2005).
17 Joanna Bourke, ‘Housewifery in Working-Class England 1860-1914’, Past & Present, 143, (1994); Judy Giles, ‘A Home of One’s Own: Women and Domesticity in England 1918-1950’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 16, (1993); Judy Giles, ‘Good Housekeeping: Professionalising the Housewife, 1920-1950’, in Women and Work Culture: Britain c1850-1950, eds. Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson (London: Routledge, 2005); Karen Hunt, ‘Labour Woman and the Housewife’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939, eds. Catherine Clay et al., (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
18 Gillian Scott, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women: The Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War (London: Routledge, 1998); Peter Gurney, ‘Redefining ‘the woman with the basket’: The Women’s Co-operative Guild and the Politics of Consumption in Britain during the Second World War’, Gender and History, 32, (2020).
19 Karen Hunt, ‘Gendering the Politics of the Working Woman’s Home’, in Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950, eds. Elizabeth Darling and Leslie Whitworth (London: Routledge, 2007) 107; June Hannam, ‘Women as Paid Organisers and Propagandists for the British Labour Party Between the Wars’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 77, (2010), 79. See also Karen Hunt, ‘Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption’, Women’s History Review, 9, (2000); Karen Hunt, ‘A Heroine At Home: The Housewife on the First World War Home Front’, in The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences Since 1914, eds. Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2014); Caroline Rowan, ‘Women in the Labour Party, 1906-1920’, Feminist Review, 12, (1982) and Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 79-136.
20 David Thackeray, ‘Home and Politics: Women and Conservative Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 49, (2010); David Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 5, (1994); David Jarvis, ‘The Conservative Party and the Politics of Gender, 1900-39’, in The Conservatives and British Society, 1880–1990, eds. Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the Gender Gap: The Conservative Party and the Women’s Vote, 1945-1964’, in The Conservatives and British Society eds. Francis and Zweiniger-Bargielowska, (1996).
21 Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997 rev. 2015); Caitríona Beaumont, ‘Citizens not Feminists: The Boundary Negotiated Between Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women’s Organisations in England, 1928-39’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 9, (2000); Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–1964 (Manchester: Manchester Univesrsity Press, 2013); Caitríona Beaumont, ‘Housewives, Workers and Citizens: Voluntary Women’s Organizations and the Campaign for Women’s Rights in England and Wales in the Post War Period’, in NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics Since 1945, eds. Nick Crownson, Matthew Hilton, and James McKay (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009).
22 James Hinton, ‘Militant Housewives: the British Housewives’ League and the Attlee Government’, History Workshop Journal, 38, (1994); Beatrix Campbell, Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory (London: Virago, 1987), 76-82; Joe Moran, ‘Queuing up in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 16, (2005) 284-288; Gary Love, ‘A ‘Mixture of Britannia and Boadicea’: Dorothy Crisp’s Conservatism and the Limits of Right-Wing Women’s Political Activism, 1927-48’, Twentieth Century British History, 30, (2018).
23 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Housewifery’, in Women in Twentieth Century Britain, ed. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2001); Charlotte Wildman and Eloise Moss, ‘Challenging Domesticity in Britain, 1890-1990: Special Issue Introduction’, Women’s History Review, 32, (2023).
24 June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London: Routledge, 2002). The alternative historiographical perspective is set out in Anne Phillips, Divided Loyalties: Dilemmas of Sex and Class (London, 1987) and Harold L. Smith, ‘Sex vs Class: British Feminists and the Labour Movement, 1919-1929’, Historian, 47, (1984).
25 Much of the scholarship follows the argument made by Graves, Labour Women.
26 Collette, ‘‘Daughter of the Newer Eve’’ 43.
27 See, for example, Harold Croft, Party Organisation (London: Labour Party, 1957) 10th edition, 28-29; Sara Barker, How the Labour Party Works (London: Labour Party, 1955) 9-10. Barker became the Chief Woman Officer in 1960.
28 The exact percentage of delegates from trade unions ranged across the period, but broadly speaking, around one in every eight delegates was from a union in this period. It was higher in some years, notably 1959, when the number of delegates from the women’s sections fell to 391. Labour Party and co-operative or socialist representation was far lower, comprising only a handful of delegates.
29 Appointed on the death of Dr Marion Phillips in 1932, Mary Sutherland served in this role until 1960. Sutherland, Mary Elizabeth (1895-1972) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39184
30 It was renamed the National Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organisations in 1952.
31 Labour women’s conference, 1928, 7. Lawrence was chair that year.
32 Richard Jobson, Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) 20.
33 They were not fully minuted until the 1980s. Amy Black and Stephen Brooke, ‘The Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender, 1951-66’, Journal of British Studies, 36, (1997) 432.
34 Labour women’s conference, 1947, 21, 13. The Manchester Guardian, 1 October 1947, 5; Liverpool Echo, 30 September 1947, 4.
35 Labour women’s conference 1955, 17-18. There was some concern expressed that these reforms privileged constituency representation at the expense of the sections.
36 Labour’s full conference reports include names of delegates and the names and addresses of the relevant secretaries. This was not provided for the women’s conference.
37 Steven Fielding, ‘‘White heat’ and white collars: The Evolution of ‘Wilsonism’ ‘, in The Wilson Governments, 1964–1970 eds. Richard Coopey, Steven Fielding, and Nick Tiratsoo, (Exeter: Pinter, 1993) 36; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘Labour and its critics: the case of the May Day Manifesto Group’, in The Wilson Governments, 1964-1970, 167.
38 See for example, Labour women’s conference 1952, 16. This did not mean it was unimportant to them. Several former MPs continued to attend and contribute beyond the loss of their seat or their retirement, notably Lucy Middleton, MP for Plymouth Sutton from 1945-50, who was a regular and vocal participant. For example, Labour women’s conference, 155, 35; 1957, 23, 42; 1958, 34; 1959, 16-17, 19, 32.
39 Black and Brooke, ‘The Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender’, 432-3.
40 The women’s conference report was explicitly mentioned only a handful of times in full conference reports; for example, in 1945 when Mrs Lenthall from North East Derby District Labour Party lamented the lack of female candidates for Parliament, and in 1950, when John Muir from Dundee Branch Labour Party raised the question of Scottish Representation on the SJCWWO. Labour conference 1945, 82 and 1950, 83.
41 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
42 Jennifer Purcell, ‘The Domestic Soldier: British Housewives and the Nation in the Second World War’, History Compass, 4, (2006).
43 In a vast literature, see, for example, Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) chapter four; Maggie Andrews, Women and Evacuation in the Second World War: Femininity, Domesticity and Motherhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) especially chapters 5 and 7; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain.
44 Jane Lewis, ‘Gender, the family and women’s agency in the building of ‘welfare states’: The British case’, Social History, Vol 19, (1994); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Peter Sloman, ‘Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942–55’, Contemporary British History, 30, (2016).
45 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, 126.
46 Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of the Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40, (2005)
47 Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens, 72. For example, Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the Gender Gap’ 196.
48 For example, see Labour women’s conference 1946, 26; 1949, 40. For the history of the NIH see Lucy Delap, Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 128–9 and especially Pamela Horn, ‘Experiment or Anachronism? The role of the National Institute of Houseworkers’, Labour History Review, 66, (2001).
49 Labour women’s conference 1946, 15.
50 Black and Brooke, ‘The Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender’ 433.
51 For a classic article on the centrality of race to the construction of national identity in this era, see Chris Waters, ‘"Dark Strangers" in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963’, Journal of British Studies, 36, (1997); and for a recent assessment of Labour’s implicit assumptions of whiteness among voters, see Charlotte Lydia Riley, ‘Must Labour Lose? The 1959 Election and the Politics of the People’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 47, (2021). Labour women affirmed their commitment to racial equality in their discussions of colonial development, but such discussions, not framed in terms of housewifery, are beyond the scope of this article.
52 Labour women’s conference, 1948, 44.
53 Labour women’s conference, 1955, 14.
54 Labour women’s conference, 1948, 7.
55 Labour women’s conference 1946, 16.
56 Labour women’s conference, 1952, 21.
57 Labour’s women’s conference, 1947, 9, 1.
58 Hinton, ‘Militant Housewives’ 146-148. For an account of some of its later activities, see Amy C. Whipple, ‘‘Into Every Home, Into Every Body’: Organicism and Anti-Statism in the British Anti-Fluoridation Movement, 1952–1960’, Twentieth Century British History, 21, (2010).
59 Labour women’s conference 1955, 21
60 Labour women’s conference, 1959, 13. Miller chaired Labour women’s conference in 1967.
61 Labour women’s conference 1949, 10, 37-40.
62 Labour women’s conference 1946, 35.
63 Labour women’s conference 1949, 39.
64 Labour women’s conference 1947, 22.
65 Labour women’s conference, 1948, 43.
66 Labour’s women’s conference 1946, 5.
67 For example, Labour women’s conference 1948, 31; 1949, 20.
68 Labour women’s conference 1948, 9, see also 31.
69 Labour women’s conference 1949, 10.
70 Labour women’s conference 1949, 12.
71 Labour women’s conference 1949, 32.
72 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, 58-59. For the wider context, see Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries, and Paul Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapters four and five.
73 Labour women’s conference 1949, 38. Alma Birk was elected to the borough council the following year. She unsuccessfully stood for Parliament throughout the 1950s, served on the National Labour Women’s Advisory Council, and was raised to the peerage in 1967.
74 Labour women’s conference 1946, 49.
75 Labour women’s conference 1948, 42-3.
76 Labour women’s conference 1949, 10-11.
77 Labour women’s conference, 1948, 27.
78 Labour women’s conference 1949, 30. Jessie Stephen was a lifelong activist for both women’s rights and the labour movement, forming a pioneering trade union for domestic workers while still a teenager. See Laura Schwartz, ‘ ‘What we think is needed is a union of domestics such as the miners have’: The Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland, 1908–14’, Twentieth Century British History, 25, (2014).
79 Labour women’s conference 1948, 9.
80 Labour women’s conference 1946, 46-7.
81 The Manchester Guardian, 5 September 1945, 6.
82 Labour women’s conference 1952, 20.
83 Labour women’s conference 1948, 43.
84 Labour women’s conference 1949, 16.
85 Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of the Home in Postwar Britain’.
86 Labour women’s conference 1948, 35-6.
87 Labour women’s conference 1946, 36-7; 1948, 17-18; 1953, 20; 1954, 27.
88 Labour women’s conference 1946, 22-33.
89 Labour women’s conference, 1949, 23.
90 Labour women’s conference 1953, 17-19. This discussion concerned the new national insurance provisions on maternity benefits, introduced under the former government by Dr Edith Summerskill.
91 Labour women’s conference, 1946, 31; 1948, 32.
92 Labour conference, 1949, 108-9.
93 Labour conference, 1950, 157.
94 Labour conference, 1950, 156.
95 See, for example, Labour women’s conference 1955, 26-29; 1957, 40-42; 1958, 22-25; 1959, 24-27.
96 Collette, The Newer Eve, 112.
97 Labour women’s conference 1955, 35; 1958, 36-37.
98 Labour women’s conference, 1949, 36-37; 1953, 26; 1955, 15 and 35.
99 Labour women’s conference 1946, 22-3.
100 Labour women’s conference 1953, 16.
101 For surveys of these trends, see Denise Riley, War in the Nursery (London: Virago, 1983) 84-108; Gerry Holloway, Women and Work in Britain Since 1840 (London: Routledge, 2005) 183-208; Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 79-105; Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood in Modern Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) 197-259.
102 Dolly Smith Wilson, ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 17 (2006) 209; Helen McCarthy, ‘Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-War Britain’, Past & Present, 233, (2016), 269.
103 Smith Wilson, ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’; Stephen Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain in the 1950s’, Journal of Social History, 34, (2001); McCarthy, ‘Social Science and Married Women’s Employment’; Laura Paterson, ‘‘I didn’t feel like my own person’: paid work in women’s narratives of self and working motherhood, 1950–1980’, Contemporary British History, 33, (2019)
104 Labour women’s conference, 1946, 48-9.
105 See Equal Pay (Government Policy) HC Deb 11 June 1947 vol 438 cc1069-75. There are some doubts are to how far the Party leadership was genuinely committed even to the principle of equal pay at this time. Jim Tomlinson, Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years, 1945–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 200-2. On the wider economic context for this statement, which followed the announcement of the Marshall Plan and preceded the convertibility crisis, see, for example, Catherine Schenk, The Decline of Sterling: Managing the Retreat of an International Currency, 1945–1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 37-82; Richard Toye, The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931–1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 185-235.
106 Labour women’s conference, 1946, 48-9.
107 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the Gender Gap’, 196. On equal pay in this period more widely, see Harold L. Smith, ‘The Politics of Conservative reform: the equal pay for equal work issue, 1945-1955’, Historical Journal, 35, (1992); Helen Glew, Gender, Rhetoric, and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016) 146-177; Helen Glew, ‘In a Minority in Male Spaces: The Networks, Relationships and Collaborations between Women MPs and Women Civil Servants, 1919–1955’, Open Library of Humanities 6, (2020).
108 Labour women’s conference, 1948, 39.
109 The Manchester Guardian, 1 October 1948, 1, Labour women’s conference 1948, 39-40.
110 For example, Labour conference 1947, 157-159.
111 Labour women’s conference 1952, 21; 1954, 37; 1958, 42-43.
112 Labour women’s conference 1955, 44.
113 Smith, ‘The Politics of Conservative Reform’, 410; Black and Brooke, ‘The Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender’, 445; The 1953 draft NEC Statement: Labour’s Challenge to Britain: programme of action for the next Labour government, and the 1954 revision can be consulted in ‘Labour Party Pamphlets and Leaflets,’ People’s History Museum.
114 Labour women’s conference 1949, 46, see also, 1954, 36.
115 Sheila Lewenhack, Women and Trade Unions: An Outline of Women in the Trade Union Movement (London: St Martin’s Press, 1977) 247-252.
116 Labour women’s conference 1958, 19.
117 Labour women’s conference 1948, 23.
118 Labour conference 1947, 151.
119 On the history of wartime and post-war nurseries, see Riley, War in the Nursery, 110-148; Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London: Routledge, 1984 (reprinted 2013)) 67-98; McCarthy, Double Lives, 176–182 and 197-209.
120 Manning herself was a strong supporter of day nurseries in factories, asking the full conference for trade union support on the grounds that they provided a better service to mothers than private nurseries. Labour conference 1947, 151.
121 Labour women’s conference 1946, 44.
122 Susan L. Carruthers, ‘‘Manning the Factories’: Propaganda and Policy on the Employment of Women, 1939–47’, History, lxxv (1990), 247-256; Tomlinson, Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy, 190-7.
123 Labour women’s conference 1947, 34.
124 Labour women’s conference, 1948, 38.
125 Labour women’s conference 1952, 19. A long-time representative on the London County Council, Crout was representing the newly formed National Labour Women’s Advisory Council, discussed further below.
126 Labour women’s conference, 1957, 11.
127 Labour women’s conference, 1957, 50.
128 For example, Labour women’s conference, 1955, 21-22, 46.
129 Labour women’s conference, 1952. 9
130 Labour women’s conference, 1952, 16.
131 Labour women’s conference 1953, 31.
132 Labour women’s conference 1959, 46.
133 Labour women’s conference, 1953, 36-7; 1954, 33-4; 1957, 28.
134 Labour women’s conference, 1954, 9
135 Claire Langhamer, ‘‘Who the hell are ordinary people?’ Ordinariness as a category of historical analysis.’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 28 (2018) 13.
136 Mike Savage, ‘Working-Class Identities in the 1960s: Revisiting the Affluent Worker Study’, Sociology, 39, (2005); Matthew Hilton, ‘Politics is Ordinary: Non-governmental Organizations and Political Participation in Contemporary Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22, (2011); Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference 1968–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
137 On the centrality of such memories to the labour movement more widely, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) chapter eight.
138 Labour women’s conference, 1954, 31.
139 Labour women’s conference, 1954, 31.
140 Labour women’s conference 1951, 46.
141 Labour women’s conference, 1954, 20.
142 Labour women’s conference 1952, 37; 1954, 9-10.
143 Labour women’s conference 1954, 25.
144 Labour women’s conference, 1955, 22.
145 Labour women’s conference, 1952, 34. This complaint was reiterated the following year: 1953, 42.
146 The 1956 pamphlet celebrating their jubilee was even entitled Fifty Years of Service. Labour Party Pamphlets and Leaflets, People’s History Museum.
147 See, for example, Aneurin Bevan’s remarks to Labour Party conference, 1950, 131. For discussion, see Hinton, ‘Militant Housewives’.
148 For contrasting views on this, see Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the Gender Gap’, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Rationing, Austerity, and the Conservative Party Recovery After 1945’, Historical Journal, 37 (1994) and James Hinton, ‘Women and the Labour Vote, 1945-50’, Labour History Review, 57, (1992).
149 ‘The Recent General Election and the Next’, NEC Minutes 22 March 1950, Labour Party Archives, People’s History Museum.
150 ‘General Election 1950–Notes on the Findings of the Public Opinion Polls’ RD350/Apr. 11 1950. General Election 1950 Election Addresses, Labour Party Archives, People’s History Museum.
151 Summary of Discussion of Conference at Beatrice Webb House Dorking, 19–21 May 1950, NEC Minutes 3 June 1950, Labour Party Archives, People’s History Museum.
152 10 October 1951, Ruth Winstone, Tony Benn Years of Hope: Diaries, Papers and Letters, 1940–1962 (London: Hutchinson, 1994) 155.
153 A Mrs Ridealgh from Accrington Constituency Labour Party made the same point about women’s supposed susceptibility to Labour conference in 1951. Labour conference 1951, 82-3.
154 Labour women’s conference 1952, 12.
155 Labour women’s conference 1955, 22.
156 Labour women’s conference 1953, 25. See also, Labour women’s conference 1954, 8-9.
157 Fielding, ‘‘White heat’ and white collars’.
158 Appendix, 1947–1948 Annual Report of the SJCWWC, NEC Minutes 26 January-23 February 1949, Labour Party Archives, People’s History Museum.
159 Labour women’s conference 1955, 29.
160 Labour women’s conference 1958, 14.
161 The National Labour Women’s Advisory Committee, founded after the 1951 was the result of a desire among Labour Party women to advise the Party on issues which were not under the purview of the SJCWWO. There is little evidence that it received any more attention than the earlier body, and indeed, contributed to the diminution of the SJCWWO. Collette, The Newer Eve, 113-4.
162 ‘Special campaign for early 1951’ NEC January 1951, NEC Minutes 24 January 1951.
163 General Election Campaign 1951, General Secretary’s Report–Section II, NEC Minutes 7 November 1951, Labour Party Archives, People’s History Museum. A family bereavement had interrupted Sutherland’s campaigning.
164 Labour women’s conference 1955, 3.
165 Labour women’s conference 1955, 21.
166 Labour women’s conference 1955, 16.
167 Gurney, ‘Redefining ‘the woman with the basket’’, 192.
168 Labour women’s conference 1955, 13-14.
169 Labour women’s conference 1957, 10.
170 Labour women’s conference, 1957, 31.
171 Labour women’s conference 1957, 47-48.
172 This was a more widespread trend. See Matthew Hilton, ‘The female consumer and the politics of consumption in twentieth-century Britain’, Historical Journal, 45, (2002); Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain.
173 Labour women’s conference 1955, 11.
174 Labour women’s conference 1955, 10; 1954, 34.
175 Labour women’s conference 1958, 15-17.
176 Labour women’s conference 1955 33-4, 46; 1959, 47-48.
177 Nick Tiratsoo, ‘Popular Politics, Affluence and the Labour Party in the 1950s’, in Contemporary British History, 1931-61: Politics and the Limits of Policy eds. Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman, and W. Scott Lucas, (London, 1991); Stephen Brooke, ‘Labour and the ‘nation’ after 1945’, in Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain Since 1820, eds. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, (Aldershot, 1997); Steven Fielding, ‘Activists against "Affluence": Labour Party Culture during the "Golden Age," circa 1950-1970’, Journal of British Studies, 40, (2001); Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951-64: Old Labour, New Britain? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003); Stuart Middleton, ‘‘Affluence’ and the Left in Britain, c.1958–1974’, English Historical Review, 129, (2014).
178 Indeed, they sometimes referred to themselves in this way. Labour women’s conference 1949, 30.
179 Jobson, Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour Party, 71; Black and Brooke, ‘The Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender’ 430-1. On the further evolution of women’s conference, see the account in Meg Russell, Building New Labour: The Politics of Party Organisation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005) 96-128.
180 Reflecting dissatisfaction which stretched back to the 1920s, the seeds of this discontent were already visible towards the end of the 1950s. Labour women’s conference, 1958, 34.
181 Labour women’s conference 1949, 12.
182 Kerrie McGiveron, ‘‘Notes on a Community Struggle’: Big Flame, the Kirkby rent strike and the ‘mass struggle of housewives’’, Women’s History Review, 32, (2022).
183 Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, ‘Vernacular Discourses Of Gender Equality In The Post-War British Working Class’, Past & Present, 251, (2022).
184 For the contemporary potential, see, for example, Eleanor Jupp, ‘Home space, gender and activism: The visible and the invisible in austere times’, Critical Social Policy, 37, (2017).
185 Black and Brooke, ‘The Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender’; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the Gender Gap’.
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Lyndsey Jenkins
Lyndsey Jenkins is a Departmental Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Oxford. She is a historian of women, politics, and social change. She earned her DPhil from Wolfson College, Oxford, and recently held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London, where she conducted this research thanks to grant number ECF 2020-264. She is the author of Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Family, Class and Suffrage c.1890-1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr (London: Biteback, 2016); and the editor, with Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, of The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London: University of London Press, 2021). Her work has been published in Cultural and Social History, Women’s History Review, Twentieth Century British History, and the Political Quarterly.