‘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.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s Co-operative Guild
• divorce
• marriage
• reform

Acknowledgements

For comments on earlier drafts of this article many thanks to Maggie Andrews, Jan Lomas, Anna Muggeridge, Frances Pine and the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Minutes of Evidence, 151.

2 Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ‘The Claims of Mothers and Children’, in Women and the Labour Party, ed. Marion Phillips (London: Headley, 1918), 29.

3 Minutes of Evidence, 149–73, evidence of Margaret Llewelyn Davies and Eleanor Barton. See also: Women’s Co-operative Guild, Working Women and Divorce, an Account of Evidence Given on Behalf of the Women’s Co-operative Guild before the Royal Commission on Divorce (London: David Nutt, 1911).

4 Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ed., Life as We have Known It (London: Virago, 1977) and Maternity, Letters from Working Women (London: Virago, 1978).

5 Jean Gaffin and David Thoms, Caring and Sharing, the Centenary History of the Women’s Co-operative Guild (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1983); Gillian Scott, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women (London: UCL Press, 1998) and ‘Working Out Their Own Salvation: Women’s Autonomy and Divorce Law Reform in the Co-operative Movement, 1910-1920’, in New Views of Co-operation, ed. Stephen Yeo (London: Routledge, 1988); Barbara J. Blaszak, The Matriarchs of England’s Co-operative Movement (Westport: Greenwood, 2000).

6 For the Guild and suffrage, see for example, Sandra Holton, Feminism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 60–5; Gillian Scott, ‘The Women’s Co-operative Guild’, in Suffrage outside Suffragism: Women’s Vote in Britain, 1880—1914, ed. Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women, Britain, 1880s-1920 (London: Routledge, 2002).

7 See for example Andrew Flinn, ‘Mothers for Peace, Co-operation, Feminism and Peace: The Women’s Co-operative Guild and the Anti-war Movement between the Wars’, in Consumerism and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock, eds. Lawrence Black and Nicole Robertson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Sarah Hellawell, ‘“A Strong International Spirit”: The Influence of Internationalism on the Women’s Co-operative Guild’, Twentieth Century British History 31, no. 1 (2021): 93–118.

8 Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Nicole Robertson, The Co-operative Movement and Communities in Britain, 1914-1960: Minding their Own Business (London: Routledge, 2016).

9 Rachael Vorberg-Rugh, ‘“The Unit of the Co-operative Movement is a Woman”: Gender and the Development of the Co-operative Business Model’, in Mainstreaming Co-operation: An Alternative for the 21st Century? eds., Anthony Webster, Linda Shaw, and Rachael Vorberg-Rugh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 90–111. See also: 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 31, no. 1 (2020): 189–207. Aspects of gender politics in the movement were highlighted in relation to the Guild’s earlier period in Barbara J. Blaszak, ‘The Gendered Geography of the English Co-operative Movement at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Women’s History Review 9, no. 3 (2000): 559–83; John K. Wilson, ‘Locality, Gender and Co-operation in England: A Comment on Barbara J. Blaszak’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 3 (2003): 477–88; Barbara J. Blaszak, ‘The Hazards of Localism: A Reply to John K. Walton’, Women’s History Review 12, no. 3 (2003): 489–98.

10 Jacky Burnett, ‘Exposing The “Inner Life”: The Women’s Co-operative Guild’s Attitude to “Cruelty”’, in Everyday Violence in Britain: Gender and Class, ed. Shani D’Cruze (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), 137.

11 A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992), 44 and 50; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast, Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris, 2001), 184.

12 Kathryn Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 127.

13 For my previous work see Ruth Cohen, ‘Mothers First’: The Women’s Co-operative Guild’s Campaign for Maternity Care, 1906-18’, Women's History no. 2 (2016): 11–18; Margaret Llewelyn Davies: With Women for a New World (Dagenham: Merlin Press, 2020).

14 However see note 21: this division was not always rigid, and often ‘largely separate fields of endeavour for men and women [were] coupled with a strong sense of interdependence’ Vorberg-Rugh, Unit of the Co-operative Movement, 92.

15 O. R. MacGregor, Divorce in England, a Centenary Study (London: Heinemann, 1957), 24–5; Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 62.

16 Gurney, Co-operative Culture.

17 See Rachael Vorberg-Rugh, ‘Employers and Workers: Conflicting Identities in the British Co-operative Movement’, in Consumerism and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British History: Taking Stock, ed. Lawrence Black and Nicole Robertson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 122–34.

18 Women’s Co-operative Guild, Annual Report 1909-1910.

19 Manchester Guardian, 24 June 1914.

20 Minutes of Evidence, 150. It has been suggested though that in this period Guildswomen’s husbands’ occupations varied more widely than this, see Pamela M. Graves, Labour Women, Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918-39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 43–4.

21 According to Davies, many of those Guildswomen who did work outside the home worked in mills and factories, especially in Lancashire where there was a tradition of women continuing to work after marriage. Other individual occupations reported included nursing, cleaning, dressmaking and teaching. See Davies, Maternity, 191; Catherine Webb, The Woman with the Basket, the Story of the Women’s Co-operative Guild (Manchester: Co-operative Wholesale Society, 1927), 74.

22 See Davies, Maternity, which includes details of letter-writers’ husbands’ wages, and lists occupations (192–3). For individual testimony see Davies, Life as We Have Known It. For comparison, in 1913 Fabian Women’s Group research in London reported that respectable families with husbands earning ‘top’ wages were bringing up children on wholly inadequate wages; Maud Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week (London: Virago, 1979), ix.

23 Scott, Feminism and the Politics, 4.

24 Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London: Virago, 1978).

25 See for example, Cohen, ‘Mothers First’ and Cohen, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Chapter 13. The Guild went on to support birth control and abortion in the 1920s and 1930s, see Scott, Feminism and the Politics, 243.

26 Webb, The Woman with the Basket, 69–79; Vorberg-Rugh, ‘The Unit of the Co-operative Movement,’ 90.

27 See for example Vorberg-Rugh, ‘Employers and Workers,’ 122–34; Cohen, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, chapter 11.

28 The consultation was initially with branches and then the Guild’s annual Congress; the latter overwhelmingly supported the motion without discussion. Co-operative News, July 16, 1910; Minutes of Evidence, 150.

29 Along the lines of recent reforms in Norway. Fru Ella Anker gave evidence about these to the Commission (see Minutes of Evidence, vol. ii) and also wrote and presented a paper for discussion in the Guild: Fru Ella Anker, Marriage and Divorce (London: Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1911).

30 Women’s Co-operative Guild Central Committee Minutes, September 8 and 9, 1910. All the selected officials were, or had previously been, elected as president (chair) or secretary of local branches across the country. Davies herself seems to have selected the 124 individuals, though when challenged at the Commission she asserted that she had not known their views on divorce in advance, but selected them on the grounds of their ‘special intelligence’.

31 Achieving consensus was highly valued within the Guild, and given events discussed later in this article, this lack of response may well have reflected an unwillingness to express open disagreement.

32 The Mothers’ Union, one of whose aims was to uphold what it saw as the sanctity of marriage, vigorously opposed divorce and excluded divorced women from membership: see Catriona Beaumont, ‘“Citizens not Feminists”: The Boundary Negotiated between Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women's Organisations in England, 1928-39’, Women’s History Review 9, no. 2 (2000): 11–429, 416.

33 Burnett, ‘Exposing the “Inner Life”’, 137.

34 Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, 63.

35 See Women's Co-operative Guild, Working Women and Divorce.

36 Women’s Co-operative Guild, Annual Report, 1913–14. For fuller accounts of subsequent conflicts within the Guild and between the Guild and the co-operative leadership, see for example Scott, Feminism and the Politics; Cohen, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 163–7.

37 The Keep Archive, University of Sussex, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, undated letter to Leonard Woolf. Note that a divorce resolution to the Guild congress on similar lines to the previous year’s went through without noticeable difficulty. See Women’s Co-operative Guild, Annual Report, 1914–15; Co-operative News, June 27, 1914.

38 Minutes of Evidence, 150.

39 Ibid., 171.

40 Ibid., 150.

41 Ibid., 151

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 156.

44 Ibid.

45 See Davies, Maternity, new introduction by Gloden Dallas. See also note 25.

46 For the legal position, see Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, 12–13 and 52. In the evidence, marital rape tended to be referred to obliquely, for example ‘ … she has to be insulted with him every time the thinks fit’, Minutes of Evidence, 164.

47 Minutes of Evidence, 171.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 167.

50 Ibid., 152. See also Burnett, ‘Exposing the “Inner Life”,’ 144.

51 Minutes of Evidence, 167.

52 Ibid., 168.

53 Ibid., 163–4.

54 Ibid., 164.

55 Ibid., 163.

56 Ibid., 156.

57 Ibid., 155 and 163.

58 Ibid., 163 and 166.

59 See Gail Savage, ‘The Instrument of an Animal Function, Marital Rape and Sexual Cruelty in the Divorce Court, 1858-1908’, in The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, ed. Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Wills (London: Palgrave, 2009), 53. For an example of some men’s interpretation of conjugal rights, see Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 56.

60 Minutes of Evidence, 151.

61 Ibid., 153.

62 Ibid., 164.

63 Ibid., 156.

64 Ibid., 151.

65 Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, 12–13.

66 Minutes of Evidence, 158.

67 Ibid., 164 and 171.

68 Ibid., 164.

69 Ibid., 153.

70 Ibid., 164–5.

71 Ibid., 163.

72 Women’s Co-operative Guild, Working Women and Divorce, 37.

73 Minutes of Evidence, 164.

74 Ibid., 164.

75 Ibid., 163.

76 For working-class women’s employment in this period, see: Gerry Holloway, Women and Work in Britain Since 1940 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), Chapter 6, especially 106–7.

77 Minutes of Evidence, 167.

78 Ibid., 151.

79 Ibid., 167.

80 Ibid., 160.

81 Ibid., 164.

82 Ibid., 164.

83 See for example: Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

84 Davies, Maternity.

85 Minutes of Evidence, 151.

86 Women's Co-operative Guild, Working Women and Divorce, 29–30.

87 See Burnett, ‘Exposing the “Inner Life”’, 143–4.

88 Women's Co-operative Guild, Working Women and Divorce, 21.

89 Cohen, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 161.

90 Minutes of Evidence, 162 and 170.

91 Ibid., 152–3.

92 Ibid., 172.

93 Ibid., 152.

94 Ibid., 157.

95 Ibid., 168.

96 See Bland, Banishing the Beast, especially Chapter 4.

97 Minutes of Evidence, 151; see also Bland, Banishing the Beast, Chapter 3.

98 Women’s Co-operative Guild, Annual Report, 1910–1911. See also Cohen, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 149–51; Blaszak, The Matriarchs, 150, for differing interpretations of a legal dispute in 1907 over married women’s access to the dividend paid out by co-operative shops.

99 See Claire Langhamer, The English in Love, the Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

100 Minutes of Evidence, 151.

101 Co-operative News, 27 June 1914.

102 Cited in: Gillian Scott, ‘“A Trade Union for Married Women”: The Women’s Co-operative Guild 1914–1920’, in This Working-Day World, Women’s Lives and Culture(s) in Britain, 1914-45, ed. Sylvia Oldfield (London: Routledge, 1994), 18–28.

103 Women's Co-operative Guild, Working Women and Divorce, 21.

104 Scott, Feminism and the Politics, 4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Cohen

Ruth Cohen is an independent scholar who works on the Women’s Co-operative Guild in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her article about the Guild’s maternity campaign appeared in Women’s History in 2016, and her biography of its then General Secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, With Women for a New World, was published in 2020.