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Abstract
This article examines the role of feminist periodicals in mobilizing consensus for and against welfare reform measures such as the endowment of motherhood and birth control in the 1920s. It argues that the tendency to characterize the differences between ‘old’ (equalitarian) and ‘new’ (welfare) feminists as a conflict between equality and difference has been reductive and misleading. Both camps aimed to liberate women from the domestic sphere by ensuring opportunities and access in the sphere of work/professions, but for welfare feminists, equality was not enough because it accepted a world structured for men. The concept of self-determination is central to how new feminists like Eleanor Rathbone attempted to redefine the home and maternal labour as they championed controversial policies aimed at ensuring a degree of economic and reproductive autonomy for women. An analysis of the debates that played out in and between the Woman’s Leader and Time and Tide in the 1920s underscores the role of the feminist press in the processes of political and strategic communication, at a time when self-declared feminists were trying to achieve a range of goals in a context of hostile reaction. The article encourages a reassessment of the ambitious goals of welfare feminism in the interwar period and suggests that these struggles (often obscured by ‘equality’ feminism) have never completely gone away. They resurface in various forms—from ‘wages for housework’ campaigns to assessing the conditions and economics of motherhood for working women—all of which underscore the impact of the welfare state on relations in the family and the home.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The scholarship on the history of the welfare state and the specifically feminist analysis of women’s economic position within the family is too extensive to document here. Significant contributions to the history of early women’s movements and feminist social policy research include work by historians such as Jane Lewis, Susan Pedersen and Pat Thane. Also important are the analyses of new feminism in histories of feminism/women’s movements in the interwar period by Cheryl Law, Johanna Alberti, Barbara Caine, Valerie Bryson and Joanne Workman. In the case of the birth-control movement, Clare Debenham’s recent book has been a valuable addition to studies of individual birth-control activists (2014).
2 We are using the idea of ‘demise narratives’ or ‘demise historians’ as a shorthand to refer to the debates in the historiography of the women’s movement in the interwar period and specifically the influence of the work of figures like Susan Kingsley Kent, Martin Pugh, Deidre Beddoe and Olive Banks. For a more detailed analysis of these narratives and the challenges to them, see DiCenzo (Citation2014).
3 The director here was Millicent Fawcett, and it was from this board that she resigned very publically in 1925 in protest over the approval in principle of family allowances by the NUSEC at their annual council meeting. She had been a vocal opponent on the grounds that such a policy would diminish responsibility and encourage dependency.
4 Catherine Clay’s references to correspondence related to Time and Tide in her contribution to this special issue are a good example of how archival documents reveal editorial strategies and provide another layer to what is otherwise the public/official utterance of a given periodical.
5 It was by this time a convention in women’s periodicals to refer to the mainstream and daily newspapers as the ‘press’.
6 The correspondent, A. W. Handover, does not identify the specific article, but she is likely referring to Ada Nield Chew’s contribution to the debate, ‘Family Endowment: Another View’ (15 September 1922: 261–2). Chew was an outspoken critic of the policy and one of the few feminist voices to propose alternative approaches to family life, including day care and more involvement on the part of fathers.
7 Rathbone published other books on family allowances, but also relevant here is the connection between book and periodical publishing for a figure like Marie Stopes, whose books saw many editions, but who also produced the Birth Control News (1922–46). Many prominent feminists who contributed to feminist periodicals also published polemical books about the women’s movement—Winifred Holtby, Naomi Mitchison and Dora Russell to name a few. For a more detailed discussion of collections of essays on feminism post-1918, see DiCenzo (Citation2014).
8 William Beveridge, director of the London School of Economics at the time he read Rathbone’s book, was exploring measures for using the country’s wealth to provide public services in the interests of eradicating poverty. Already considering family allowances, Rathbone’s book offered the compelling evidence he needed, and he described himself as one of her ‘enthusiastic followers’ (Beveridge Citation1949: 270). In this way, Rathbone’s work would eventually influence the landmark Beveridge Report of 1942, which, in turn, established the foundation of the welfare state in Britain after the Second World War by creating a system of social security, including the National Health Service.
9 We deliberately use the term ‘endowment’ (even though the term ‘family allowances’ had become the more familiar term by 1922) because we want to stress the feminist origins of the reform. The shift to the concept of family allowances was itself a way of making proposed reforms more palatable by framing them in terms of reducing child poverty and less overtly in aid of women’s economic independence from husbands.
10 Pedersen offers a detailed analysis of these competing interests in what she terms the ‘failed campaign’ for the endowment of motherhood (Pedersen Citation1993).
11 The phrase is used in ‘Is Birth Control a Feminist Reform?’ (Woman’s Leader, 2 October 1925: 283).
12 The point about overlapping agendas is made frequently on the part of historians. Alberti goes as far as to refer to the ‘facile division of feminists into the old and the new’ (Alberti Citation1989: 165).
13 The terms we are using here are influenced by Craig Calhoun’s discussion of the features that old and new social movements share, and his use of the phrase ‘politicization of everyday life’ to describe social movements that disrupt the so-called ‘proper boundaries of the political’, noting how important political (or more generally macrostructural) results may stem from actions that are not explicitly political or instrumental in their self-understanding (Calhoun Citation2012: 264).
14 The debates in the historiography of the women’s movement in the interwar period are dealt with in DiCenzo (Citation2014).
15 For a discussion of the strategic use of history writing in the suffrage movement and the characterizations of organizations in terms of the old and new, see DiCenzo (Citation2005).
16 The differences in priorities are underscored in Clay’s analysis of Time and Tide’s emphasis on work and professionalism in its appeal to a middle-class readership.
17 It is worth noting that Rathbone’s presidential addresses are often quoted in the scholarship from the collection entitled Milestones: Presidential Addresses at the Annual Council Meetings of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (Citation1929). It provides a valuable record, as the title suggests, but these same addresses were reproduced in the pages of the Woman’s Leader, along with summaries of the debates and votes at annual councils, and situated in this way in the broader context of contention mediated by the paper.
18 By September 1925, Time and Tide was strongly advocating that the ‘next step’ for the women’s movement was to avoid new problems such as family endowment and temperance, and to concentrate all its energies on removing the two remaining political barriers. The chief goals were gaining the equal franchise and securing admission of women to the House of Lords.
19 This captures most clearly what Joan Scott describes as the ‘difference dilemma’ (Scott Citation1988), and the ways in which the universalizing tendencies of equality arguments (often in the interests of steering a safer course) work to erase difference and can prove to be self-defeating.
20 Attempts by Time and Tide and some of its contributors to champion a particular brand of feminism demonstrate how it fluctuated between foregrounding its feminist politics more at some points in time than at others (see Clay’s analysis of how it initially distanced itself from a women-centred focus).
21 We are conscious here of a selective reading of new feminism, not taking into account some of the more controversial opinions Rathbone expressed, such as the failure to include unmarried mothers or promote more communal forms of childcare and greater involvement of fathers. But Rathbone was a pragmatist and no more guilty of making strategic choices than other groups. Our goal is to disrupt the usual privileging of equality over welfare agendas.
22 We allude here to Dawn Foster’s Lean Out (Citation2016) in response to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (Citation2013) .
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