‘The voice of the true British housewife’: the politics of housewifery at Labour’s women’s conferences, 1945–1959

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Housewives
• Labour Party
• 1950s
• activism
• consumerism

Introduction

The keynote address at Labour’s 1951 women’s conference was given by Alice Bacon, MP for Normanton.¹ Paying tribute to the tireless efforts of women activists in the Labour Party, Bacon explained what set the Labour women’s movement apart from other campaigning groups:

We have seen since the end of the war the growth of “mushroom” women’s organisations, but our organisation is not one of those. We have not come together just because we want to criticise or because we want to grumble. Our women’s organisations have persisted throughout the years because we have faith in an idea. We have heard the voice of the true British housewife in this Conference.²

What did it mean for Labour women to position themselves as ‘the voice of the true British housewife’? In his groundbreaking Speaking for the People Jon Lawrence sets out to identify ‘how politicians had understood the claim to represent, and to analyse the different ways they had gone about trying to articulate that claim’.³ Here, I analyse why, how and with what effects women on the left claimed to represent ‘the housewife’ in post-war Britain. I argue that Labour women asserted themselves as housewives for various reasons. First, because it best suited their self-understanding. Second, to contest the claims of women on the right to embody this identity and represent housewives. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, they saw it as the most effective means to advance policies suited to the needs of working-class women within the framework of the welfare state. In pursuing these themes, I demonstrate that housewifery was a malleable and contested political identity. It was constructed differently by women across the political spectrum, but as valuable and relevant to women on the left as to women on the right or non-partisan women. However, I also identify the difficulties these women encountered in promoting a left-wing politics of housewifery, and thus trace its decline through the 1950s. While Labour women clearly understood housewifery as a useful political identity, it proved less effective than they hoped. The strength of association between housewifery and the political right meant Labour men proved reluctant to respond to their claims as housewives.

These post-war Labour women followed their predecessors in prioritising (though not exclusively) the specific needs of working-class women within the home. They used the language of housewifery as a way to advance claims which would improve their lives, and understood the housewife’s interest as expansive and outward-looking rather than narrow and limited. While their party was in government from 1945 to 1951, Labour women used housewifery as a means of challenging the discrepancies and anomalies emerging under the new welfare state. After the Conservative victory at the general election in 1951, Labour women focused on the rising costs of living, advocating a return to Labour’s policies of ‘fair shares’ for all through rationing. Labour women’s commitment to state controls and consumer protection was thus starkly different from a Conservative politics of the housewife which prioritised deregulation and choice. Nevertheless, it made little headway in a party which had become increasingly suspicious of claims made by housewives. As a result, their approach shifted, and they embraced the politics of consumption which was gaining traction in the wider party. However, in the process they rather lost sight of the value of the housewife which had distinguished their politics.

Following women’s enfranchisement, in the early 1920s Labour women pursued a distinctive political agenda, championing radical causes such as birth control even in the face of party indifference or hostility.⁴ Building on a long tradition of women’s involvement in local government, they were often able to achieve significant influence.⁵ Their successes were vital in reorienting Labour towards social welfare measures, laying the foundations for the expansion of the welfare state after Labour’s landslide victory and first majority government in 1945.⁶ The women’s organisations were highly effective at recruiting, politicising and mobilising women, and were sites of profound meaning and attachment.⁷ But though a few women, such as Ellen Wilkinson or Margaret Bondfield, achieved high office and public prominence, women were undoubtedly marginalised within formal party structures and cultures.⁸ Historians have usually argued that the women’s organisations in the Labour Party declined after painful failures to improve their own status in the Party and make headway over issues such as family allowances.⁹ In the post-war period, it has been seen as an ageing and moribund organisation, even contributing to Labour’s electoral problems by refusing to change.¹⁰

Other scholarship, however, has taken a more optimistic view, showing that some women’s sections remained active and assertive spaces.¹¹ Betty Boothroyd attended the local women’s section in Dewsbury with her mother, describing it as having ‘a flourishing life of its own before political correctness became the rage.’¹² Joyce Gould, who became the chief women's officer in 1975, argued that ‘it was the women members that led the way’ in ensuring the ‘party was seen as part of the wider community, part of the life of the city’ and that ‘these women were the bedrock of the party’.¹³ Despite the historiographical assertion that ambitious women took little interest in the women’s organisations, several leading figures in the party, including MPs like Millie Miller and Joan Maynard–the latter in particular neither a shrinking violet nor a party loyalist–gained valuable experience at women’s conference.¹⁴ Christine Collette, who has also examined Labour women’s conferences from 1945 to 1951, argues that Labour women acted as ‘confident colleagues, rather than suffering sisters’. In her view, though they failed to ‘develop an ideology of gender’ they nevertheless continued to set out a distinctive agenda, committed to peace, equal pay, and most successfully, social welfare.¹⁵ A failure to appreciate these efforts tends to encourage particular and narrow ways of understanding women’s activism in the twentieth century, disregarding the activity of women outside specifically ‘feminist’ organisations and reinforcing outdated notions of ‘waves’ of activity.¹⁶ Even if they apparently met with limited success, it is important to identify both what Labour women wanted and how they sought to achieve it.

Housewifery had long been central to working-class women’s sense of identity and self-worth, and thus provided a powerful basis for mobilising and organising.¹⁷ The Women’s Co-Operative Guild had been founded to act as a trade union for housewives, and was rejuvenated during the Second World War.¹⁸ Labour women developed what Karen Hunt has termed a ‘politics of the home’ and June Hannam has called ‘a politics of everyday life’ which focused on issues such as food, consumption, housing, and cleanliness.¹⁹ Nor was the emphasis on housewifery unique to Labour women. Indeed, both before and after the Second World War, housewifery was often more readily associated with, and capitalised on, by the Conservative Party.²⁰ Women’s voluntary organisations also used their identification as housewives to assert their value as they campaigned to improve women’s lives through strengthened social welfare provision.²¹ A more idiosyncratic and less constructive approach was taken by the British Housewives League. This high profile populist group, established in 1946 to resist rationing, claimed to represent housewives fed up with shortages and sacrifice. It quickly became a focal point for resisting austerity, state controls and even the National Health Service.²²

Yet a distinctively left-wing politics of the housewife continued into the immediate post-war period alongside these better-known campaigns. This positively celebrated state control as the means to ensure fairness for the working-class housewife, while also critiquing how it operated in practice. In analysing this politics, this article contributes to the growing body of literature examining housewifery as an identity which justified, and even required, political participation, rather than a retreat into the home: showing that this was valuable to Labour women too.²³ In doing so, it also contributes to the scholarship which insists that Labour women did not choose between prioritising women and prioritising the working-classes, but rather focused on the needs of working-class women.²⁴ Further, it qualifies the literature which emphasises the decline of women-centred activism in the Labour Party from the 1930s, instead highlighting its continuities as well as its challenges.²⁵ Building on Collette’s argument that the Attlee years ‘represented a high point of women’s experience of Labour Party and trade union participation’, it suggests that a politics of the housewife attentive to the particular needs of working-class women was a source of that strength.²⁶

To consider how Labour women articulated their political demands, this article draws on the records of Labour’s women’s conferences. These drew together women from various local and regional branches of socialist women’s organisations. Most representatives came from the women’s sections: local groups of women which were organised at ward, branch or constituency level depending on the local party structure.²⁷ They were also attended by other representatives from co-operatives guilds and trades unions, who provided important contributions.²⁸ Women’s conference represented an important occasion to debate local views at a national level. Local delegates spoke alongside prominent figures like female MPs, union leaders, and the chief women's officer, Mary Sutherland.²⁹ Conference debates and resolutions informed the yearly programme of the Standing Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organisations (SJCWWO). This brought together senior leaders of female organisations affiliated to the Labour Party.³⁰ The Chief Woman Officer, who served as the secretary for the SJCWWO, then wrote the report of their activities which, in turn, informed the conference agenda. But grassroots activists also used this platform to articulate their experiences, express their views, put forward ideas and support or challenge existing policies.

These records therefore provide important insights into the political ambitions and strategies of Labour women. As Susan Lawrence MP had argued earlier in the century, ‘we see here … ordinary women putting forward in their own words demands which would suffice to change the face of the world as we know it.’³¹ In contrast, the official party publication, Labour Woman, tended to take a didactic approach. It provided instructions and advice about how to develop local branches, including suggesting discussion topics. There was little space for activists to develop and discuss alternatives. In contrast, records of Labour’s women’s conference offer an opportunity to understand the perspectives of grassroots activists. Attention to these voices is especially important given how muted they were in mainstream Labour conferences. For example, in 1951, women made up just 96 of the 611 delegates from constituency Labour parties and 17 of the 572 delegates from trades unions.³²

There are, of course, limitations to these sources. Conference records are not always strictly verbatim.³³ The records from 1947 contain vague references to ‘an interruption’ and an unauthorised speaker. In fact, the conference was infiltrated first by local Conservative women and then a member of the British Housewives League, who both succeeded in disrupting proceedings.³⁴ Nor can the views voiced at conference be seen as ‘representative’ of women’s views across the Labour Party. They represent the perspective of those activists who had the time, resources and support to attend a conference held over several days often far from their homes. In fact, in 1954 more than eighty per cent of women’s sections did not send a representative to women’s conference. After this, reforms were brought in to strengthen participation.³⁵ The lack of a full list of participants mean that it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the delegates, nor to analyse them by class, religion, age or ethnicity.³⁶ However, there was a perception in the wider party that conference was dominated by older women and was failing to engage with younger women.³⁷ Though it is important to be alert to the possibility of ageist assumptions here, Labour women did share this concern.

Women’s conference had very little impact on the overall party programme. It was supposed to be an annual event but, despite requests that it should be attached to the main Party conference, was shunted around the calendar, and even cancelled during the election year of 1950. It frequently took place when Parliament was sitting, limiting opportunities for women MPs to attend.³⁸ Resolutions at women’s conferences were not binding on the wider party and there was no formal mechanism which required policy making bodies to take account of their decisions.³⁹ The Chief Woman Officer provided a short report each year to the main conference, but there was little sense that the full conference agenda was informed by concerns at women’s conference.⁴⁰ Issues such as women’s pensions, for example, which dominated women’s conference, received limited attention in the wider conference. Meanwhile, women’s conference shared the commitment to comprehensive education which was central to Labour’s politics in the 1950s, but their interests on child welfare and education ranged far more widely, encompassing nurseries, adoption, juvenile delinquency, disabled children, ‘neglected’ children, and so-called ‘maladjusted children’. The only issue of longstanding shared concern was equal pay, discussed further below. But though women’s conference was not necessarily important to the wider Party, it was evidently important to the participants themselves.

The housewife and the home in Labour women’s politics

Housewifery had long occupied a central role in British society, culture and politics. But it had taken on new significance during the Second World War.⁴¹ Women’s contributions on the home front–such as cooking, cleaning, and caring, as much as their employment in uniformed services or factories–had been understood as crucial contributions to the war effort, including by women themselves.⁴² What happened in the home had profound implications for morale, well-being and ultimately, the country’s ability to emerge victorious from the war: it was thus a political and public, rather than merely a private, concern.⁴³ The Beveridge report therefore paid particular attention to the housewife’s concerns and claims to citizenship, albeit in ways that inscribed gendered norms and female dependency.⁴⁴ In the post-war era too, women’s commitment to austerity was understood as essential to the nation’s economic security and prosperity. Women acted as a ‘buffer’ which absorbed successive shocks to the family economy, scrimping, saving, and protecting their families from the full consequences of shortages.⁴⁵ At the same time, domesticity took on renewed social and cultural importance.⁴⁶ This created political opportunities for women, enabling them to capitalise on the value of their contribution as they asserted their own rights and needs. While scholars have sometimes suggested that the Labour Party placed too much emphasis on women’s domestic roles, it is important to remember, as Caitríona Beaumont reminds us, that most women at the time were, and saw themselves as, wives and mothers.⁴⁷

Labour women never defined exactly what it meant to be a housewife. Indeed, it was often used as a synonym for ‘adult woman’. This rested on an assumption that for most women, domestic labour occupied most of their time and energy and was central to their sense of self. Indeed, Labour women were keen to raise the status of domestic labour, and as such, were enthusiastic champions of the National Institute of Houseworkers (NIH), which they saw as crucial to raising the status of domestic work not only for servants but for all women.⁴⁸ Housewifery placed women within their family context, implying that they were responsible, caring, and trustworthy citizens, devoted to kin and community. The use of housewife was a more inclusive term than ‘mother’, since it included both married women without children and those with children who had left home. It also incorporated those who also undertook paid work, since they remained primarily responsible for domestic labour. Indeed, among Labour women there was a recognition that housewifery involved multiple responsibilities. Alice Bacon argued that during the war there had been a blurring of the boundaries in different roles so that ‘the woman within the home became also the trade union woman at work while the trade union woman became the woman with the basket’.⁴⁹ This was in contrast to the wider party, which struggled to cope with ‘modern anomalies such as married women workers’.⁵⁰ Housewifery could thus unite women around shared experience and resonate outside their own organisation. But it might also gloss over differences, such as those between single and married women. It might also mask other silences: for example, around race.⁵¹

Like earlier generations of Labour women activists, Labour women sought to identify themselves as housewives as a means of justifying their political participation and their claims. But this was not an opportunistic move. It entirely reflected their self-understanding as ‘responsible women’ who could be trusted to work for the nation’s economic and social recovery.⁵² They were keen to emphasise that women’s sections would work ‘with devotion, but a real sense of responsibility’.⁵³ Paying tribute to the recently deceased councillor Mrs Cartmell from Oldbury, Mary Sutherland claimed that she ‘typified the sturdy, forthright, commonsense, toleration and devotion of the Women’s Sections’.⁵⁴

This commitment to constructive effort in the service of the nation was important, because it helped position Labour women’s politics of the housewife as distinctive from other women’s claims. Labour women were keen to distance themselves from any association with feminism. In 1946, Alice Bacon argued that ‘our Labour women’s movement has never been a merely feminist one, shouting shrilly for the rights of women. Our scope is much wider and covers a variety of activities and subjects … we are at the forefront in great questions of social welfare.’⁵⁵ Accordingly, they resisted, for example, the idea that claims for equal pay might be termed a feminist demand.⁵⁶ But they were equally keen to distinguish themselves from women’s activism on the right. Where the British Housewives League would only carp and complain, Labour women would place themselves at the government’s service. They would be willing comrades in the hard but essential work of rebuilding the nation: positioning themselves as positive and constructive, rather than negative and destructive. Accordingly, in 1947, the conference chair, Florence Hancock, made arch reference to ‘organizations of women under self-appointed leaders who have not scrupled to make the worst of the situation, to make mischief for political ends, to foment the feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction arising out of the conditions of scarcity and shortage affecting the home and the housewife’. Mary Sutherland likewise commended women’s sections on the work they had done to tackle the ‘anti-Government campaign’ of the British Housewives League.⁵⁷ Labour women’s politics of housewifery was not simply a reaction to the politics of the British Housewives League. Nevertheless, the extraordinary impact of the League caused Labour women great anxiety, and it continued to influence their thinking long after it disappeared from mainstream political debate towards the end of 1947.⁵⁸ In 1955, for example, Mrs Souness, from the Carlisle Women’s Constituency Committee, proposed that there ‘ought to be a Labour Women’s Housewife’s League’.⁵⁹ As late as 1959, the future MP Millie Miller warned that ‘buried under the ashes of the ration books of many years before, there were people like the members of the Housewives’ League waiting to catch them out at every turn.’⁶⁰

Labour women believed that nothing benefited the housewife more than a Labour government. In their view, full employment meant an end to the worries and uncertainty which had plagued housewives. Most of the married Labour women depended on their husband’s ability to gain regular, well-paying work, and remembered all too well the consequences of long-term unemployment which had characterised the 1930s.⁶¹ The relief that they could look forward to ‘freedom from the great fear of continuous unemployment’ was palpable.⁶² If, as one delegate claimed, ‘the chief concern of the woman in the home was the wage packet and its regularity’ then their expectations were more than met.⁶³

Further, and in direct contrast to the complaints of the British Housewives League, Labour women believed that the Labour government’s commitment to promoting affordable and accessible foodstuffs through subsidies, rationing and controls, was the means of guaranteeing affordable prices and a certain standard of living for all. Consequently, they were enthusiastic champions of these policies. Labour women pointed out the dramatic price rises in other countries and claimed ‘every housewife should be thankful that the Government had kept rigid price control on basic necessities’.⁶⁴ Coupons were understood as ‘the housewife’s protection’, a temporary solution while supply remained limited.⁶⁵ The SJCWWO claimed that while housewives might find rationing ‘irksome’, it was the only way to guarantee ‘fair shares and equitable distribution’.⁶⁶

Finally, Labour women argued that the security of the welfare state, particularly the National Health Service and social security provision, meant housewives could be confident that they and their children would be cared for.⁶⁷ ‘No section of the nation will gain more from the Heath Service than the women in the home,’ asserted the chair, Margaret Allen, in 1948. Without such a service, working-class housewives frequently could not afford to visit the doctor, and often did not do so until it was too late.⁶⁸ Consequently, the following year, the chair, Rose Whyatt, claimed that ‘for the first time in our history, working-class housewives and mothers have been given a real sense of security’ through full employment, social security and the national health service, while food subsidies meant ‘the British housewife had almost the cheapest diet in the world’.⁶⁹ In sum, the Labour government had provided ‘a square deal for the housewife and mother’.⁷⁰ As the election approached, Mary Sutherland instructed her comrades to ‘make every housewife aware of what she and her family have owed to the Government since 1945’.⁷¹ This has been borne out by subsequent analysis: consumption increased, nutrition improved, public health enhanced, and inequality narrowed during Attlee’s term in office.⁷²

But their support was not unqualified. Their commitment to the government ‘did not mean,’ insisted Alma Birk, representing Finchley North Ward women’s section in 1949, ‘that housewives should make no comment on the Government’s policy’.⁷³ In particular, the coupon system needed to be improved ‘at a time when every housewife was at her wits' end’, in the words of Mrs Hall, a delegate from Wythenshawe.⁷⁴ In theory, coupons needed for the household–such as for linen–came out of the household budget. In practice, they came out of the housewife’s allocation.⁷⁵ Towards the end of 1949, when devaluation drove up the cost of living, delegates suggested far-reaching government action focusing on curbing profits, bringing down the costs of children’s clothing, removing the purchase tax, and increasing the utility range. The removal of rationing on sweets had led to unmanageable demand and its swift re-introduction. In the light of this debacle, Labour women proposed a series of resolutions affirming their commitment to rationing, especially of commodities like soap.⁷⁶ They were especially concerned with the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables. They also consistently raised questions about the quality and cleanliness of foodstuffs, passing resolution after resolution on food hygiene and preparation.⁷⁷ ‘The housewives should be given a square deal in these matters’ insisted Jessie Stephen, representing the Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union.⁷⁸

Labour women also sought ways to make the housewife’s life easier. The self-service shop was presented as one important route to achieving this–a modern, scientific approach to shopping which would reduce waste of both time and food.⁷⁹ Altering the hours shops were open to better suit the ‘harassed housewife’ was more controversial, owing to the demands it would place on shop workers.⁸⁰ The quality of housing was a regular concern.⁸¹ The home, of course, played a central role in their lives, and as Eirene White MP put it in 1952, ‘the home is the woman’s workshop’.⁸² These workshops often represented poor working conditions. Some demands were as basic as ensuring that cold water taps were available in rented accommodation.⁸³ Other delegates asked that the standards of the new council housing, with ‘first-class kitchen equipment, cupboard room, drying cupboards’ were ‘considered as the minimum and provided for housewives wherever possible.’⁸⁴ But the wider housebuilding programme received surprisingly little attention.⁸⁵ In 1948, when Aneurin Bevan, the Minister for Health with responsibility for housing, attended the women’s conference, the debate concentrated on cost rather than quantity, and on the intricacies of the tied cottage system.⁸⁶

Labour women also looked to the developing welfare state to provide appropriate support and protection for women. Two priorities in particular recurred over the period. First, Labour women were especially concerned with the rights of widows and the treatment of older women under the new social security system. These concerns probably reflected their own demographic makeup as well as the inadequacies of the existing framework. However, there were a range of opinions on the nature of the problems as well as on the possible solutions. In particular, there were debates about how the needs of widows might be balanced against the needs of single women within the welfare state. These discussions reflected wider differences in understandings of capabilities, rights and responsibilities. Many delegates at women’s conference insisted that the widow–who might have been out of the labour market for many years–needed to be protected through generous benefits. But union activists cautioned that older women workers were already likely to be seen as dispensable, and countered that older women could still make a valuable contribution to the labour market.⁸⁷

Second, Labour women were also deeply concerned with women’s experiences as mothers, and especially as new mothers. There were extensive debates about how women might be supported through effective pre- and post-natal care, and a clear desire to ensure that maternity care was prioritised in the nascent NHS. Their objectives were to increase provision and improve quality, ensuring that working-class women were able to access the quality of care available to the ‘well-to-do’.⁸⁸ In 1949, Councillor Mrs Topping, representing Hanwell North women’s section, introduced a motion which aimed to reduce the distance and time pregnant women needed to travel for their appointments. Mary Sutherland defended the government line and insisted this was a matter for local health authorities, but the motion was defeated only by a relatively narrow margin.⁸⁹ They were especially concerned that women were able to take a proper break immediately after giving birth, though there were varied opinions about whether home or hospital might be best.⁹⁰ Home helps were also seen as an invaluable service for the ill or elderly, as well as women with newborns.⁹¹

During Labour’s term in office then, Labour women sought to work within the broad parameters set by the government, but also to offer constructive criticism and present achievable and meaningful refinements to policies grounded in their own experiences as housewives. On austerity, where the government was perhaps most vulnerable to attack, they were very ready in defence. Where other groups enumerated and emphasised the housewife’s grievances and demands, Labour women instead constructed an image of the housewife as more than willing to play her part in the reconstruction of the nation, for which she would be richly rewarded by the bounty of the welfare state.

The centrality of the housewife to their debates was a marked contrast to her fleeting appearances at Labour’s full conference. In 1949, for example, the conference chair, James Griffiths, framed support for women in terms of their roles as mothers rather than housewives:

In our new programme we recognise the duty of facing up squarely and of solving these problems which concern our people, particularly the mothers, in their everyday life-the problems we have in the cost of living, food and homes … the mothers carry a heavy burden but our social services are helping them to carry it more easily.⁹²

The following year, Edith Summerskill drew attention to the need to save the housewife time and energy, referencing how the cost of fruit and vegetables was an ongoing concern for women’s sections.⁹³ But the debate as a whole discussed questions of marketing and distribution with reference to the supposedly gender neutral consumer or to the impact on the male wage packet. John Muir, a delegate from Dundee, referred to the ‘married men in this hall’ who ‘will realise why their wives complain about just how little 6d will buy’.⁹⁴ Housewives were present neither in the imagination nor in the flesh.

The politics of the housewife beyond the home

This politics of the housewife was by no means limited to concerns about domesticity and consumption. On the contrary, conference debates ranged widely, from mental illness to the potential ill-effects of the cinema. In particular, Labour women were consistently concerned with foreign policy, particularly with the best way to preserve peace. Acute anxieties about nuclear weaponry were a constant feature of women’s conference.⁹⁵ Thus as with earlier generations of Labour activists, Labour women’s self-identification as housewives did not restrict them to a narrow agenda but was used to justify their interest in a full range of economic, social, and foreign policy concerns. The assumption was that if housewives were understood as equal citizens, then they must be understood as full citizens, ready and able to face all the country's challenges. Indeed, this more expansive outlook distinguished women’s politics from the wider party’s assumption that the interests of the housewife were solely related to their home and family.

At the same time, Labour women sought to reframe particular questions as relevant to the housewife. Where Christine Collette has argued that Labour women activists ‘chose not to emphasise gender issues’, I suggest instead that they were expanding the notion of what might be understood as ‘women’s issues’.⁹⁶ Labour women felt both entitled and equipped to debate, for example, devaluation, the public ownership of industry, or rural electrification-the latter especially framed as of particular importance to the housewife.⁹⁷ These were questions which would impact the lives of every citizen, and especially mattered to working-class people who gained the most from full employment and a robust welfare state.⁹⁸ As a result, a proposal in 1946 to appoint a woman Minister for social welfare was defeated.⁹⁹ This reflected Labour women’s broad consensus that no question was wholly a woman’s question, nor were there any political questions off-limits to women. There was, however, a profound commitment to increasing women’s political participation, not just within the Labour party, but on local councils, in Parliament, and on public bodies. Rejecting a comment from a colleague that sex did not matter, Councillor Mrs Fletcher, from Penn and St Phillips women’s section in Wolverhampton, argued that ‘working-class women should be represented on councils because they could put forward the point of view that the men knew nothing about’.¹⁰⁰ It is, of course, not possible to provide a detailed analysis of the full range of their interests here. Instead, this section focuses on how Labour women understood and sought to support the housewife’s relationship to paid work.

After the Second World War, the supposed social desirability of women returning to their ‘normal’ lives within the home was reinforced by a renewed celebration of domesticity in popular culture, and exacerbated by pronatalist concerns about the birthrate and the popularisation of psychological theories which warned of the dangers of maternal deprivation. But these were also tempered by economic realities. Government and employers were desperate to encourage women’s contribution to the labour market, albeit on a temporary basis in a limited range of supposedly suitable industries.¹⁰¹ Women sought to reconcile these competing and contradictory discourses while also making their own choices about what would best suit their families, and, increasingly, themselves. As a consequence, there was a striking growth in the numbers of married women working, especially once their children were a little older. By 1951, 21.7% per cent of married women were in paid work, compared with just 10% in 1931.¹⁰² Their demand for more flexible opportunities meant the post-war period also saw the beginnings of a growth in part-time work. This would ultimately become a defining characteristic of women’s employment in late twentieth century Britain, entrenching significant disadvantages as well as offering the practical ability to combine multiple roles. Idealised versions of the family adhering to gendered norms were thus increasingly out of step with realities. Social mores, and women’s self-understandings, both began to shift accordingly.¹⁰³

Labour women were caught up in these contradictory currents: keen to promote women’s interests, but not always agreed on what those interests were, and mindful not to appear too critical of the government. Their attitude to equal pay provides one example. There were unanimous motions calling for implementation in 1946.¹⁰⁴ In June 1947, however, the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, set out the government’s response to the Royal Commission on Equal Pay. He reaffirmed Labour’s commitment to the principle, but deferred implementation on the grounds that it was unaffordable, and likely to drive inflation without improving productivity.¹⁰⁵ This was hugely controversial, but after months of pressure, Labour women reluctantly acquiesced.¹⁰⁶ This has been seen as evidence both of unwavering loyalty and relative weakness.¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, there was great disquiet at women’s conference. Several women complained that it was counterproductive to try and incentivise women into the workforce without offering a fair wage. Mrs Bourne, a trade unionist from the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsman, insisted it was ‘of vital importance, especially to mothers and housewives’, since lower wages for women undercut men’s wages.¹⁰⁸ Others, however, urged restraint. Accepting the government position was framed as a noble sacrifice and a temporary delay, with the clear expectation that their patience would soon be rewarded.¹⁰⁹ It was not.

Equal pay was a rare example of a policy specifically affecting women which regularly featured at the main conference too. Indeed, the full party conference was ahead of the leadership in demanding its immediate implementation.¹¹⁰ Equal pay was soon back on the agenda at women’s conference too, and was pursued with renewed vigour when Labour entered opposition.¹¹¹ In 1955, Labour women, led by Mrs Peel from the Electrical Trades Union, complained that the Party’s failure to act on this issue more decisively had meant they lost ground to the Tories. Further, the legislation their opponents had introduced had overlooked women in industry.¹¹² This constant insistence on this principle was necessary. As other scholars have noted, a supposed ‘oversight’ meant that a commitment to equal pay was missed out of the first draft of Challenge to Britain, a key policy document published by the Party in 1953.¹¹³ In the meantime, women focused on increasing unionisation among paid workers, arguing that industries where women were unionised were achieving successes in gaining equal pay agreements.¹¹⁴ Indeed, union women were at the forefront of Labour women’s demands for equality.¹¹⁵ For example, a 1958 resolution from Miss Horan, representing the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, called for equal educational opportunities for girls in science and industry.¹¹⁶

Equal pay was not the only concern in relation to paid work. Labour women were keen to demonstrate their readiness to engage in paid work as part of their service to the nation. However, they were concerned that housewives were being asked to shoulder a disproportionate burden. In 1947, when demand for women’s labour was most acute, Anne Godwin from the Clerical and Administrative Workers Union complained that ‘it had never been part of the policy of Labour women that women should do two jobs, and one aspect of the production drive was that married women were called upon to do more than their fair share of the work of the country.’ She was followed by Amy Wild from the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, who reminded delegates that women in paid work ‘were efficient housekeepers and they were disturbed that they could not do their job at homekeeping so well’ with their increased burdens. They set out a platform of policies which housewives would need if they were to juggle multiple responsibilities, including part-time and flexible working, the provision of meals, good working conditions and equal pay.¹¹⁷ The MP Leah Manning took this message to Labour’s full conference, arguing that:

we have to find some way to show the women that they can make the best of both worlds, that they can help their country in its great fight for production, but at the same time they can look after their homes; they can have a happy life for their children; they can make a comfortable place for their men to live in and they can have some form of recreation.¹¹⁸

One element of this programme was nurseries. During the war, the government had considered these necessary but temporary: neither desirable for children, nor, despite evident demand, desired by women. After the war, responsibility for funding nurseries was passed to local authorities, resulting in higher fees and widespread closures.¹¹⁹ As with equal pay, Labour women were not consistent in their approach to this issue, and their support waxed and waned.¹²⁰ In 1946, Labour women passed an expansive resolution which went as far as to recognise that it was not only mothers in paid work who might need access to high quality nursery care: housewives too had a right to ‘rest and relaxation’.¹²¹ The following year, however, a government campaign aimed at tackling labour shortages had prompted concerns that women with young children were being encouraged to enter paid work.¹²² The government insisted this was not the case. Keen not to add to the pressure on this issue, Labour women heavily defeated a resolution calling for greater government support for nurseries.¹²³

Yet by 1948, delegates once again supported a motion in support of greater nursery provision, although with the caveat that women should not be ‘shirking their responsibilities’ or using them to ‘“dump” their children’.¹²⁴ Their commitment was reaffirmed in 1952, since, according to Mabel Crout JP, nurseries were mostly used by working-class women and not ‘Tories’.¹²⁵ By 1957, however, nurseries were conceptualised by the chair, Alice Wood, as part of Labour’s overall education programme.¹²⁶ Some delegates, such as Mrs Talbert from East Walthamstow women’s section, emphasised their importance to working mothers, warned against untrained childminders, and suggested they might even ‘prevent the break up of problem families’. But Councillor Mrs Galvin from Dover ‘felt it was wrong’ Labour women should campaign for day nurseries and should instead prioritise ‘better wages, so that mothers could stay home and look after their children’.¹²⁷ Attitudes towards nursery provision were thus ambiguous, and Labour women’s varied views were indicative of the tensions between the housewife’s varied responsibilities as mother and worker.

Housewives in opposition and the shift to consumption

If bitterly disappointed by Labour’s defeat to the Conservatives in 1951, Labour women were also galvanised and united by their opposition to the new government. Initially, Labour women intensified their focus on the rising cost of living, including the price of essential goods like coal, and particularly, the high cost of food, which primarily affected the housewife.¹²⁸ ‘It is the housewives and mothers who are going to bear the burden in more worry, more work, more self sacrifice,’ claimed the chair, Councillor Jessie Smith JP, in 1952. ‘They have endured the irritations, inconveniences, and hardships of shortages and restrictions for over twelve years. But they are reasonable and sensible, and the great majority have not complained, because they felt they were getting a fair deal.’¹²⁹ In their view, the Conservative government undermined fairness. Labour women lamented cuts to taxes, reductions in food subsidies, and the suspension of the utility scheme, as policies which fostered inequality.¹³⁰ An emergency resolution introduced by Alice Bacon in 1953 condemned the fact that the Budget offered tax relief for furs, cars, cosmetics, and jewellery but not for clothes, textiles, and footwear.¹³¹ A campaign against the purchase tax on essential goods lasted throughout the decade.¹³² Led by Florence Hancock, Labour women also attacked reductions to the NIH budget, emphasising that its graduates were invaluable to working-class households in need of assistance.¹³³

The concept of the ‘ordinary’ housewife was central to these arguments. Labour women were keen to assert that they were ‘the ordinary housewives of the country’.¹³⁴ Claire Langhamer has shown that many women defined themselves, and were defined by others, both as ‘ordinary’ and as ‘housewives’.¹³⁵ Indeed, ‘ordinariness’ itself was central to shifting notions of individual identity, and thus integral to political discourse in post-war Britain.¹³⁶ For Labour women, ordinariness had a class dimension. Throughout the 1950s, Labour women looked back to the 1930s. They recalled the hunger, want and misery, and were wary that these might return.¹³⁷ They saw Conservative politics as attentive to the needs of, in the words of the MP Jean Mann, ‘mink clad, well powdered women’.¹³⁸ This politics focused on the costs of fridges, washing machines and televisions, rather than milk, butter and bacon.¹³⁹ ‘Ordinariness’ was thus central to making the case for austerity politics. Austerity benefited the ‘ordinary’ woman, not the wealthy and privileged women who demanded too much and gave too little. Ordinariness was also a way to position their lived experience in opposition to officials and experts, whose facts and figures did not reflect the realities of their daily burdens. As Mary Sutherland put it in 1951, these were women speaking ‘from their experience of life as women who had learned their economics the hard way’.¹⁴⁰ Denouncing the increases in the cost of living in 1954, Mrs Gibbs, from the Earlestown women’s section, rejected the supposed stability of the retail prices index, since ‘any housewife knew’ that prices had increased.¹⁴¹

Where the Conservative government entrusted distribution to the market, Labour women looked to state intervention to balance the needs of all members of the community. This would mean that the consumer did not thrive at the expense of the producer; towns and cities would not succeed at the expense of rural communities, and that British prosperity did not rest on the exploitation of peoples abroad.¹⁴² Labour women did not want to replicate the supposed selfishness of their Tory counterparts, but to recognise the interconnected and interdependent webs of common interest and mutual obligation binding producers and consumers together. Speaking to women’s conference in 1954, for example, Barbara Castle MP called for ‘a united front of the growers and the housewives’.¹⁴³ Labour women claimed they were neither selfish nor sectional, but ‘had the country’s interests at heart’.¹⁴⁴ In contrast, when criticising the introduction of new prescription charges, Miss Foggin, from the Socialist Medical Association, asserted that ‘the Tory Government had in one blow divided the country into classes’.¹⁴⁵

Yet Labour women had only limited success in persuading the party of the merits of a socialist politics of housewifery. The ideological, social and cultural barriers which tended to marginalise women remained strong despite Labour women’s continuing efforts to assert their interests. Indeed, their self-conception as ‘devoted and self-sacrificing’ women, committed to duty and service meant that Labour women were unlikely to engage in wholescale rebellion.¹⁴⁶ The political context was equally important. The success of the British Housewives League meant that male colleagues within the party were increasingly suspicious of a discourse which was so effectively deployed by women on the right. Though the League was independent, the Conservatives were certainly delighted to capitalise on their efforts. Meanwhile, within the Labour Party, it was perceived as little more than a front for the Tories.¹⁴⁷

Successive defeats in the 1951 and 1955 elections worsened Labour women’s position still further. Whether or not it was true that the women’s vote accounted for Labour’s electoral fortunes, it was certainly widely believed within the Party.¹⁴⁸ In the wake of the 1950 results, Herbert Morrison MP noted that ‘in one or two quarters I have heard the complaint, which we usually hear following on disappointing election results, to the effect that “the women have let us down”.’ While Morrison did not necessarily agree–he leaned more towards a class-based, than gender-based, explanation–he did worry that ‘even some of the working-class housewives went wrong’ as well as ‘a substantial number of middle class housewives’.¹⁴⁹ Internal analysis of the polling also highlighted the specificities of women’s voting patterns. Support among women as a whole was lower, but there was a larger swing away from Labour among men. While support for Labour among middle-class women had fallen sharply, support among working-class women, and thus women as a whole, had actually increased. In the light of these findings, it is extraordinary that the associated report suggested ‘it is easy to picture the happy results that would follow if working men could only persuade their wives to share their opinions.’¹⁵⁰ An internal discussion on the election results held that while women ‘did not let us down’ they were ‘susceptible to the snob appeal of Toryism’.¹⁵¹ These attitudes persisted into the following election campaign. The MP Tony Benn, who had won his seat in a by-election months previously, commented in his diary that ‘the housewives are our weakest spot, and I am sure that with men alone voting we would win easily’.¹⁵²

These views were shared by Labour women too.¹⁵³ At the 1952 conference, trade unionist Miss Baddeley proclaimed that ‘everyone knew that the last election was lost mainly in the queue at the butcher’s or the grocer’s. The Tory party successfully directed its shallow propaganda at the housewife.’¹⁵⁴ She was reprimanded by Mary Sutherland, but was by no means an isolated voice. At the 1955 conference, the MP Jean Mann ‘appealed to housewives not to let the Tories pull the wool over their eyes again’.¹⁵⁵ Labour women saw it as their particular responsibility to address this. They consistently asserted the value of their contribution to Labour’s electoral campaigns and specifically claimed they were best placed to persuade other housewives to vote for the Party. At the 1953 conference, for example, Mrs Wood, representing the National Union of General and Municipal Workers said that ‘the women were the people who could turn the vote’.¹⁵⁶ But from the perspective of the wider party, they appeared to be failing in that task. Indeed, Steven Fielding argues that women’s sections were increasingly understood as an obstacle rather than an asset in mobilising the women’s vote.¹⁵⁷

This is not entirely fair. Labour women insisted on the importance of winning over women. The SJCWWO had warned that ‘the importance of housewives’ problems today’ (defined as housing, social security, education and the cost of living) should be central to the Party’s campaign for the 1950 General Election.¹⁵⁸ In 1955, Mrs Hope from the Clapham Women’s Constituency called for a Ministry of Consumer Welfare which would help the party ‘appeal to the housewives of Britain’.¹⁵⁹ The problem was not so much that Labour women could not mobilise women voters, rather that the Party itself failed to heed their advice. When he visited Labour women’s conference in 1958, the party chair, Tom Driberg, said that he disagreed with ‘the Martha and Mary attitude: that men should do the high abstract thinking and mediation on important political issues, and that women, like Martha should always be cumbered about with much serving, and have to do the humdrum chores’.¹⁶⁰ But this was not borne out in practice. Internal reviews sought to maximise women’s contribution to electioneering rather than increase their involvement in policy making.¹⁶¹ It was claimed that ‘the most effective work can be carried on by women members of the Party in shopping queues, shopping centres and by house to house canvassing’.¹⁶² Male attendees to women’s conference continually praised women's organisational capacities and contribution to election efforts. It is notable, however, that the General Secretary’s report on the 1951 election results refers only to the work of Mary Sutherland under ‘women’s activities’.¹⁶³ Whether he did not know or did not care what the rest of the organisation had been doing is unclear.

At the same time, Labour women’s conference itself was clearly in decline as a space for creative innovation or distinctive policy making. The 1955 conference report commented approvingly that the resolutions from the 1954 conference were already in harmony with party policy so required no action.¹⁶⁴ That year, Mrs Souness, representing Carlisle Women’s Constituency Committee, introduced a resolution expressing a conviction that ‘the only hope of restraining the cost of living lies in Labour’s economic and financial policies.’¹⁶⁵ Conference was committed to what Mrs Gibbons from Edinburgh termed ‘nationalisation to help the housewife’, though, as she noted, nationalisation had not kept prices down.¹⁶⁶ As this suggests, Labour women tended to propose a return to the policies already tried and tested in government–rationing, controls, bulk buying and the utility scheme–rather than developing new approaches. Peter Gurney has attributed the decline of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild to a hardening moralistic stance on social and cultural issues which alienated younger women.¹⁶⁷ Labour women’s interest in juvenile delinquency, ‘problem’ families, and worries about the impact of the cinema, as well as their own anxieties about the failure to attract younger women, suggests that this argument might well be applied to the wider women’s Labour movement too.¹⁶⁸

Seeking a more compelling language which better reflected the wider Party’s shifting agenda, housewifery became less central towards the end of the 1950s. In 1957, when the Chair, Alice Wood, spoke of ‘those who have suffered most from rising prices’, she did not refer to housewives but to ‘the low paid wage earners, pensioners and others who have to make ends meet on small fixed incomes’.¹⁶⁹ The subsequent debate on the cost of living made no mention to the specific costs to the housewife, beyond a rhetorical question by a Miss Jones from the Transport Salaried Staffs Association about the disappearance of the Housewives League.¹⁷⁰ Challenges encountered in shops–excessive packaging, dirty vegetables–were reported as problems for the consumer, rather than the housewife.¹⁷¹ In such generic debates on consumption, there was less explicit assertion that, by and large, it was women who were managing these concerns.¹⁷²

Where the housewife was present in these later debates, she was more often conceptualised as someone in need of protection from ‘the monopolist and the shoddy manufacturer’.¹⁷³ They deplored the government’s failure to tackle these businesses ‘which exploit the public and throw hardship on the housewife’.¹⁷⁴ Solutions proposed included clearer labelling, a reduction in marketing strategies, and participation in the consumer movement, as well as, of course, a Labour government which would prioritise consumer protection.¹⁷⁵ This desire for increased protection extended into other health and safety concerns, and anxieties about accidents in different settings during the latter half of the 1950s.¹⁷⁶ These were undoubtedly important issues, which were shared across women’s organisations. Yet there was also a risk of conceptually remaking the housewife, imagining her not as a source of strength who simply needed the right framework of support but as a far weaker figure, vulnerable to exploitation and in constant need of protection.

The difficulties that the Labour Party experienced in adapting positively to rising expectations and increased consumption during a period of growing affluence have been well-documented.¹⁷⁷ Labour women clearly shared these difficulties. Having failed to persuade their colleagues to pay greater attention to the specific needs of housewives, they adopted the strategy gaining traction in the wider party, and turned to the language of consumption to make their case. This supposedly more inclusive politics, however, was itself based on gender and class assumptions which did not necessarily reflect the ongoing realities of many working-class women.

Conclusion

During the 1940s and 1950s, Labour women had sought to organise and campaign around the notion of housewifery. This drew on and adapted a long-standing tradition of women’s organising on the left. It enabled them to assert their significance within Labour’s broader political movement and make a specific set of demands. This politics was grounded in lived experience which shaped their beliefs about the issues which most affected working-class women’s lives. As such, these women organised as Labour housewives, not just as housewives.¹⁷⁸ The fact these identities were understood to be fully compatible rather than in conflict is important, given the historiographical emphasis on Labour’s failures to appeal to women. Many working-class women evidently saw significant possibilities and relevance within Labour’s programme.

It is true, of course, that on the whole this was a cautious approach to pursuing their interests and carving out space within the Party. This changed during the 1960s, when Labour women became more openly critical of the Party and government, and more determined to assert themselves and their views.¹⁷⁹ This was undoubtedly linked to wider shifts in women’s economic, social and cultural position as well as the re-election of a Labour government, and was later reinforced by the emergence of the women’s liberation movement. Labour women were no longer prepared to tolerate their subordinate position within the organisation.¹⁸⁰ Nevertheless, in the immediate post-war period this was a pragmatic strategy which reflected their own self-understandings and chimed with the dominant political and ideological discourse. It was also a point of pride. In 1949, Rose Whyatt claimed that Labour women had ‘done more than anyone else to help the housewife to believe in herself and to formulate her own demands for better conditions for her job.’¹⁸¹

It is therefore important that we understand the ongoing importance of housewifery to women on the left. It was not only meaningful and useful to those in voluntary organisations or those on the right. Moreover, though the women’s liberation movement has often been associated with a critique of housework as a primary source of exploitation, new scholarship is also showing that even into later decades of the twentieth century, housewifery might continue be a powerful source of political identification in working class communities.¹⁸² A commitment to home and family did not mean women saw themselves as unequal with men.¹⁸³ Disregarding associations between housewifery and the left risks obscuring the possibilities for particular forms of activism centred around the home.¹⁸⁴ But excavating this association also sheds new light on the longstanding gender gap in British politics caused by Labour’s failures to appeal to women.¹⁸⁵ The fact that Labour women were often drowned out or disregarded by contemporaries should not obscure their attempt to define, pursue and expand working-class women’s interests within the post-war social democratic settlement.

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.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

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.

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’.