Margaret's campaigning
Margaret retired from the Guild a hundred years ago, yet many of the campaigns she initiated raise issues which are startlingly familiar today. This woman was definitely ahead of her time.
Battles within the movement
Campaigning for Co-operation to be extended to poor areas, Margaret wrote in 1899:
‘steady trade, good quality, an educated taste, a well-to-do membership, are all excellent things ... But is this all that co-operation can do? Are we not becoming dangerously respectable ... I sometimes wonder whether I can be in the right camp when I find we have dukes and bishops and royalties and The Times newspaper on our side.’
While this sounds facetious, it reflects Margaret’s view of the Co-operative movement of the time, which was highly respectable and associated with individual self-help. Her insistence on Co-operation’s ethical ideals and its radical traditions often made her a thorn in the side of its conservative elements.
In particular, a constant focus for Margaret and the Guild was a bruising struggle against sexism within the movement. Despite theoretical gender equality, women could not join some local Co-operative societies if their husbands were already members. And there was a long drawn out battle for women to be elected in any numbers on to the powerful local and national committees which ran the movement. Aiming, as she said, not for ‘special privileges’, but ‘real equality of opportunity’, Margaret made a point of supporting and publicising the pioneering Guildswomen who came forward. The antagonism they often faced was very real: as late as 1914, Margaret wrote bitterly to a friend of ‘the opposition, contempt, desire to keep [women] in their places ... that we have gone through all these years - and still constantly experience.’
Fair trade and decent wages
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Margaret believed that trade unionism and co-operation should be seen as ‘two halves of the same circle’ and consistently supported collaboration between the two movements. More immediately, she encouraged Guildswomen to push their local Co-operative societies for improved hours and conditions for their workers, and for their shops to refuse to sell goods produced by ‘sweated’ labour. In addition, she tackled unequal pay head on, leading the Guild in a major campaign for minimum wages for women working in Co-operatively-run shops, factories and workshops, a campaign which she presented as ‘a step towards a living wage, and the ultimate adoption of equal pay for equal work’.
Votes for which women?
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While thoroughly committed to the early 20th century battle for the vote, Margaret always highlighted the position of working class women, and she and the Guild collaborated closely with major organisations of women workers in northern textile towns, known now as the ‘radical suffragists’. Margaret’s story also highlights another neglected but important aspect of the movement: the division between those who demanded votes for women on the same terms as then applied to men, which would exclude many working class women, and those who insisted instead on votes for all adults, both men and women. While this was sometimes purely a matter of immediate tactics, at other stages of the struggle it became a crucial point of contention in which Margaret was a key player.
Gender politics in the home
Clearly, the vote in itself could not improve the hard lives of women like those in the Guild, and Margaret’s campaigns also opened up controversial discussions about women’s position in the home.
After being invited to give evidence to a Royal Commission on divorce law reform in 1910, Margaret came up with radical proposals for liberalisation, including permitting divorce on grounds of mutual consent, which shocked conventional public opinion and even divided the Guild. Nevertheless, Guildswomen stood united in rejecting Co-operative leaders’ attempt to silence the campaign. To support it, Margaret gathered and published their explosive testimony of women’s suffering within marriage, lifting what she called the ‘thick curtain that falls on…married life’ to great effect.
Not long after, Margaret published more heart-rending letters from Guildswomen, this time about their experience of maternity. The campaign started with a successful though controversial battle for a new state maternity grant to be paid to the wife rather than the husband. Margaret went on to look at mothers’ needs more broadly, pointing out the reality of pregnancy for many women: exhausted by back-breaking housework and caring for children and husband, while often forced to take on casual work in order to save up for any medical care at the time of the birth. Drawing on wide-ranging evidence which included the letters from Guildswomen, Margaret and colleague Margaret Bondfield devised and promoted a ground breaking, influential scheme for ‘The National Care of Maternity’: a system of comprehensive services, organised not by charities but by local authorities, so that, as she put it, mothers would feel ‘as free to use a Municipal Maternity Centre as they are to use a Council School to a Public Library.’ This was amazingly forward-looking for the time. (See Margaret and the Guild, and Women’s Voices)
These are just some of Margaret’s most significant campaigns, though we should not forget the longstanding commitment to pacifism and internationalism which became her major focus after she retired. While she was motivated by her strong feminist and socialist beliefs as well as her by central loyalty to Co-operation, she (nearly) always managed a pragmatic approach which struck a chord with the majority of Guildswomen. The success of these radical campaigns depended on them.