Abstract

"Housewives Imagine a New World: The Social and Economic Thought of the International Co-operative Women’s Guild, 1921-1939"

Nicole de Silva, University of California, Santa Barbara (nicole_desilva@ucsb.edu)

The International Cooperative Alliance (established 1895) and the International Cooperative Wholesale Society (formed 1924 to collect and exchange market data) helped to extend the global reach of the co-operative movement in the interwar period. These organizations have received some scholarly attention, but fewer historians have examined the International Co-operative Women’s Guild (ICWG, founded 1921). By 1937, ICWG conferences brought together over five-hundred women from the U.S. and Europe. The ICWG gave feminist economists and self-declared “housewives” an institutional space for reimagining global political economy from the bottom-up view of the household-consumer. Through an examination of the ICWG papers and writings of leaders, I claim that co-operative women combined social ideals with business practices in three ways. First, when international co-operative wholesalers like the English CWS gained control of agricultural and industrial production, this theoretically gave consumers more direct control over the kinds and qualities of goods supplied. The movement's methods of "production for use," according to the ICWG, offered a form of "economic planning" that moved up from consumer demand. Second, women claimed that these wholesalers' expansive methods of food inspection offered to create a new and more stringent international regime of food safety regulation. This helped ensure that working housewives had access to safe, affordable food for their families. Finally, co-operative women used their international network to advocate for the importance of unwaged housework at an international level, and advocated local uses of the co-operative form to collectivize this work through co-operative, communal laundries and kitchens. Overall, I claim that identifying as a "co-operative housewife" offered to link women to an expansive international vision of social economy, even as there were distinctions between the concerns of urban and rural women co-operators.