Papers presented by Nicole de Silva since 2019
2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform
"'Housewives Imagine a New World': The International Cooperative Women’s Guild's Conceptions of Ethical Commerce, 1921-1924"
Nicole de Silva, University of California, Santa Barbara
Abstract:
The International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), established in 1895 as an international forum for national cooperative unions, has offered historians one example of a global "fair trade" movement. Its affiliated women’s organization, the International Cooperative Women’s Guild (ICWG), formed by Austrian MP Emmy Freundlich and several English ICA colleagues in 1921, claimed that “cooperative housewives” around the world could help build an alternative, more ethical mode of global trade by shopping at consumer cooperatives. This, they claimed, would strengthen international wholesalers that linked cooperative producers to global consumers. In turn, they claimed that international cooperation could help "housewives" by offering a system of retail more responsive to consumer demand and even through promoting global peace through fairer trade. In the years following World War I, ICWG meetings provided a forum for female reformers to engage in discussions about what reconstructed global commerce might look like. By the late 1930s, conferences brought together over five hundred women from Europe, the US, and Asia and developed relationships with the League of Nations and International Labor Organization. My paper explores the "ethical imagination" of ICWG leaders, a term I use to describe their implicit conception of the morality of market interactions. ICWG commentary on cooperative trade helps reveal the contours of this imagination. As an example, I conduct a case study of Irish cooperative dairy trade during the Anglo-Irish war. I examine cooperative business records alongside ICWG archives, including conference records and petitions of Irish cooperative women to the ICWG's primarily English leaders. While identifying as a “cooperative housewife” might link oneself to an international conversation about the future of cooperative commerce, this study illustrates blindspots in ICWG leaders’ universalist conception of “women” and the limits of their ethical imaginations.
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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"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
Abstract:
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.