Redefining ‘the woman with the basket’: The Women's Co‐operative Guild and the Politics of Consumption in Britain during the Second World War

Abstract

Over recent decades, historians of gender have transformed our understanding of the impact of total war on British society. Feminist scholars in particular have been drawn to this field of research because, as Margaret and Patrice Higonnet suggested in an influential essay, war 'crystallizes contradictions between ideology and actual experience'. 1 Mass mobilisation necessitated by total war blurred boundaries between military and home fronts and between men and women. Dominant conceptions of gender roles were put under intense pressure, making possible greater awareness of their constructed and hence malleable nature. 2 Understandably, women who experienced the most dramatic change have attracted the most scholarly attention; women in uniform, for example, who threatened to destabilise definitions of gender that conceived of the soldier as the epitome of masculinity. 3 Women conscripted into the paid labour force were often called upon to perform the physically demanding or skilled tasks that historically had been bound up with ideas of masculinity, and these too have been subjected to detailed investigation. 4 Running through both these historiographical strands is an interest in memory; little wonder as the full range of women's experience has been marginalised if not effaced from public memory. Oral historians have addressed this lacuna by attending to women's own narratives of their experience of industrial and military mobilisation. 5 Knowledge of the way in which war shaped the activities and ideology of feminist groups and women's voluntary organisations, which sought to expand female notions of citizenship particularly during the Second World War, has also been significantly elucidated by studies of bodies such as the Women's Institute (WI), the Women's Voluntary Services (WVS) and Townswomen's Guilds. 6 The working-class housewife, however, remains at best a shadowy presence in this literature, despite some useful leads concerning individual attitudes. 7 Their agency is also underplayed by those social historians who have explored wartime austerity, including the effects on ordinary consumers of rationing and the black market. 8 For sure, recovering the experience of a protean category that has left no straightforward