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

The Women's Co-operative Guild has been largely overlooked by historians of the home front in Britain during the Second World War. This article seeks to remedy this absence and argues for the importance of the Guild, which mobilised and redefined the role of working-class housewives, or 'the woman with the basket', in the context of national crisis. It shows how the Guild moved beyond its pacifist stance to engage in humanitarian aid, participate on wartime committees and educate women about the politics of food. The Guild sought to empower housewives in debates on post-war reconstruction, which soon broadened into a critique of the international capitalist economy. Reasons are also suggested for the Guild's subsequent decline after the war ended. Women were largely excluded from the business side of the movement and this held them back. However, equally important were generational conflicts that were exacerbated in austerity Britain. I argue that the rather inflexible moralism of the Guild tended to isolate it from young female consumers, especially women whose gender roles and expectations were not adequately captured by 'the woman with the basket' designation and whose seemingly profligate consumption habits and wayward behaviour leaders of the Guild wanted to discipline.