It is impossible to say how much I owe the Guild.
(Mrs Lizzie Layton, page 54)

‘Life as We Have Known It’ is a collection of first-hand accounts of the lives of working class women from the later nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth. Many of them escaped poverty or were inspired to write, by membership of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, and the accounts were collated and edited into a collection by the Guild’s secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Despite the Victorian provenance of many of the accounts the book wasn’t published until as late as 1931. It made a big splash at a time when the study of social history was just starting to be a thing, typified by the foundation of the Mass Observation movement in 1937.

The Women’s Co-Operative Guild

The co-operative movement

In the first half of the nineteenth century workers formed co-operative groups in many countries across Europe in response to the Industrial Revolution. Wherever it occurred, the Revolution created a large industrial proletariat which the factory and business-owning classes brutally exploited.

A central activity of these various co-operative movements was to band together to open their own stores selling good quality groceries. In 1844 10 weavers and 20 other workers in Rochdale set up the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers and opened a store which became well-known for selling good quality food and groceries at prices their working class customers could afford. In the process they developed the so-called Rochdale Principles which went on to become widely copied and famous. Over the following decades in Britain, larger co-operatives were formed from the merger of many independent retail societies. In 1863 the North of England Co-operative Society was launched by 300 individual co-ops across Yorkshire and Lancashire. By 1872, it had become known as the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and so on.

Women and the co-operative movement

Meanwhile, something had been missing from all this well-intentioned activity, namely women. Women worked side by side men in factories and, of course, ran most households, did most of the shopping, cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, and yet they not only had no representation in society at large, could not vote or take part in civic life – they didn’t even have a role within the Co-operative Movement.

So in 1883 a handful of women activists set up the Women’s Co-Operative Guild to fill the gap. There was no shortage of Victorian charities run by high-minded middle-class women who wanted to do something to the working class – but right from the start, the Guild was about working class women doing it for themselves.

The role of Margaret Llewellyn Davies

In 1889, the young Margaret Llewellyn Davies (born in 1861 and so 28 years old) took over as President of the Guild. She began implementing an ambitious agenda to broaden and expand the organisation. She encouraged working women around the country to form local groups, to organise and attend regional and national congresses, to educate themselves about broader political issues such as higher wages, shorter working hours, better working conditions, health and safety and, of course, the campaign to give women the vote. Davies was to serve as the Guild’s general secretary for over 30 years, until 1921. Her personal views, a combination of socialism and feminism, shaped the Guild’s direction.

• Margaret Llewelyn Davies Wikipedia article

In 1915, 16 years into the job, Davies edited a book titled Maternity: Letters from Working Women. it was based on letters from Guild members describing their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing and was an eye-opening example of social history.

And now we finally come to the book under review because 16 years later, in 1931, Davies published a sister book, Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women. By this point the Guild had 1,400 branches and 67,000 members for whom it had opened doors and given them undreamed of opportunities.

Life as We Have Known It

It’s a lot shorter than its reputation suggests, at just 170 pages of big type, and that’s with various bits of editorial matter added onto the original text, such as the introduction by Virginia Woolf, a note on the Women’s Co-operative Guild by Margaret Davies, and an afterword by the publishers of the 1977 Virago edition.

From everything I’d read about it I was expecting it to be mammoth and encyclopedic along the lines of Henry Mayhew’s epic ‘London Labour and the London Poor’. Instead it contains only six substantial accounts:

1. Memories of Seventy Years by Mrs Layton (60 pages)
2. A Plate-Layer’s Wife by Mrs Wrigley (12 pages)
3. In A Mining Village by Mrs F.H. Smith (7 pages)
4. A Guild Office Clerk contributed by the Editor (8 pages)
5. A Felt Hat Worker by Mrs Scott J.P. (24 pages)
6. A Public-Spirited Rebel by Mrs Yearn (8 pages)

These together make up 120 just pages.

There follow several slightly eccentric appendices. The most powerful is a brutal account of working as child slave labour in East Anglia by a Mrs Burrows. This is followed, a little oddly, about 20 extracts from letters from Guildswomen all round Britain which address the topic of what books they like reading and have read recently, with the result that many of them are just glorified lists of popular books of the first decades of the twentieth century, mildly interesting but not a patch on the searing accounts from the first part of the book.

1. Memories of Seventy Years by Mrs Layton (60 pages)

This is by far the longest memoir and is so long it has to be divided into chapters.

1. Childhood in Bethnal Green

Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ was born in Bethnal Green 1855, one of 14 children, so that her mother was permanently pregnant or suckling or both. In those days Bethnal Green was a village and they had a big garden in which they kept pigs and ducks and chickens. When she was 6 they moved to a bigger house but in a more cramped neighbourhood with little outside space. A neighbouring dairyman kept cows whose manure stank out the house. There was no sanitation or running water, with human waste piled close to water butts with the result that there were recurring outbreaks of cholera. At the age of 12 her older sister went into service. One day a week all the babies were washed with the girls kept back from school to help. They used to hire a pram for a penny to take the babies to Victoria Park for a treat. One day she and her sister were naughty and went on an outing, walking, with one of the babies, to Epping Forest. Her parents were worried sick and relieved when they reappeared.

Her father was an educated man with a job in government service, who dressed smartly and was musical. He played at the coronation of Queen Victoria (1837). He taught himself tailoring to supplement his income, and grew all their own vegetables. Lizzie is never among the poorest of the poor.

As the family grew her mother had to take on extra work and became continually exhausted. A doctor prescribed spirits and so little Lizzie saved up pennies earned minding babies and running errands and bought treats of gin for her mother. This probably didn’t help and her mum went downhill and died when she was still a girl.

A development of bigger grander houses is built nearby. Some of the girls become ‘step girls’ who can earn up to 9d a Saturday for cleaning all the steps. The Sisters of Mercy are attached to a nearby church and have a spooky reputation but they give Lizzie and her sister food when they go knocking on their door.

The Sisters visit a house they’ve heard is poorly and discover a mother and two sisters with smallpox. In that neighbourhood people made matchboxes at home and the matchboxes were being made in the same room as the smallpox patients then taken out onto the streets to be sold and distributed.

As London expands fine old houses get converted into tenements or even into factories. Women and girls have to beg for their pennies pay while in the grand house the family of the owners live off roast joints.

Little Lizzie is ill, the doctor recommends a change of air and so she goes and stays with her aunt in the countryside. She loves the countryside and her first stay lasts five weeks. Her uncle is a farm bailiff. He lets her ride on the cows or on the cart piled with fresh fodder for the cows. She is scared of the bees but loves the sunsets she sees from the windows of the cottage.

2. Ten years in domestic service

When she’s 10 she starts earning a living as a baby minder, interspersed with attending one of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools. The baby belongs to a couple who keep a small shop and pawn shop, so Lizzie sees the misery of families so poor they have to pawn their children’s clothes to pay for food.

Age 13, goes to Hampstead in service for a year. She is kept inside the house all week except for Sunday morning excursions to church. She has confirmation classes and is confirmed by the Bishop of London.

Age 15 went to be a maternity nurse in Kentish Town, where a young mother of 3 children and a baby died or puerperal fever. She gets 3 shillings a week which she ekes out by repairing her own clothes. One evening a gentleman offered her ten shillings to have sex with him and she was tempted but refused. the two oldest children are taught to read and write at home and Lizzie picks up some of this by watching. She develops an appetite for instalments of sensational stories in magazines lent her by the servant next door, but had to read these in secret.

Age 17 she quits the job when the family try to make her take the children on the only spare hours she gets to herself, on Sunday afternoons. She gets a new post with a lady and her daughter. This is a good gig as they happily let her read and the grown-up daughter even corrects her reading and writing. She has days off to go walking with her father, which she loved, and develops a cult of poring over maps and railway timetables and dreaming of travelling to farflung places such as Manchester!

She gets time off to assist at the lying-in of her sister and is horrified by the realities of childbirth and the harsh treatment of new mothers (not allowed to wash afterwards and fed on water gruel and toast).

Age 18, she can afford to dress well and starts having male friends. Men start proposing marriage to her. She happens to attend a wedding and is horrified at the vows a woman has to make and give up her freedom. Nonetheless she becomes engaged and the engagement lasts two years.

She accompanies her kind family for an extended stay at Hastings. The mother invites her fiancé to stay but he makes an improper suggestion to Lizzie and follows it up by trying to force her. She fights him off but from that point despises him. When they move back to London, this man keeps trying to see her until eventually she gives up her post and moves to Balham in south London to try and escape him.

3. Married life, Midwifery, Co-operation

She meets a man at a Mission Hall, Mr Layton. By now she is interested in social issues. They are engaged for three years and then, in 1882 Lizzie marries, aged 26. On the eve of the wedding the piano-making firm her fiancé works for goes bankrupt and he is thrown out of work.

After slogging round for work her husband gets a regular job as a carriage cleaner for a railway, working 12 hours a night, 6 days a week for 19 shillings i.e. 95p.

September 1883 first child. It is a forceps delivery with no anaesthetic. Imagine! She is all alone to look after the child. Three months later husband lost his job. A friend lodging in the same house tells him about a job working at St Pancras loading and unloading for 17 shillings a week. What with the rent and the cost of commuting to work, there isn’t much left over and Lizzie often goes hungry. The long hours make husband sick and he is routinely off sick for months at a time.

She takes in washing which she can only do when the baby is asleep and often only gets two hours sleep herself. Three years later a second child but it dies after three months from lack of nourishment and she says she might have died, too.

Her husband joins the Railwaymen’s trade union. She comes to understand the importance of trade unions for protecting working people A co-operative store opens 2 miles away and Mrs L becomes a member. An Education committee is set up and through them a branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. She loves that it’s not a question of middle class women coming and lecturing but working class women presenting and explaining and being open to questions.

She saw Margaret Llewelyn Davies speak. She was only a member for ten months before she was elected president. She nervously attends meetings of the general Co-Op Management Committee. She is invited to give lectures on domestic economy to guilds around London. She begins to speak in the meetings about political issues.

Her husband gets a promotion, they move to Cricklewood, Lizzie takes up nursing instead of taking in washing and ironing. She is encouraged by doctors but can’t possibly afford the fees for a midwifery course which start at £30. So she remains a maternity nurse but one who reads and studies and is show techniques by supportive doctors.

She handles so many cases that the friendliest doctor says he’d be confident her handling deliveries by herself, only contacting him if there are problems. Eventually she saves up the £30 and takes the exam, which she found intimidating, especially the five-minute interview, but fails. In the event the landmark Midwives Act of 1902 allowed her to trade on her extensive practical experience to become fully qualified.

Her local Guild fails but she joins a new one in Willesden where she is soon elected President. it’s quite clear by now that Lizzie Layton is an extremely competent, conscientious and hard-working woman. It’s an inspiring story. She is the first woman sent by the (male) management committee of the Willesden Co-Op to represent them at the national Co-Operative Union Congress. Then she attends the next Congress in Swansea.

For ten years she scrimped and saved enough to buy a house or, more precisely, to have a house of two apartments built to her specifications. She surprised the builder with her knowledge of drainage and ventilation. She insists the deeds of the house should be in her name, not her husband’s, despite the latter’s protests.

The last few pages of her account turn to how much she owes the Guild. Without them she would have had no focus to her life. The family they shared a house with worked all day and went to the pub every night. Without the Guild, its lectures and disciple, she might easily have taken to drink like her mother.

From a shy, nervous woman the Guild made me a fighter. (p.54)

She becomes a political lobbyist, meeting Sir Rufus Isaac to get maternity pay included in the Liberal Party’s forthcoming National Insurance Act (1911). When war came and so many men disappeared, she lobbied for the creation of home helps to support hard-pressed mothers left alone. She memorably describes lobbying the Prince of Wales’s Fund to change its decision not to support unmarried mothers (because of Anglican clerics, obviously) arguing that they needed support more than the married.

In 1921 she retires as Vice-President of the Guild and initially feels bereft. but her local branch was in trouble and so she sets up and runs a clothing club to help working people save for affordable clothes. She has been to three international Congresses but still patches her own boots, repairs her own clothes, and has an allotment. And the last two pages given an idyllic account of her allotment with its little shed, its seats and paraffin stove for cooking supper and the view over the railway embankment to the tower of Hampstead Old Church. Here she lives on her pension and a little money she has saved, and cooks and cares for a friend who is not very well.

What an inspiring narrative!

2. A Plate-Layer’s Wife by Mrs Wrigley

Much shorter and less epic but describing a childhood of extraordinary hard work. She was born in Cefn Mawr in Wales in 1858. Her father was a shoemaker earning 12 shillings a week, her mother went out sewing all day long for 1 shilling. As a small child her chores included:

• looking after the 4 younger children
• walking 2 miles to a pit bank to collect coals and carry them home in a basket on her head
• walk 2 miles to a local farm to buy and bring home buttermilk
• fetch water from a well in a jar she carried on her head
• cleaning other people’s backyards for a penny
• carrying men workers’ dinners to the iron forge for twopence a week

Some of her happiest memories are of going with other children to wash the family clothes in the River Dee. All this by the age of 8.

When she’s about 9 she goes to be a nurse for a child to a family in Stockport. But they make her work long hours as a lackey till a friendly old lady writes her parents to come and fetch her back.

Then she goes to work on a dairy farm near Oswestry. She’s paid 2 shillings and sixpence a month and stays there till she’s 12 years old. Then to work at another dairy farm, at Marple.

1872: aged 14 she moves to a job at a Temperance Hotel in Oldham. The master and mistress teach her to read and write and send her to school. She’s there to the age of 19. Here her wages rise to a pound a month.

1877: moves to a job as servant in a big house in Saddleworth. Hard work for two years. Here she first meets her future husband on the few hours a week she’s allowed out.

Aged 21 she moves to a gentleman’s house to be a cook. It is an excellent house kept by real Christians who were fair to the staff and allowed them balls and entertainments. Five years, until her husband persuades her to marry and leave.

Her husband was a platelayer on the railway earning 18 shillings a week, not enough to support a household so she had to do sewing. She soon joined one of the Oldham Co-operative stores and never looked back for the next 46 years. She’s 72 now and can’t imagine how she’d have survived without the Co-Op.

When she discovered she was pregnant she took in more sewing and washing to make up money but the extra work made her ill and she had to go home to her mother to look after her.

She tells the story of the mother she knew who was much worse off, she couldn’t sew, she often went without food, the children had rags. She got a job minding a house while two fine women went on holiday. There was a marble timepiece and she pawned it to get money to feed her family but the two ladies returned before the could redeem it and she was committed to gaol overnight, while her husband found the sum. A few days later she had her baby and was all alone, so Mrs Wrigley took pity, sent for a nurse, brought round clean bed clothes, and looked after her till she was well. Christ was in that woman.

1894 moved to Stockport. She had the fourth of their children. When they were small the table was often bare or she went without eating anything. One by one the children grew old enough to run errands and small jobs, a newspaper round, delivering milk, it made all the difference to the total family income.

She ensured the children all got an education and, as the boys turned 14, were put into apprenticeships. All five of them were given music lessons so that they made quite the little orchestra. During the Great War one was killed and two got married and moved away. The son died when she was 30 and just 11 months later he husband passed away.

Since then another son died, aged 30. She’s been a widow these 14 years. She couldn’t have stood her life if not for the Guild. It educated her, she became a member of her local branch, then a worker on committees, then was president for two years.

She joined the Suffrage to prevent the next generation having the hard life she endured. She doesn’t think there’d have been a war if women had had the vote beforehand. That’s what they all say. Women had the vote by the 1930s and look what happened next. But it was 1931 and she said she was working for peace. History suggests no-one can keep the peace if enemies (Hitler, Putin) are determined for war. But that shouldn’t stop anyone working to make their little part of the world a better place.

3. In A Mining Village by Mrs F.H. Smith (7 pages)

Born in Cardiff in 1884, Mrs Smith was 19 when she left the job in service she had to marry a miner in 1903. She discovered that miners had baths but no running water. Water had to be brought in from outside and boiled over a coal fire and emptied into the bath a bucket at a time. The miners’ houses weren’t built for convenience, just the bare minimum for the corporation to screw rent out of. There were just two rooms, bedroom and living room. The weekly wash had to be done in the same room as the miner stripped off in, so it was impossible. There was a continual layer of coal dust over everything.

The open fires and freedom of boiling water in numerous containers explains the high rates of child scaldings and burns in Wales. A 5-year old she knows died after falling in a bath of boiling water.

1904: baby daughter born. 1905: rented a house from the colliery company her husband worked for. 1906: a terrible pit explosion which killed 122, including the husband, two sons and adopted son of the woman opposite.

She describes the long hours of pit shifts and only 20 minutes food break. Sometimes so cold they shiver, sometimes so hot they emerge drenched in sweat.

Eventually she had nine children. Since 1925 her husband’s been ill, latterly with neuritis for 9 months. He tried to get light work at the pit but there wasn’t any so he went on the unemployment list.

All the facilities in her town are a cinema, the British Legion and some unfinished playing fields. There are two lovely parks and they can send the children for walks in the beautiful hills.

These days it is heart-breaking to see the unemployed men and lads down at the Labour Exchange. Being a member of the Guild and the local Co-Op has been one of the things that’s kept her going through all the hard times.

4. A Guild Office Clerk contributed by the Editor (7 pages)

This is Davies’s tribute to Harriet A. Kidd, chief secretary at the Guild head office from 1906 to 1917. Davies tells us she was a prickly but fiercely opinionated woman.

She started at a steel mill at Leek when she was ten years old. Whole families were employed by the paternalistic owners, who looked after morals and ensured they went to church.

She became a member of the local Co-Op and then of the Guild in 1897. She became secretary of her branch and of the Macclesfield region. She stayed up late doing Guild work then went to the mill next day. She got involved in trade unionism.

In 1906 she was invited to become a clerk at the Guild’s head office in Westmorland at which point she wrote back a letter confessing that when she was 18 she was seduced, or raped, by her employer and made pregnant. He refused to acknowledge the child and she had to bring up her son in secret, with the help of ‘her people’.

Nonetheless she was taken on at Guild headquarters among women who were supportive. In 1908 she followed the move of the headquarters to Hampstead in London. She became a proficient typist and insisted on hogging the office machine. She lacked much education but enjoyed reading. She became the Guild cashier, and also the cook and caterer whenever Guild Schools were held at the office.

She was the first woman to be elected to a position in the Amalgamated Union of Co-Operative Employees. She was a great advocate of the right of women to run their own lives, to vote, and receive equal pay for their work.

She was a wholehearted socialist, her hero Keir Hardie, her favourite song The Red Flag.

In 1916 she was diagnosed with a fatal illness but bore it with fortitude. Margaret often visited her after she became bed-ridden.

5. A Felt Hat Worker by Mrs Scott J.P.

Nellie. When she was seven her family moved into a draper’s shop. She was given the task of going round the customers every Saturday asking the poor to pay their bills and debts. Her extended family were very opinionated, with relatives who were Conservative, Liberal, an uncle who was a follower of Darwin, a regular visitor to the shop who was a Bradlaughite i.e. atheist. As a child she sat under the counter and listened to the grown-ups arguing back and forth.

When she was 12 she was sent to work in a hat shop, a nice clean job. When she was 14 she was sent to a hat manufactory, one big smelly room. Work started at 6.20am every morning and she had to walk a mile to get there. She only later realised a lot of the girls there were also prostitutes.

She was now living with her uncle, who had returned from Canada and America, and subscribed to American magazines, which she read from cover to cover.

She is badly ill for three months. When she recovers she goes to work in Christie’s Hat Mills. She is bolshie. She tells a conservative woman that the charwoman who brought up her family was as good a soul as Queen Victoria. The hat-making was hard, difficult to push the needles through tough fabric, and the senior women judged their work and sent back anything with uneven stitching to be redone. They had to take work home to work on it till 8 or 9 at night.

It’s too hard so she goes and works at Lees and Hatconks. There a fierce debates between the Conservatives and the Radicals. She joins Clarion Hall and there’s a Ruskin Hall Settlement in Stockport.

She gets married but, on her return, joins the Felt Hatters Trade Union and becomes an activist, getting all the other girls to sign up. When her mother dies she takes over the family ‘ticket’ for membership of the Co-Op. She becomes treasure of the Women’s Labour League, is on the Labour representation Committee and so on. She’s involved in the long campaign to stop girls having to take work home at night.

The text then turns to tell us about her favourite books by authors such as J.M. Barrie, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, George Egerton, and half a page about H.G. Wells. She says the thing about all Wells’s novels is you seem to know the characters.

[I’m reading this book because the Penguin Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf includes the long introduction to it. Elsewhere in her essays, Woolf launches a sustained attack on novelists from the generation before hers – Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells – and one of her central criticisms is that they describe characters who are ‘not like us’. It is, therefore, extremely enlightening to read the praise for Wells coming from ordinary working class women on precisely this point, that they identify with Wells’s characters. What this does is highlight the class-based nature of Woolf’s opposition to Wells et al. Woolf finds Wells’s characters common and vulgar. Inextricably mixed up in her radical innovations in the novel was a huge amount of unattractive snobbery.]

In 1908 she was asked to set up a Women’s Co-operative Guild in Stockport. There are now 300 members. It’s been a battle for women to take their place alongside the men.

I think sometimes, when I hear the women speaking of the influence of the Guild, what a wonderful organisation it is, and what it has meant to so many women. (p.106)

She stops working in hat factories to become superintendent at a place for feeding school children, was there during the start of the War when there was great want. Then she becomes a sickness visitor for an Approved Society in a part of Derbyshire, for seven years, the last 3 of the war, then 4 afterwards. She describes the bleak snow-packed countryside, the emptiness and beauty, and the kindness and hospitality of the people.

Then a doctor tells her she’s strained her heart and needs to quit the arduous work, sometimes walking over 20 miles a day etc. Now she works as a justice of the peace, or magistrate. The Guild lost members during the war because of its pacifism but it has since restored its numbers. She is proud when she hears testimonies of women who it has helped through deep trouble.

She describes a Guild member who lives out in India with her husband who manages a cotton mill and how she supervises creches and support for the native women.

She says how gratifying it is to think that her work for the Guild, the Co-Op and other progressive movements have paved the way for the women who come afterwards; how the Guild opened doors and minds, how it helped working women become articulate and express their demands.

6. A Public-Spirited Rebel by Mrs Yearn (8 pages)

‘We’ve had enough of posh men lording it over us, we’re not going to accept their posh wives!’

One of 14 children, eight of whom died in childhood. Dad was a brick-setter and couldn’t work for half the year, so mum went to the mill, leaving childcare to the older sisters. The family became slowly better off and mum joined the Stores. She died of cancer.

She married but her husband was out of work during the Engineers strike so she went to the mill. She was a trade unionist and got all the women to join, for which she was given the sack.

Then she joined the Guild and was soon elected to the committee. She attended her first Congress in 1915. She pioneered women in public roles in Oldham and stood for the town council, incurring much mockery from the men. She gives a CV of her activities, roles and positions through the 1920s, often the first woman to hold particular posts.

Class conscious, she objected to Lady Beaverbrook standing as a candidate in a local election. We’ve had enough of posh men lording it over us, we’re not going to accept their posh wives!

She tells us the International Co-Operative Women’s Guild will ensure there is peace.

Appendix

The appendix is made up of excerpts from lots of letters sent to Davies. It opens with the longest one, at 6 pages long, then settles down to 1- or 2-page snippets.

A childhood in the Fens about 1850 by Mrs Burrows

An account of an incredibly hard childhood. On her 8th birthday she was taken out of school and set to work in the fields. She worked alongside 50 or so other children and was among the oldest. The working day was 14 hours long. It was at Croyland near Peterborough and some of the children were as young as 5. The ganger used a long whip to make them work. They left town on the stroke of 6 and had to walk at least 2 miles, sometimes 5.

In the four years she worked there they never had a single meal under cover or in shelter except on one occasion, on a particularly bitter cold day, when a local shepherd’s wife told the ganger to let the children come into her house to eat their lunch.

As a child at Croyland she saw many opium addicts and knew a child whose daily task it was to go to a pharmacy to collect a shilling’s worth of opium.

After 4 years slavery she was sent to work in a factory in Leeds. Her father was a kindly man but sick with a brain tumour. Her mother worked like a dog. When the children grew up they paid her back and tried to make her last years comfortable.

Extract from letters

There follow 16 short extracts from letters. They all appear to have been commissioned to answer a question along the lines of ‘What books have you been reading?’ or ‘What are your favourite books?’ because they all address this question, briefly or at length. None of them have interesting views per se but it’s interesting to see the different levels of literacy and articulacy on display, as well as getting a sense of which authors’ names recur, notably H.G. Wells, but also Shaw and Hardy. And among the classics, everyone loves Dickens.

1. Mrs Hood: never a day without attending a committee, reads the progressive newspapers; likes Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, would love to read Tess, wants to read a good history of the French Revolution
2. Mrs Ferguson: reads the daily papers and the Co-operative press but also interested in books on international affairs; and dips into Tennyson for rest
3. Mrs Foister: lists books she’s read in the past 2 and a half years, an interesting insight into what was available to the serious reader
4. Mrs Axten: some of the books she’s read in the past 4 years
5. Mrs Corrie: reads pamphlets to keep up with the Labour and Co-op movement; including Kipps, Bennett and about to start Tess
6. Mrs Preston:  Dickens, especially the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby
7. Mrs Burman: the Happy Traveller by Frank Tatchell
8. Mrs Woodward: reads newspaper and journals for research for her position in the Guild; then gives a list of 27 novels
9. Mrs Rix: Little Women and Ella Wheeler Wilcox
10. Mrs Garrett: reads to inform her work for the Guild; reads the classics but singles out H.G. Wells; her son lent her ‘The Green Hat’ which she strongly disapproved of
11. Mrs White: a Guild officer, she and her husband have long attended the Working Men’s College in Camden Town; her list of 20 or so books includes ones by Wells and George Bernard Shaw
12. Mrs Bedhall: gets books from the students library at the Warwickshire Education Committee; she gives an interesting list of books on serious topics such as co-operation, socialism, education and so on
13. Mrs Bampton: likes books about the supernatural or history
14. Mrs Smith: likes books about London and so likes Martin Chuzzlewit (by Dickens)
15. Mrs Marshall: Hardy and Lorna Doone
16. Mrs Russell: busy with Co-op and Guild work but scrapes together a list of books she’s liked in the past, Hardy, Eliot, Bronte and Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The last ten pages contain five excerpts on very specific subjects.

Pioneer Poor Law Guardians

From a Lincolnshire Guildswoman

In 1895 the unnamed author overcomes male opposition to get elected to the Board of Guardians. How she and two women colleagues win round the Chairman of the Board. Becomes the first woman Vice-Chair of the House Committee. She has a jokey relationship with the chairman. He warns the ladies not to take the seats of ‘the old fossils’ on the committee. After serving for nine years she wonders if she herself has become one of ‘the old fossils’. When it was proposed to send a woman to the national Poor Law Conference the men cried out that women should stay at home and mind their families, but she overcame this opposition and went anyway.

From a Lancashire Guildswoman

When a young girl the mill she worked in burned down and she was unemployed and often went hungry. When she got another job she saved her pennies and invested in the local Co-op shop. Only later did she hear about the women’s Guild.

I attended the Guild Annual Meeting, which was a revelation. Each day my vision seemed to be widening and my spirit felt that here was the very opportunity I had always been seeking but never put into words. I had longings and aspirations and a vague idea of power within myself which had never had an opportunity of realisation. (p.147)

She comes to understand why the campaign to give women the vote was so important. The Guild was about widening its members’ sense of what their duties, rights and responsibilities could be. All girls and women were brought up to believe their job was to look after their man, their home and their children. The notion that they could break out of this prison and take on broader social, administrative positions came as a revelation to tens of thousands of women, as these letters testify again and again.

She quotes men who resisted women taking roles in Poor Law administration but learned that they were the most reliable and clear headed. And she describes her weekly schedule to show how routine and organisation allowed her to do all the housework, and then all her administrative and Guild jobs on top.

Pit-head baths

From a mid-Lancashire Guildswoman

This woman quotes the account of her husband describing the arrangement of baths at the colliery where he works, and comments on the enormous benefit for miners’ wives of having the men strip, bathe, and put on clean clothes at the pit, rather than bring the dirty clothes home to take off and shake coaldust all round the house.

From a Durham Guildswoman

Her husband’s pit have had showers since 1926 and she describes the advantages for him and her: no dirty clothes bringing soot and dust back to dirty the house; no smell of pit which used to fill the house; no need to boil water for the miner’s bath and for his dinner on the same fire at the same time. Vast improvement.

A member’s view of the Guild

From a London Guildswoman

An inspiring page and a half in which the unnamed author describes how membership of the Guild not only liberated her but gave her a profound understanding of the power of unity and united action. She praises the Guild for its democratic spirit whereby all the members feel absolute equals. She cites members who the Guild has given the confidence to think about bigger issues, outside the home, realise that their voice and opinions have value, given them to confidence to speak up, even in situations previously reserved exclusively for men.

Paratexts

According to Wikipedia:

Paratext is material that surrounds a published main text supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public.

The main body of ‘Life as We Have Known It’ is not only fragmentary in itself, but strewn with additional paratexts which enrich or complicate its reception, depending on your point of view. There are three:

1. Introductory letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies by Virginia Woolf (28 pages)

The original text was published by the Hogarth Press, the small publishing house set up by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard. Virginia knew Davies so it’s no coincidence that the text has a long  and characteristically digressive introductory essay by Virginia, which describes her own involvement with the Guild, specifically her impressions of visiting a 1913 Congress and then the Guild’s London headquarters.

Woolf’s factual writing, her essays, and reviews, are generally very chewy, meaning they are often highly digressive, approaching their subject in a roundabout way, and this long essay is no exception. In sheer length, Woolf’s introduction is longer than all but one of the Guildswomen’s contributions i.e. in depth and complexity it threatens to overwhelm the stories that follow. It also spends a long time going into detail about the distance which she, as a privileged upper-middle-class lady, felt from the earthy working class women of the movement. For these reasons I’d definitely leave reading it till after you’ve read the main body of the text.

Woolf’s introduction is included in David Bradshaw’s edition of Woolf’s collected essays, and I’ve summarised it at length in a separate blog post.

You could give students an exercise to place Woolf’s introduction side by side with one or two of the working women’s texts, and ask the students to identify what the Woolf has that the others don’t, in a bid to extract and define literariness. Distance, detachment, acute observation of details, self consciousness, class consciousness, anxiety, non-linearity, obscurity, digression and indirection, these would all be elements you would note in the Woolf which are completely absent from the Guildswomen’s accounts. Are they aspects of what makes Woolf literature while the Guildswomen’s accounts remain social history?

Conversely, what do the women’s accounts have that Woolf’s introduction doesn’t? Some kind of authenticity?

2. Notes on the Women’s Co-Operative Guild by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1930)

Davies was a radical in the old sense of the word, a genuine socialist. She emphasises that the Guild she ran took its place among many other working class movements, especially trade unionism. They make up the fabric of working people’s lives: trade unions stretch the warp of a decent living wage, while the cooperative movement threads the woof of intelligent spending. The aim? Gaining control of industry by the people for the people, consciously echoing Marx.

She sees the co-operative movement as ‘the beginning of a great revolution!’

The Movement shows in practice that there is nothing visionary or impossible in the aspirations of those who desire to see the Community in control, instead of Capitalists.

The co-operative system is designed to prevent people making fortunes and instead distributing wealth fairly among all.

Capital becomes the tool of labour and not its master. (p.165)

When she wrote there were over 1,000 co-operative societies across England and Scotland with some 6 million members, forming one of the largest trading and manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. The union is allied with the Labour Party and with an international co-operative alliance with members in 34 countries.

So she sees all this as part of a peaceful revolution ‘from autocratic Capitalism to democratic Co-operation’ and sees the Women’s Co-Operative Guild – with its 67,000 members in 1,400 branches – as playing a key role and the central mechanism of reform is shopping. In her day it was women who ran all households and did all the shopping for everything. Therefore, if they chose not to shop at normal commercial businesses designed to maximise profit, let alone at shops tied to factories and pits, but instead spent money at co-operative stores which they part-owned and ran, they changed at a stroke from being exploited consumers to empowered decision makers.

She explains the administrative structure of the Guild, staffed and run entirely by working women so that as soon as they joined, opportunities arose to volunteer for this or that committee or role. With responsibility came education in how to run and manage things, alongside political education into the big issues of the day, a kind of ratchet effect leading women who joined inevitably forward into greater enlightenment and empowerment.

And roles in the local Women’s Guilds acted as springboards for roles in the local and regional Co-operative movement. Despite opposition from men at all levels, at the time of writing many Guildswomen had taken up roles at all levels of the regional and national Co-Operative Movement.

In addition, newly liberated, informed and confident women have been active in national campaigns for:

• the establishment of school clinics
• a national maternity scheme
• the inclusion of maternity benefit in the National Insurance Act of 1911
• ensuring this maternity benefit was legally awarded to the mother not the father

Not only have women been educated to take on administrative roles within the Guild, the wider Co-Operative Movement, but in local and regional government. And this momentum has become international with the creation of an International Co-Operative Women’s Guild including 27 countries (including the Soviet Union). At the most recent Congress, in 1930, delegates discussed whether the position of women would be improved by state family allowances, which sounds like the perennial proposal of state pay for housework.

She ends with bracing optimism that the International movement is committed to peace and lobbies the League of Nations for universal disarmament. We know all the fine words for peace during the 1930s completely failed, and its abject failure casts a sad shadow over what had, up until this last paragraph, been a bracing list of outstanding achievements.

3. Afterword by Anna Davin and Gloden Dallas (1977)

Most historical documents are written by educated men, so most accounts of working class lives, especially the lives of working class women, have been written by outsiders. The rarity of accounts written by genuinely working class women makes the testimony of this book priceless, with its first-hand testimony to lives and sufferings, of their childhood, marriages and children, above all of the unremitting burden of hard labour, long hours, poverty and endless worry.

And not just that, but the second part in many of these accounts – describing how these downtrodden women discovered the Co-op movement and then the Guild and its huge impact in liberating them, opening their minds, educating them and encouraging their abilities to think more widely, to take up positions of influence and power – are just as rare and valuable.

So the book is not just a document of working class immiseration but at the same time uplifting and inspirational, giving example after example of how uneducated working women were empowered to escape the prison of their homes and domestic responsibilities and engage with the wider world.

4. Virago

There’s a fourth context not contained in the text as such, which is that 46 years after it was first published, the book was chosen by the founders of the new feminist publishing house, Virago Books, as their first publication. So it has a signal importance from two quite distinct moments in feminist publishing, 1931 and 1977. So that reading it now is not only to engage with a classic of women’s social history but to also see it through the lens of the optimistic feminist editors of the 1970s. There are, as it were, at least two eras or types of feminist aspiration radiating from the text.

Thoughts

Horror The primary thought is, of course, horror at the appalling conditions and experiences described by the six core accounts and especially the childhood in the Fens. The authors thought readers in 1931 might not credit the miseries they lived through, how much harder is it for us a hundred years later.

Triumph Next you respond to the ‘triumph over adversity’ theme of the accounts, awed by how these women supported their menfolk and families through decades of grinding poverty, by sheer, unremitting hard work and commitment. None of them ran away from their responsibilities through years and decades of grinding poverty, not enough money, not enough to eat, no clothes for the children, depriving themselves of food to make sure their children ate and so on. Mind-bogglingly exemplary commitment and what used to be called moral fibre.

The Guild And then all the accounts take the same turn, which is to describe their discovery of the Co-Op movement, then of the Women’s Guild within it, often running alongside a commitment to trade unions and other movements for the improvement of working people. In this respect, it’s a self-selected group – if they praise the role the Guild played in opening their minds, supporting their education, boosting their confidence, allowing them to take on administrative roles of a sort previously unavailable to women, it’s precisely because these are letters written to Davies from Guild members in praise of the Guild’s role.

Which doesn’t stop them being eye opening about not just the misery of childhood and work in the Victorian working classes, but about the role the Co-Op movement and the Guild in particular played in liberating so many working women’s minds and abilities.

Oddity Then there’s puzzlement. It’s hard, at this distance of time, to understand why there are the 16 short letters or snippets from Guildswomen listing their favourite books. Why was this considered important? Was it to address some concern at the time about working class literacy or women’s literacy? Was general reading considered a marker of cultural achievement and so was valued as much as the financial support the movement offered? On the face of it you’d have thought these 20 odd pages would have been better filled with a few more detailed autobiographical accounts on the pattern of Mrs Layton or Mrs Burrows. But maybe it was important to Davies and the Guild to make a point about the cultural uplift the Guild supported?

Paratexts It’s already a text made up of multiple sub-texts and fragments, which set up complex echoes and cross-references, raising lots of issues of social history and politics which it doesn’t quite complete or fulfil. But then there are the paratexts which add a whole new layer of complexity. Davies’s afterword gives a factual account of the Guild which provides context for the letters but it is itself haunted by the fact that – when you look it up – you discover that the Women’s Co-Operative Guild closed in 2016. So not only are the women whose accounts the book contains long dead, but the organisation which Davies describes in such loving detail, is itself now defunct, a ghost.

Virginia Woolf‘s introductory essay is important but is so characteristically self-involved and tortuous, so long and impactful in its literary and psychological complexity, that it threatens to overawe the much simpler, starker texts from the working women. Above all, it enters a big note of doubt and scepticism about the Guild’s work, which you should definitely only read once you’ve first fully read all the original accounts.

Anna Davin and Gloden Dallas’s afterword radiates the kind of radical socialist feminism of the 1970s which, as far as I can tell, has completely disappeared. 1977 was still close to the radical politics of the late 1960s, it was a world of squats and huge trade union membership leading to regular national strikes and mass protest marches which gave a real sense that some kind of radical restructuring of society was possible, was maybe just round the corner. All that has disappeared like morning dew.

Gone When I try to describe to my kids what it felt like to be young and left wing in the 1970s going into the embattled 1980s they look at me like I’ve just landed from Mars. Their world is mediated through TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp. Rather than changing the capitalist basis of the economic system my daughter, the queer 4th wave feminist, is concerned about gender fluidity, MeToo in the American film industry and Black Lives Matter on the streets of American cities.

TikTok The world of coal miners, of unionised heavy industries, the world of local communities dotted around Britain loyally supporting their local Co-op, in fact the whole concept of people living all their lives in small close-knit communities, has disappeared utterly, to be replaced by cosmopolitan networks of globetrotting buddies keeping in touch via social media. And they all love it, young people love the gadgets and opportunities provided by billion-dollar American corporations and don’t want to change a thing.

Lost So, for me, the book is (obviously enough) testimony to the lost world of Victorian and early 20th century working class poverty and the fightback against it – but it is also witness to the lost world of 1970s radicalism, to the optimistic feminist editors who chose it to be Virago’s first ever publication. As I read it I had the complicated sensation of engaging with not one but two lost worlds.

Credit

‘Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women’ edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies was first published by The Hogarth Press in 1931. It was republished by Virago Press in 1977. I read the 2012 Virago paperback edition.

Related link

• Women’s Co-Operative Guild website

Related reviews

• Feminist reviews
• Nineteenth century Britain reviews
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