ABSTRACT
In the three decades before the First World War, a curious often convoluted relationship existed between the feminist and the socialist movements. Recently, a number of feminist historians have examined the histories of socialism and feminism to determine if socialism had indeed provided a fertile soil for notions of women’s emancipation, or if socialists themselves had been particularly receptive to feminism. In prewar Britain, the one organization which might have bridged the gap between feminism and socialism was the Fabian Society. Unlike its socialist contemporaries, the Social-Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, and the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society was almost entirely a middle-class organization. In 1908, the tensions created by the Fabian old guard’s indifference to the “woman question” were both eased and exacerbated by the formation of the Fabian Women’s Group. The Honorable Secretary no longer had to record feminist requests for support with “courteously acknowledged,” in the Executive Minutes; he wrote instead, refer to Women’s Group.
