ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an aspect of women’s relationship with a particular built space, that of the home. Its focus is the working-class home of the first decades of the twentieth century, wherever this was located physically, whether in houses, tenements, flats or rooms. This domestic space could provide a site for women activists to make a politics which directly connected with unorganised women’s everyday experience in a way that the mainstream masculinist political agenda did not.1 The chapter explores, for one class during a specific period, the political potentialities which underlie women’s relationship with domestic built space. To this end, my concern is not only the conditions under which the home as a physical space provided a catalyst to women’s political action, but also whether women’s arguments for a politics of the home or their actions were gendered. The subjects here are those politically active women who sought to reach the female occupants of working-class housing with their message of radical change under the banner of socialism. These left-wing activists would variously identify themselves as socialist or Labour women. Socialist women gave their principal allegiance to explicitly socialist parties such as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF).2 Labour women’s focus was the women’s groups of the organised working class such as the Women’s Labour League (WLL), the women’s auxiliary to the Labour Party, and the Standing Joint Committee of Working Women’s Organisations (SJC).3 In the early decades of the twentieth century these women made their politics in a series of spaces both local and national: in meeting rooms, in print and on the streets, in radical and reformist organisations, in mixed-sex political parties and in women’s groups. The female activists of the Left, whether leading
1 See K. Hunt, ‘Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist
women and the politics of consumption’, Women’s History Review, 9:2, 2000. 2 See J. Hannam and K. Hunt, Socialist Women. Britain, 1880s to 1920s,
London: Routledge, 2002. 3 C. Collette, For Labour and for Women: the Women’s Labour League, 1906-
18, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989. The work of the SJC is considered in the chapters by Scott and Whitworth.
