ABSTRACT
[Miss Greenwood’s father, Abraham Greenwood, an early Rochdale activist and promoter of wholesaling, remarked during a discussion on education at the first annual Co-operative Congress in 1869: “The intellectual education of women was all very well – but the most pressing want now was the education of their daughters in the kitchen management, the economy of food, and the right kind of food. This would be of the greatest advantage to the comforts of home, and the promotion of good temper”. [Proceedings of the Co-operative Congress…1869 (1869), 73] Clearly, Greenwood’s daughter did not take her father’s advice, as this speech reproduced from the 1885 Congress demonstrates. Unfortunately, we know fairly little about Miss Greenwood, who was a keen supporter of the Women’s Co-operative Guild and is in fact credited with first suggesting its name (it had initially been called the “Women’s League for the Spread of Co-operation”). She was active locally, helping to form in November 1883 one of the earliest branches in Rochdale and serving as its secretary, and nationally from the following spring when she became vice-president of the WCG. [G.D.H. Cole, A Century of Cooperation (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1945), 215, 217] In her address to the Co-operative Congress in 1885, Miss Greenwood looks back over what had been achieved during the past two years. She admits that after an initial period of enthusiasm, progress has been slow. Indeed, the Guild had a total membership of only 416 at this point, as the general secretary, Mrs Laurenson, revealed in the report which followed this address. Urging co-operative women to overcome their apathy and timidity, Miss Greenwood also points to male hostility as an explanation for the Guild’s faltering growth, “‘so called co-operators’ who tell them ‘we should do more good staying at home and educating our children.’” As the extract from William Marcroft which follows Greenwood’s suggests, patriarchal attitudes were 254a serious obstacle to women’s participation and gender conflict was to remain a key feature of the movement throughout its subsequent history, to damaging effect.]
