ABSTRACT
The Guild’s primary aim, as Sarah Reddish wrote in 1890, was ‘to bring into active life the great body of women in the Co-operative movement.’ 1 Its first major interventions were in the Co-operative movement itself, beginning in 1899 with the extension of Cooperation to the poor, and then, from 1905, with the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (AUCE), to secure a minimum wage for Co-operative female employees. In tandem with these campaigns ran the Guild’s elaboration of an original working-class feminist agenda under the banner of its Citizenship work, and while it gave formal support to the suffrage movement, it did not, as Davies later pointed out, ‘wait for the vote to tackle some of the most urgent problems of married women’s lives.’ 2 It was through its prominent national campaigns, for statutory maternity benefit and divorce law reform between 1910 and 1914, that the Guild established a distinctive reputation as ‘a kind of trade union for married women’.
