Matriarchs of England's Cooperative Movement
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€86.99
A01=Barbara J. Blaszak
Author_Barbara J. Blaszak
Category=JBSF11
Category=JHBL
Category=JPWG
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
World History
Product details
- ISBN 9780313309953
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Dec 1999
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Current thinking considers the Women's Cooperative Guild within the English Cooperative Movement to have been an independent and democratically run organization whose leaders built sisterhood across class lines and achieved many benefits for married working-class women. This study of the dynamics of gender within the movement between 1883 and 1921 arrives at different conclusions. Blaszak examines what freedoms of speech and activity women were permitted within the movement, as well as what resources they were given to accomplish their tasks. Ultimately, the parameters set by the men would determine the type of female leadership that emerged and whether it was able to realize its feminist and utopian agendas.
Setting the organization's activities within the context of gender relations in the Cooperative Movement, Blaszak finds that the Guild was much more dependent and much less democratically directed than has usually been supposed. Restrictions established by male cooperators and enhanced by the realities of working-class life turned the Guild into a clique dominated by a few. Even the Guild's most revered leader, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, found it impossible to escape the gendered socio-economic circumstances in which she labored at her ministry to improve the lives of working-class women. Consequently, her leadership inadvertently assisted male cooperators in their attempts to limit possibilities for women.
BARBARA J. BLASZAK is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of History at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She has published works about the Cooperative Movement in England and on women's roles in that movement. She is a past president of the New York State Association of European Historians and is active in the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies.
