Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The stereotype of the SDF -- Part 1 The woman question: the theory -- 1 The contribution of the founding fathers -- The reception of 'The Origin of the Family' and 'Woman and Socialism' in the British socialist movement -- 2 The SDF's understanding of the woman question -- The sex/class analogy -- Woman's oppression as a sex -- Sexual equality -- Nature or nurture? -- Feminism -- Strategic implications of the woman question -- 3 Understanding the SDF and the woman question -- The paradoxical Mr Bax -- Clara Zetkin, the International and internationalism -- A comparative case: race -- Part 2 The SDF and the woman question: the theory and practice of the party on aspects of the woman question -- 4 The politics of the private sphere -- Socialism and the family -- Marriage and 'free love' -- The Lanchester Case -- Beyond the Lanchester Case: the SDF's response to 'free love' as a public issue -- The Bedborough Case -- The Potteries and 'free love' -- Wells and the Fabian Basis -- The politics of the private sphere: the SDF, family, marriage and 'free love* -- 5 Women and work -- Women's work as an issue for the SDF -- Protective legislation -- Equal pay -- Wages boards and minimum wage legislation -- Trade unions -- The endowment of motherhood: an alternative means to economic independence -- Women and unemployment: a woman's right to work -- 6 The suffrage -- The years before the militants (1884-1905) -- The polarisation of positions: limited women's suffrage versus adult suffrage (1905-1907) -- Adult suffrage as a socialist demand (1907-1911) -- The suffrage and the woman question -- Part 3 Women and the SDF: the practical implications of the SDF's understanding of the woman question -- 7 The SDF's attitude to women as potential socialists
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This 1996 book takes a look at the relationship between socialism and feminism in the years before the First World War through a detailed examination of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), Britain's first Marxist party. It reassesses the history of the SDF, exploring for the first time SDF ideas and practice on issues such as marriage and 'free love', women and work, and the suffrage, as well as the attitudes taken to women and their potential as socialists. Dr Hunt shows how the SDF came to officially equivocate on the woman question and how this shaped what it meant to be a socialist woman in the following years. Through this fascinating examination of the links and antagonisms between the feminist and socialist movements, Dr Hunt not only reclaims the history of a forgotten group of socialist women, but also sheds light on the perennial debate about the comparative significance of sex and class in defining political identity
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New technologies of mobility which emerged in the wake of industrialisation helped to create a radical diaspora which in the first decades of the twentieth century began to create new transnationalist politics. This diaspora of socialists, feminists and anarchists consisted both of migrants (whose politics spurred migration or whose migration prompted political engagement) and travellers. Amongst the latter was Dora Montefiore, an English suffragist, socialist and later communist, who sought to make an internationalist politics in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. During her personal political journey through the changing landscape of progressive politics, travel was to be an important ingredient in her developing political practice. This essay explores the ways in which travel affected how Montefiore 'did' her politics. It considers why travel was such an important feature of her life as well as the different kinds of political travel she engaged in and its function in her politics. Political tourism, networking and propagandist tours are all explored. For Montefiore, travel could enable unforeseen conversations, serendipitous encounters, new experiences and even friendships which could be put to work by her as a political activist. These experiences often had a lasting effect on her politics. Travel could also be transformative when it was about leisure, pleasure and recuperation. Many of Montefiore's journeys contained all of these elements. However, increasingly the constraints on such travel, particularly the growth of police surveillance, changed the nature of how travel was experienced by political activists and thus what they could do with it within their politics. This essay is therefore about the possibilities of travel for a political activist, but also its limitations. How a radical activist 'whirl'd through the world' was always contingent, but the process of this kind of political travel necessarily affected the traveller herself as well as those she encountered along the way. ; New technologies of mobility which emerged in the wake of industrialisation helped to create a radical diaspora which in the first decades of the twentieth century began to create new transnationalist politics. This diaspora of socialists, feminists and anarchists consisted both of migrants (whose politics spurred migration or whose migration prompted political engagement) and travellers. Amongst the latter was Dora Montefiore, an English suffragist, socialist and later communist, who sought to make an internationalist politics in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. During her personal political journey through the changing landscape of progressive politics, travel was to be an important ingredient in her developing political practice. This essay explores the ways in which travel affected how Montefiore 'did' her politics. It considers why travel was such an important feature of her life as well as the different kinds of political travel she engaged in and its function in her politics. Political tourism, networking and propagandist tours are all explored. For Montefiore, travel could enable unforeseen conversations, serendipitous encounters, new experiences and even friendships which could be put to work by her as a political activist. These experiences often had a lasting effect on her politics. Travel could also be transformative when it was about leisure, pleasure and recuperation. Many of Montefiore's journeys contained all of these elements. However, increasingly the constraints on such travel, particularly the growth of police surveillance, changed the nature of how travel was experienced by political activists and thus what they could do with it within their politics. This essay is therefore about the possibilities of travel for a political activist, but also its limitations. How a radical activist 'whirl'd through the world' was always contingent, but the process of this kind of political travel necessarily affected the traveller herself as well as those she encountered along the way.
AbstractIn 1917 and 1918 violent cost-of-living protests, largely peopled by poor urban housewives, erupted across the world. Although Britain did not experience such dramatic events, a women's politics of food can be found in local neighborhoods that touched the lives of unorganized housewives on the wartime home front. The new local committees created to defend consumer interests in the face of food shortages proved to be permeable to some women, particularly those who already had some experience with women's politics. However, limits were placed on this participation and on the self-organization of housewives by the ambiguous understanding of who constituted a consumer and thus who could speak for the ordinary housewife as she battled the food queues. By exploring the women's politics of food at a local level, it is argued that working-class women's participation in Food Vigilance Committees or in local boycotts may have had longer lasting effects in Britain than the more dramatic cost-of-living actions elsewhere.
