This article offers a new interpretation of the development of Conservative activism in the early twentieth century, outlining how the culture of the Conservative women's organization changed between the creation of the Women's Unionist and Tariff Reform Association (WUTRA) in 1906 and Stanley Baldwin's accession to the party leadership in 1923. The women's tariff association claimed to have 300,000 members, at “a most moderate estimate,” during its late-Edwardian heyday. In 1918 it became the backbone of the Conservative party's new female auxiliary, the Women's Unionist Organization (WUO).Footnote 1 Nonetheless, WUTRA has been neglected. In particular, historians have underestimated the contribution that this organization made to Edwardian debates about consumption and citizenship. Frank Trentmann has recently demonstrated that free traders often used the imagery of the housewife in their campaigning. By contrast, he argues, tariff reformers failed to develop a popular language of the consumer and instead focused on protecting the interests of the (usually male) producer.Footnote 2 Greater attention to the activities of WUTRA does much to modify this view.

WUTRA played a crucial, and unfairly neglected, role in advancing women's position within Conservative politics. Female Conservative activism flourished during the Edwardian period as WUTRA argued that engagement with political life was a vital duty for women as citizens and consumers. Building on this success, the WUO adapted effectively to the challenge of women's enfranchisement after 1918. Studies of women's role within Conservative politics during the early twentieth century have, however, focused chiefly on the Primrose League.Footnote 3 This Conservative auxiliary organization was formed in 1883, a year before the Third Reform Act. Open to both sexes, it aimed to widen the social bases of the Conservatives’ appeal, providing an opportunity for party supporters to participate in a variety of social and political events through the work of local habitations. Yet, by the early 1900s, the world of the Primrose dame was increasingly taking on the appearance of an archaic Victorian relic. Many felt that the Primrose League no longer offered women a meaningful role in political life. The Ladies Grand Council was purely an advisory body; it was dominated by aristocrats, and it lacked any formal authority.Footnote 4 At a local level, several activists complained that Primrose League habitations were focusing excessively on fetes, dances, and smoking concerts to the neglect of political work.Footnote 5

Given that the Primrose League had appeared to lapse into a decorous, socially focused culture by the early twentieth century, David Jarvis argues that the 1920s marked a substantial watershed in women's position within Conservative politics. According to Jarvis, it was generally felt that women's experiences as political activists during the Edwardian period, when they had worked in a strictly ancillary role, were largely irrelevant to postwar politics.Footnote 6 During the 1920s, Conservative Central Office made a concerted effort to appeal to the new female electorate, with women appearing prominently in its publications for the first time.Footnote 7

The Conservative party's attempts to appeal to women in the 1920s have been linked to the new centrality of antisocialism in its discourse after the war. In his celebrated essay “Class and Conventional Wisdom” (1990), Ross McKibbin claims that the Conservatives’ interwar success was built on the party's portrayal of itself as the defender of “the public” against the sectional interests of organized labor. As part of this strategy, Conservative propaganda nurtured hostile “conventional wisdoms” critical of unionized working-class culture. By calling for economic deflation and an end to government waste, the party was able to expand its membership significantly, with these increases being concentrated overwhelmingly in middle-class constituencies.Footnote 8 McKibbin claims that the Conservatives were able to steal a lead on the other parties in appealing to women by portraying their interests as antithetical to the masculine culture of the organized working class.Footnote 9 He does not engage with Labour's responses to antisocialist rhetoric and assumes that the Conservatives’ discourse was chiefly promoted by national media. In this reading, local activists appear to have played little role in shaping the party's affairs.Footnote 10

The key assumptions inherent in McKibbin's thesis, that the development of Conservative organization in the 1920s was chiefly concentrated in the suburbs and nurtured by a nationally produced antisocialist propaganda, have heavily influenced work over the past two decades.Footnote 11 Nonetheless, Philip Williamson has provided a cogent challenge to McKibbin in arguing that the ideological stereotypes promoted by Conservatives during the 1920s were by no means hostile to the organized working class. Williamson claims that Baldwin's leadership of the Conservatives was key to their success. After 1923, Baldwin reformed the party by promoting a consensual language, which celebrated “commonsensical, decent, self-reliant, contented working men and women.”Footnote 12 While Jarvis, McKibbin, and Williamson differ in their conclusions, they all assume that nationally produced appeals were key to the Conservatives’ success after 1918, revitalizing a party grassroots that had become demoralized by the traumas of three consecutive election defeats during the Edwardian era.

This article uses case studies of women's activism in Birmingham and Leeds to challenge McKibbin's claim that Conservative success after the war relied on fostering conventional wisdoms adverse to the culture of organized labor. Local activists did much to provide the Conservatives with a coherent appeal that could bridge divisions of class and gender. The WUO was able to expand significantly in industrial areas after 1918 through championing the Conservatives’ progressive record in municipal politics and by expressing empathy with working women's social cultures. Through its attempts to create a more consensual ethos of activism that could appeal to all classes, the women's Conservative organization played a pivotal role in establishing and advancing the discourse of Baldwinite Conservatism in the localities.

WUTRA was effectively born out of disaster. The Unionists’ catastrophic showing at the 1906 election appeared to demonstrate that existing conservative organizations, such as the Primrose League, were unable to combat a resurgent Liberal party. This organization had long struggled to match the opportunities that its Liberal rivals offered for female activism. From the 1880s onward, the Women's Liberal Federation (WLF) had provided its members with an effective stake in public politics, and many of its leaders addressed predominantly male meetings. Unlike the Primrose dame, women Liberals were provided with autonomy and effective power. Local WLF associations could develop their own policies and were less hamstrung by the decisions of the executive.Footnote 13 Subsequently, when the tariff reform debate erupted in 1903, Liberals had no difficulty in placing the female consumer at the heart of their discourse. As Trentmann vividly demonstrates, the Liberals mounted an extraordinary popular campaign in defense of free trade, galvanizing women activists to defend the cheap loaf.Footnote 14

Through adopting a policy of neutrality on the fiscal question, the Primrose League Grand Council hampered the ability of local habitations to participate in tariff reform activism, leading to the creation of the Women's Tariff Reform League (WTRL) as an alternative campaigning organization in 1904.Footnote 15 By 1906 the Women's Liberal Unionist Association had been shorn of its free trade membership, and it subsequently amalgamated with the WTRL to create WUTRA.Footnote 16 The new organization was led by Mary Maxse, eldest daughter of the Sussex grandee and acolyte of Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Leconfield. At a local level, WUTRA was often led by Conservative MPs’ wives or daughters, like Beatrice Chamberlain and Edith Lyttleton. Despite Maxse being an antisuffragist, the organization contained leaders on both sides of the franchise debate. However, these divisions did not cause significant dissension as leading Conservative “Antis” within WUTRA, such as Katherine Tullibardine, later the duchess of Atholl, supported a progressive “Forward Policy” focused on advancing women's role in municipal politics and social work.Footnote 17 In fact, Tullibardine, who had opposed female enfranchisement before the war, became the first WUTRA leader to become an MP in 1923.

While WUTRA drew on traditional social leaders, much like the Primrose League, it marked a crucial cultural shift, offering more substantial opportunities for female leadership in Conservative politics. At the heart of the Primrose League's problems in the early 1900s was its excessive focus on socializing. Dissatisfaction with the opportunities that the Primrose League offered for political activism was most pronounced among Liberal Unionists, who had inherited the Nonconformist-influenced social culture of late-Victorian Liberalism. Writing in 1906, John Bridges, former chairman of the East Worcestershire Conservative Association, evocatively described the differences between the two wings of the Unionist alliance in his constituency. Bridges believed that Liberal Unionist women in the division “would have laughed to scorn the idea of developing into political personages like our Primrose Dames.” Chamberlain's followers could not abide the Conservative culture of smoking concerts at which a long political speech would have quickly cleared the room.Footnote 18 Even where there were flourishing habitations in nearby constituencies, the Primrose League struggled to make inroads in areas where the Liberal Unionists dominated the Unionist alliance, such as Bury.Footnote 19

WUTRA responded to popular frustrations with the Primrose League and attempted to create a truly Unionist women's organization where grassroots political activism could flourish. Learning from the Liberal example, WUTRA's chairman, Mary Maxse, was a keen believer in letting the local branches of the association act as the female voice of tariff reform in their localities. She limited the role of salaried regional organizers to “inspection, advice and guidance divested of direct executive control.”Footnote 20 Local study circles became central to WUTRA's new brand of politically aware activist and were seen as essential for effective canvassing and encouraging responsible citizenship.Footnote 21 Associations also formed amateur drama companies to perform plays in support of tariff reform at Unionist gatherings, and their productions provide an example of how WUTRA was able to merge the social focus of the Primrose League with the more propagandist culture of Liberal Unionism.Footnote 22 Successful productions were imitated, and topical allusions could be thrown in and characters added to suit the concerns of local audiences.Footnote 23

Throughout the Edwardian era, WUTRA's activists were intent on spreading one message above all others: tariff reform was a housewife's question, and as the family's chief consumer, she needed to educate herself on it. A speaker told the Lincoln women's tariff association that it was “their bounden duty as housekeepers” to take an interest in fiscal debates: “As it so especially referred to their homes they might in a great measure be able to influence men to think seriously about it.”Footnote 24 Despite the focus here on encouraging women to influence male voters on the fiscal question, female tariff activists were also concerned with offering women a greater prominence in Conservative politics.

WUTRA argued that, by taking an intelligent interest in the fiscal question, women could play a significant role in political life. The audience at the talk “The Influence of Women in Politics” by St. Clair Townsend, the leader of a County Durham branch, was implored to take an active part in the fight for tariff reform: they could no longer “draw aside their skirts, lest they become soiled and focus all their energies on their own domestic circles.” Engaging with the fiscal controversy would enhance the capabilities of women in their household tasks: “The home need not suffer; rather should it gain in completeness by the broader outlook its women gain.”Footnote 25 For WUTRA, engagement with politics was a duty for the respectable woman in her role as housewife.

Whereas the Liberals used slogans such as “Your bread will cost you more” to portray tariff reform as a food tax, WUTRA suggested that their rivals’ celebration of cheap food masked the systemic problems that underlay the existing fiscal system. Amy Moreton, a Warwickshire Conservative activist, wrote the play Freedom in Happy England (1911) to parody a free trade film produced for the previous year's elections.Footnote 26 The action takes place in the scantily furnished home of Tom Jones, an unemployed motor mechanic. Tom and his friend Bill are confronted by a canvasser working on behalf of a Liberal candidate, Karl Schutzman. Bill, whose firm has been struggling to compete against a tariff-protected German rival, becomes irate with the Radical sent to canvass “for a carpet-bagger with a foreign name.” He persuades Tom to kick out the German, showing him that “there's still one right left to us, and that's the right o’ the Englishman to be master in his own 'ome.”Footnote 27 Tom, having realized that tariff reform is the only fiscal policy that stands up for the nation's interests, decides to emigrate to Canada, which offers Britain kinship “while we bang the door in her [Canada’s] face and open it to the foreign enemy.”Footnote 28 This play explored the key arguments regularly employed by WUTRA: free trade did not provide prosperity or stand up for Britain's interests. Instead, it built up the industrial base of rivals like America and Germany, who could dump manufactured goods in Britain, protected by their tariff walls. Britain's long-term future lay in a closer relationship with the Dominions, which were tied to Britain by blood and a common culture.Footnote 29

Although the continuance of free trade was regularly presented as a threat to the prosperity of the British home, female Conservatives were keen to remind the public that an even greater menace lurked on the horizon: socialism. In Moreton's play, Bill tells the canvasser: “It ain’t the capitalists that live on us, it's the blood-sucking socialist agitator that respects neither God nor man … ’e goes about the country sowing the seeds of anarchy and discontent, and encouraging boycottin’ and intimidation.”Footnote 30 St. Clair Townsend was similarly lurid in arguing that women had to organize to prevent the rise of this deadly foe: “There are many new and subtle dangers which beset home and family, and it behoves women to awaken to them in time, if they would safeguard all that they hold most precious, for an evil genius stalks the land—some call him socialism.” Townsend's diatribe anticipated many of the more extreme antisocialist arguments employed by Conservatives in the 1920s. Under socialism, she claimed, children would be taken from mothers “to be nourished in the cold bosom of the state.” Such a dystopian system would crush all the patriotic Briton held dear, love of home and love of country.Footnote 31

While free traders and socialists were regularly presented as enemies of British home life, WUTRA was not merely concerned with fiscal policy. Indeed, it caught the imagination of Unionists when it stood in defense of Ulster following the introduction of the Third Irish Home Rule Bill. The lady organizers of the women's tariff association became a familiar sight in streets across the country during spring 1914, promoting their “Help the Ulster Women and Children” campaign. In a leaflet distributed house to house, readers were asked to visualize the grim spectacle of Ulster families turned out of their homes and left to starve in the event of an Irish civil war, with “no resting place for those who love the Union Jack” in the rest of the country.Footnote 32 British women were encouraged to offer promises of shelter to potential Ulster refugees. A key part of the campaign's massive popular appeal was that it emphasized the importance of traditional female roles of philanthropy and care for the family. If Conservatives were to introduce tariff reform, they would have to convert an exclusively male electorate. By contrast, the Ulster campaign's leaders presented it as being dependent on the goodwill of English women, and they relied on female activists to promote the cause.Footnote 33 The response was startling. By April 1914, the campaign had already received promises of over £12,000 in cash and hospitality for over 5,000 refugees in the event of the government using force to coerce Ulster into accepting the authority of a Dublin parliament.Footnote 34 A member of the organizing committee later claimed that pledges were eventually received to host the “whole female and infant population of Ulster.”Footnote 35

The Ulster Women campaign was also significant given that it had the full cooperation of the Primrose League, which now supported WUTRA's assertive style of female activism. It had not always been this way. George Lane-Fox, the league's vice-chancellor until 1912, was keen to portray the Women's Tariff Reform League as an unnecessary association that was undermining the work of his organization. In 1906 he wrote to Balfour's secretary claiming that in several areas branches were being formed “to work against the Primrose League.”Footnote 36 Despite this assertion, most Primrose League activists did not share Lane-Fox's intense animosity toward the women's tariff association. Even though the Primrose League Grand Council adopted a policy of neutrality on the fiscal question, in practice many habitations eventually came to support tariff reform enthusiastically. In free trade Blackburn, Tariff Reform League speakers ran a campaign addressing Primrose League meetings on the fiscal question.Footnote 37 Meanwhile, in areas of Scotland where both organizations operated, they gave each other notice of meetings or agreed on areas where each body could work so as to avoid clashes of interest.Footnote 38 Long-standing attempts at cooperation in England culminated in the two organizations working together to promote the Help the Ulster Women campaign.Footnote 39 Collaboration between the Primrose League and WUTRA was facilitated by the former organization taking a more serious attitude to political education than it had done during the early 1900s. The East Marylebone organization was typical in this respect. Having suffered from low subscriptions, it found a new lease of life when the Irish issue came to the fore in 1912. Members agreed to double their subscriptions and were encouraged to assist in entertainments, thereby cutting the habitation's spending on performers’ services. The habitation subsequently had far greater finances to devote to electioneering.Footnote 40

In the decade before the Great War, women substantially enhanced their position within Conservative activism through WUTRA and a revitalized Primrose League. Nonetheless, despite its ongoing attempts to appeal to working-class housewives, the strength of the women's tariff association was largely concentrated in the county and suburban seats of southern England and the West Midlands. Among the largest branches were Mid-Devon (4,800 members), Horsham, Sussex (1,800), and Bewdley, Worcestershire (2,000), Stanley Baldwin's seat.Footnote 41 Of course, the unpopularity of tariff reform in northern industrial districts provides a key reason for this disparity. Liberals vigorously argued that putting tariffs on imported foodstuffs was tantamount to introducing “food taxes,” impoverishing working families. The introduction of tariffs on imported raw materials would also be deleterious to staple industries in the north such as cotton.Footnote 42 Leigh was the only Lancashire textile-producing town where a successful Women's Unionist Association was formed after 1906, and even here mining was the chief industry.Footnote 43

WUTRA's development relied heavily on local initiative, and it came to reflect the class-bound social cultures of its heartlands in southern England and West Midlands. This exacerbated the problems it faced in developing a support base in industrial districts. Although WUTRA created a more progressive ethos than the previous generation of female Conservatives, it still distinguished the roles that it expected activists of different classes to undertake. The countess of Ilchester, president of the association, provided a glowing preface to Constance Williams's 1905 election manual, which encouraged women to get in touch with ladies of high social standing in their localities, who could lend a drawing room for meetings.Footnote 44 Likewise, when WUTRA made a request for Ulster women to cross the Irish Sea and speak against home rule in 1911, it asked for “ladies capable of speaking at small cottage meetings, in village schools, or in ladies’ drawing rooms … second, women of any class who will be content to go from house to house talking to each individual occupier.”Footnote 45

While WUTRA focused on the plight of working families, it made few substantial efforts to accommodate itself to the social culture of industrial areas. The Help the Ulster Women campaign, for example, was predicated on the idea that families would have spare accommodation to house Irish refugees. This meant that it received an enthusiastic response from the affluent in rural areas of counties such as Sussex.Footnote 46 Conversely, such pledges of housing were unrealistic in the terraced districts of a northern town like Darwen in Lancashire.Footnote 47 WUTRA's strategy tended to revitalize and consolidate female Conservative activism in existing heartlands rather than to advance the party's appeal in marginal urban seats. This put it at a disadvantage in appealing to the hearts and minds of working women. As Trentmann convincingly demonstrates, free traders developed a more democratic appeal than Chamberlain's supporters, championing the housewife who needed to buy the family's necessities at the cheapest possible price.Footnote 48 Liberals were also keen to pounce on any sign that their opponents were still dominated by the traditional Lady Bountiful. The Free Trader cruelly mocked a WUTRA campaign in Forfarshire, claiming that one of the countess of Dalhousie's “lady” supporters had called on a ploughman's wife and incorrectly told her that the Unionists were committed to lowering the pension age to sixty. The journal dismissively observed: “No doubt it is a delightfully novel experience for the Tariff ladies to take a part in politics, but their influence among the ploughmen is not very harassing to the Free Traders.”Footnote 49

Despite these problems, Conservative women had managed to establish a more politically effective form of female Tory activism during the Edwardian period. With the cessation of party activities in August 1914, when the Great War broke out, Conservative women threw themselves into various forms of patriotic war work. Conservative women were subsequently able to learn from their wartime experiences working in voluntary organizations such as the Women's Institutes, which were less hierarchical than WUTRA. After the war this enabled them to forge a more truly cross-class Conservative women's movement.

From August 1914 onward WUTRA's leaders played a central role in establishing voluntary organizations in support of the war effort. The Help the Ulster Women campaign provided a nucleus for the Belgian Refugee Committee. Those who had pledged to provide shelter for potential Ulster refugees were now asked to offer hospitality to Belgians who had lost their livelihoods in the initial German advance.Footnote 50 Conservative women subsequently became involved in a variety of patriotic campaigns, attacking household waste, promoting women's work on the land, and setting up Women's Institutes in rural areas.Footnote 51

During the war, leading female Conservatives were deeply troubled by the apparent threat that Britain faced from socialists who called for a negotiated peace. Writing to WUTRA members in June 1917, Maxse claimed that socialist propaganda “has lain at the root of many of the industrial troubles which have hindered the output of war material; it is spreading at a deplorable rate, and it may produce chaos and disorder when the time comes to face our after-war problems.”Footnote 52 When WUTRA leaders met with Bonar Law and Conservative Central Office staff in summer 1917, discussion focused on the specter of socialist agitation.Footnote 53 A manifesto produced for these meetings by WUTRA's leaders indicates how the war had reshaped their outlook. They now believed that the Conservatives would need to concentrate their energies on appealing to the working classes if they were to have a long-term future as a party of government. Mary Maxse and Caroline Bridgeman wanted Bonar Law to outline a progressive agenda supporting reforms such as a major house building program that the women's association could publicize through a national campaign.Footnote 54 Alas, the party hierarchy does not appear to have been enthused with WUTRA's visionary spirit in summer 1917. Following the talks, Maxse despaired at the lack of initiative shown by Bonar Law toward postwar questions: “He cannot give our Association any leads as regards policy, we must do everything off our own responsibility and off our own bat, he says even the Unionist leaders would be hopelessly divided on labor questions and on many others … his last words to me were that he saw no hope or solution at all of the after the war situation.”Footnote 55

While Bonar Law's outlook provided little cause for optimism, the rise of nonparty activism during the war offered hope to Conservative women in their efforts to combat the apparent growth of socialist influence. When Maxse wrote to WUTRA members in June 1917 advising them on how to combat industrial discontent, she noted the value of work through organizations such as infant welfare centers, girls clubs for munitions, and war workers and soldiers’ wives clubs. As Maxse enthusiastically observed, such activities gave the members of WUTRA new opportunities to get in touch with working women in their neighborhoods and gain an understanding of their mind-set.Footnote 56

Perhaps more than any other organization, the Women's Institutes (WIs) symbolized the more meritocratic ethos of grassroots activism, which women molded during the war. The WIs flourished in Unionist strongholds such as Sussex, which had eighty-four branches by late 1918. Conservative women also had a large presence on the executives of WI county federations like Worcestershire.Footnote 57 On becoming president of a village branch, Maxse wrote a letter explaining the workings of the Institute movement to her husband who was serving in France. She noted that the WIs, with their democratic structure, had “caught on like wildfire” in her native Sussex: “It is managed by the women themselves, a committee is formed representing all classes, and they run it, everyone is alike. … It is supposed when started to settle all the female energies of the village.”Footnote 58 Obviously, by settling energies and providing a forum for all classes to discuss domestic subjects, the WI's expansion appeared to offer a bulwark against the expansion of extreme socialist doctrines. After 1918, the Conservative women's organization attempted to follow the WI's ideal and appeal to women of all classes, challenging the traditional stereotype of the “Lady Bountiful.”

The enfranchisement of most females over age thirty in 1918 marked a crucial shift in the Conservative party's relationship with women. While women had previously been encouraged to vote in municipal elections, their role in parliamentary contests had been confined to that of party workers who could only indirectly influence an all-male electorate. Under the new leadership of Caroline Bridgeman, in 1918 WUTRA welcomed the enfranchisement of women.Footnote 59 Nonetheless, it met the task of appealing to the new women voters with trepidation, believing that it lacked the organizational and financial resources for such a task. Conservative party leaders were likewise alarmed by the prospect of organizing a new mass electorate, many of whom appeared to lack traditional party ties.Footnote 60 These mutual anxieties led to WUTRA holding merger talks with the Conservative party, which culminated in WUTRA's disbandment in May 1918 and reformation as the party's new female organization: the Women's Unionist Organization. Several Primrose League habitations also disbanded that year and decided to become branches of the new women's organization.Footnote 61 Despite the creation of the WUO, it was far from certain that the Conservatives could provide a long-term appeal to women electors due to the weakness of old rallying cries and the rise of alternative forms of associational culture. As early as 1917, WUTRA leaders felt that tariff reform and defense of the Union with Ireland, which had been their chief foci during the Edwardian period, would not serve as an effective base for a postwar program.Footnote 62

In explaining the revival of the Conservative women's organization after 1918, we must give credence to McKibbin's claim that the party made successful use of sensationalist antisocialist discourses. Many of the leading associations were situated in affluent constituencies. Of the WUO's thirteen regional divisions, the south-eastern counties (Kent, Surrey, and Sussex) had the largest membership, claiming 62,000 supporters in 1923.Footnote 63 In Chichester, Sussex, the WUO paid a woman who had been “in the hands of the Bolsheviks” to give lectures to its branches. These appear to have been highly successful. Indeed the association's leaders claimed that it was difficult to cope with the high demand for the lecturer's services.Footnote 64 Lurid claims that Labour's extremist wing was growing in authority and would unleash the forces of Bolshevism on Britain if given power were voiced in Worcestershire, another Conservative stronghold, during the early 1920s. At the annual meeting of the county WUO in 1921, a woman speaker claimed that Labour “was not a Labour party at all, it [is] a revolutionary party.” Lord Deerhurst took this theme further, imploring his audience to work wholeheartedly for the Conservative cause, insisting that at the next general election: “They would have a clear issue before them in Worcester; it would be the Union Jack or the Red Flag. … If this country fell and the Labour party triumphed it would mean the breaking up of civilization.”Footnote 65

In its traditional heartlands, the Conservative women's organization tapped into a negative antisocialist discourse, which was promoted heavily in national party literature during the early 1920s. Central office pamphlets depicted socialism's supposed threat to home life in stark terms. One Conservative leaflet issued for the 1922 general election showed graphic pictures of emaciated families living a wretched existence under Soviet tyranny with the slogan “This is what socialism means in Russia, keep it out of Britain by voting for the Conservative and Unionist candidate.”Footnote 66 Another pamphlet claimed that Labour would abandon India to potential capture by Russian Bolsheviks. Ending on a sinister note, the voter was reminded that some Labour leaders supported “bloody revolution.” Electors were instructed to support the Conservatives and “vote to keep your right to vote.”Footnote 67

Despite the prevalence of such extreme antisocialist sentiments in national Conservative literature, we should not exaggerate the importance of these forms of appeal in explaining the WUO's success after the war. As we have seen, WUTRA had presented socialism as one of the many threats to the home that Conservative women needed to counteract, often using sensationalist terms to depict the threat from the extreme left. Therefore, it was to be expected that female Conservatives would continue to promote a belligerent antisocialist discourse after the war in Tory heartlands such as Sussex and Worcestershire. These were regions where WUTRA had flourished during the Edwardian period. In such areas the women's Conservative organization was not so much expanding in the immediate postwar years as reestablishing its Edwardian strength. Among the largest WUO branches in the early 1920s were Newbury, Berkshire (5,300), and Horsham, Sussex, where over one-fifth of the female electorate were members of the WUO. Both constituencies had thriving Conservative women's organizations before 1914.Footnote 68 But we should also remember that WUTRA's sensationalist antisocialist discourses had failed to win a large following among working-class women in the Edwardian period.

Historians have neglected the fact that the early 1920s were characterized by a proliferation of localized antisocialist discourses. The local dimension remained vital to British politics in this decade. It was not until the 1930s that newsreels and radio came to play a key part in election campaigns.Footnote 69 While the circulation of the national popular press surged in the early 1920s, with the Daily Mail claiming 1.5 million readers, the popular papers owned by Northcliffe and Rothermere were unreliable allies for the Conservative party.Footnote 70 The intervention of their Anti-Waste League candidates against Conservatives during by-elections angered many party activists. The Anti-Waste groups, who called for drastic retrenchment and an end to government extravagance, were often seen by Conservative activists as being excessively negative in their politics and overly focused on defending the narrow interests of the middle classes.Footnote 71 Following the demise of the Anti-Waste agitation, it proved difficult for the Conservatives to fashion an effective and consistent national appeal. The party won the 1922 election on the cry that “Tranquillity” was needed following the turmoil of Lloyd George's final years as prime minister. However, Baldwin quickly became convinced that a more aggressive approach was wanted to tackle unemployment. His subsequent advocacy of tariff reform proved highly divisive within the party and culminated in defeat at the 1923 election.

Given the problems of creating a national discourse that could appeal to Conservatives across the country, grassroots activism developed a new significance during the early 1920s. Election strategists encouraged the development of stratified campaigns, suited to the varied interests of local electorates.Footnote 72 Henry Houston and Lionel Valdar thought this approach was especially valuable in appealing to the new female electorate, who were “more likely to be influenced by the personal or local questions which they understand, or [which] are brought more to their notice than the great national questions of the day.”Footnote 73 Local politics was particularly important for Conservatives during this period; although Labour seemed unlikely to win a parliamentary majority, achieving control of local councils provided it with a means to expand its support base and lay the foundations for future success in national contests.Footnote 74 Labour's substantial breakthroughs at the 1919 municipal elections, on the back of a low turnout, demonstrated to Conservatives that they needed to enthuse the public with an interest in local affairs to avoid socialists taking control of municipal government as the result of popular apathy.Footnote 75 Consequently, the WUO encouraged branches to produce localized versions of its journal Home and Politics so that women could keep up-to-date with party activities in their neighborhoods, learn about the work being undertaken by local councils, and thereby canvass effectively in the annual municipal elections. By 1926 there were thirty-nine local editions of Home and Politics, and these often covered multiple constituencies.Footnote 76

The nationally produced antisocialist propaganda, which McKibbin sees as representative of Conservative discourse, therefore had a limited influence in shaping the party's electoral appeal during the early 1920s. Scaremongering about life in Soviet Russia may have played well in areas like Sussex, where Conservatives were already well established, but in other regions there was unease with the aggressive fashion in which the socialist threat was presented in literature produced by the central office. McKibbin neglects the fact that Labour went to great lengths to counteract hostile antisocialist propaganda.Footnote 77 Labour's promotion of what it termed “mass canvassing” during the early 1920s was emblematic of its vigorous attempts to engage with the daily life of working women and overcome their opponents’ antisocialist slurs. This involved holding open-air meetings in residential streets and distributing literature to house-bound women. A local councillor, rhapsodizing about this form of electioneering in the Labour Woman during 1923, claimed that it could reach many women who were confined to the home and would never otherwise attend a political meeting. She singled out “women who are so poverty stricken that they have not the necessary clothes to go out in. Their pride is such that if they cannot go respectably dressed, they will not go at all. This group is larger than many suppose.”Footnote 78 Labour's approach to political activism relied on evangelical grassroots effort, understanding of locality, and knowledge of working-class community. To oppose it with a static, monolithic, national discourse would have been to court disaster.

In cities such as Leeds and Birmingham, Conservative women produced a consensual politics, which fits uneasily with McKibbin's claim that the party's success was reliant on promoting conventional wisdoms hostile to stereotypes of organized working-class culture. Instead, activists in these cities wished to develop a more positive appeal, focusing on their local efforts toward the amelioration of social conditions and the integration of working women into the party. The rise of this progressive style of activism can be explained by Labour's attempts to counteract sensationalist antisocialist propaganda. In cities where Labour promoted moderate reforms in local government, Conservatives proved more reluctant to tar their opponents with Bolshevik or extreme socialist associations. The debate between Labour and the Conservatives was also influenced by the imperative of winning over Liberal voters. Labour needed to demonstrate that it could govern responsibly, while the Tories had to show they were in sympathy with progressive values. The WUO's most significant growth during the immediate postwar years was concentrated in urban seats with large working-class populations. These were precisely the areas which the Conservatives had to win to achieve a parliamentary majority.

While the Conservative Central Office might have played on fears of potential socialist revolution during the early 1920s, Labour hardly appeared to present an extremist menace in Leeds. The Labour-sponsored Weekly Citizen focused on garnering support from women and the middle classes, claiming they had much to gain from the party's efforts to avoid wasteful expenditure, reduce municipal housing rates, and cut the cost of trams.Footnote 79 Housewives were implored to vote for increased council services to improve home life: “Better schools mean healthier and brighter children, and pure and cheap milk means more robust babies.”Footnote 80 From 1919 onward, minority Conservative administrations relied on an electoral alliance with the Liberals to maintain control of the city council. Perhaps given the moderation of the local labor movement, the Conservative-supporting Yorkshire Post was resolutely opposed to attempts to prolong the Lloyd George coalition, especially if this entailed going to the country on a class issue.Footnote 81 In October 1922, it published a letter attacking the coalition's attempts to promote a “Labour-cum-Socialist bogey” and turn the next election into a “dangerous and provocative class-war adventure.” The government needed to promote a “vertical cleavage of class opinions, not horizontal” if it was to stave off the threat of a Labour government.Footnote 82

Key to the WUO's response to Labour inroads in Leeds was their decision to set up a periodical, The Conservative Woman, in 1921. As well as the usual branch news relating to local women's associations, this publication attempted to foster a wider female Conservative worldview, including sections on lifestyle and the home. The Conservative Woman sometimes presented the world of organized labor in hostile terms.Footnote 83 Even so, such attacks rarely featured in editorial pieces during the early 1920s. Far more time was given to outlining the Conservatives’ effective record in local administration. The Conservative Woman also paid particular attention to the work of the party's female members of the Board of Guardians, who were instrumental in forming a women's advisory committee.Footnote 84 A regular feature offered household hints, providing advice on economical cookery and domestic management to the hard-pressed housewife.Footnote 85

The Conservative Woman was a bold attempt to demonstrate that the party was attuned to local interests, committed to the advancement of able women in municipal administration, and concerned with the welfare of all classes. It was also a strategy that had significant success. Conservative women's organizations in the city had thrived in affluent suburbs such as Headingley and Roundhay during the Edwardian period. After the war, there was significant organizational growth in older urban districts like Hunslet and Chapel-Allerton.Footnote 86 The Conservatives also made significant advances in their electoral position in the city during this period. In 1914 Liberals had held four of Leeds’ parliamentary seats, with Labour controlling the remaining one. Boundary changes meant that the city was represented by six MPs after the Great War. By 1923 Labour and the Conservatives held an even share of the city's seats, with the latter party victorious in the industrial heartland of Leeds Central as well as the northern suburbs.Footnote 87 This new support was important as the Conservatives found it increasingly difficult to get women workers from middle-class areas like the business districts of Leeds Central.Footnote 88 Yet the party made significant progress in this constituency, which had been held by the Liberals between 1906 and 1922. Sir Charles Wilson, the party's victorious candidate at the Leeds Central by-election in July 1923 was emblematic of the city's progressive strand of Conservatism. Wilson trumpeted his record in advancing unemployment relief, superannuated pensions, and championing working families’ interests as leader of the city council. The campaign elicited a dramatic popular response, with 2,000 activists working for Wilson, including many women canvassers.Footnote 89

While Birmingham remained a Conservative stronghold throughout the interwar years, Labour was able to make inroads in the industrial center of the city. The party's success relied heavily on its record of steady progress in municipal politics and engagement in local charities and relief funds.Footnote 90 Percy Shurmer, councillor for the city center ward of St. Martins from 1921, provides a good example of the moderate face Birmingham Labour wished to project. In a 1924 municipal election leaflet, he encouraged the people of Deritend to put their trust in him: “Stand by the man who has stood by you, who prevented many evictions! has made landlords repair property! fought pensions cases! had your yard lamp lit … vote for Shurmer. His next work: gas and taps in all houses.”Footnote 91

Annie Chamberlain was at the forefront of Birmingham Conservatives’ response to the rise of Labour in the city. The war effectively provided an epiphany for her, and she threw herself into service for the community as wife of the then Lord Mayor, Neville Chamberlain. She began visiting the wives and mothers of fallen servicemen, regularly coming into contact with working people living in the slums.Footnote 92 Enthused by these experiences, Annie Chamberlain decided to launch what she termed Unionist Women's Institutes in her husband's deprived constituency, Ladywood, in 1919. Based on the model of the Women's Institutes, of which Annie's sisters-in-law Hilda and Ida were keen enthusiasts, these aimed to provide a social center for women along with talks on citizenship, although unlike the WIs they had an explicit party bias.

Annie Chamberlain's institutes offered an opportunity for working women to congregate in an informal setting quite different from the drawing-room meetings in the home of a well-to-do local lady, which had been a common feature of WUTRA's social culture. Indeed, when Neville Chamberlain gave a talk to the Ladywood Institute, he felt the scene “seemed more like an infant welfare centre than a political gathering.”Footnote 93 As well as providing their babies with a hearty dose of Tory politics, women could participate in sewing clubs and see demonstrations on topics such as economical hay-box cookery. In Ladywood, simple political talks were given on subjects like “The A.B.C. of Unionism,” the Conservative-led council's attempts to improve housing, and “What the City Is Doing for the Children.”Footnote 94 The Unionist Women's Institutes spread rapidly throughout the industrial center of the city and were also promoted in the surrounding region by Annie Chamberlain in her capacity as head of the West Midlands WUO.Footnote 95 Whereas the strength of the Unionist women's movement in the West Midlands had been concentrated in counties such as Worcestershire and Staffordshire before 1914, Chamberlain's institutes meant that working women from Birmingham's city center districts began to play an important role in the party's activities. At least 115 members of the Ladywood organization canvassed for the Conservatives during the 1923 election.Footnote 96

Helen McCarthy has convincingly challenged McKibbin's claim that nonparty associations encouraged a form of supposedly apolitical sociability, which integrated the suburban middle class into the Conservative party. Rather, nonparty organizations were keen to establish a space in British political life where issues could be discussed free from acrimonious party debates.Footnote 97 Even so, our understanding of the parties’ response to the emergence of this competing form of associational culture remains unsatisfactory. For sure, some Conservatives expressed anxieties that the emergence of nonparty organizations would hamper their own efforts to organize women, although in the immediate postwar years these fears appear to have been mainly voiced by senior male party agents.Footnote 98 But we should not overlook the fact that Conservative women also valued the nonparty movement, precisely because it was able to break down traditional social barriers that had inhibited WUTRA's growth before 1914. Several of the leading nonparty organizations for women, such as the Mothers’ Union and Girls’ Friendly Society, were based on denominational rather than class lines and promoted a conservative, Anglican ethos.Footnote 99

As we have seen, Conservative women threw themselves into work for nonparty patriotic associations during the war. Therefore it seems unsurprising that the Conservative party was keen to attract women with experience in such movements after 1918. When the election agent Henry Houston wrote an election manual in 1922, he recommended that “if the co-operation can be secured of some popular woman who is active in such organizations as the local Women's Institutes, the Women's Co-operative Guilds, or other women's organizations, it is of inestimable value to the agent.”Footnote 100 Nonparty organizations did not provide a cloak for Conservatives to infiltrate associational life, as McKibbin claims, although in practice the party drew on many members with experience in such movements. Conservatives saw party and nonparty associations as filling separate, albeit complementary, spheres in Britain's associational culture. When a resolution was submitted for discussion at the Women's Institutes conference in 1921 proposing that party officials should not be able to hold posts within the Women's Institutes, it caused outrage among Conservative women, who subsequently played a prominent role in decisively defeating the motion.Footnote 101

Annie Chamberlain's Unionist Women's Institutes provide the leading example of how female Conservatives were able to learn from the success of the nonparty movement and imitate its democratic style of activism. It should be emphasized that the Unionist Women's Institutes were still not truly meritocratic compared to organizations such as the Women's Co-operative Guild.Footnote 102 Educated social workers were encouraged to provide help in launching the Institutes in poor districts. But Annie Chamberlain was clearly no Lady Bountiful, briefly lecturing the workers before returning to the comforts of suburbia. Institutes usually became self-supporting, and all members paid the same reasonable fees.Footnote 103

Chamberlain's model was not merely influential in the West Midlands; it was also promoted nationally in Conservative publications as a form of organization to be imitated.Footnote 104 Similar movements emerged across the country, such as the Fuchsia Clubs.Footnote 105 The Unionist Women's Institutes were part of a wider attempt among Conservative women to distance themselves from the exclusivity of their prewar social culture. References to gaining the support of well-to-do “ladies” were notably absent from the advice that Home and Politics gave on forming and running branches, being replaced by a new emphasis on enlisting professional help from WUO district agents.Footnote 106 This new professionalism was aided by the WUO's ability to draw on the Conservative party's financial resources, which meant it could employ salaried workers. Before the war, women agents had been far less common and could only claim limited expenses from a fund sent up by Lord Ebury. As a result, the position of WUTRA agent tended to be filled by well-to-do women.Footnote 107 After 1918, the position of woman agent and constituency chairwoman became more meritocratic and less the preserve of “ladies.”

Annie Townley, Labour women's organizer for south west England, felt that her party could learn much from Chamberlain. Writing the Labour Organiser’s “Women's Page” in 1922, she noted: “There is a revival in many places of the Liberal Women's Federation and of the Conservative Women's Association. Both of these are drawing many members from the Mother's Union, Women's Institutes, Home Guards etc.”Footnote 108 Townley admired Chamberlain's style, as outlined in her article “Clubs for Unionist Women,” which focused on providing a cheerful and bright social culture, rather than merely teaching the party program. She felt that only by giving a social appeal to meetings could political parties hope to appeal to working women: “So dull and dreary becomes the life of the average working-class mother, so over-worked is she, that only by providing some relaxation and real change can we gain her interest.”Footnote 109

While the Conservative women's organization flourished in the 1920s, it often held a frosty relationship with men's constituency associations. As David Jarvis has demonstrated, male party leaders were commonly frustrated by women's increasing dominance of local parties, which appeared to be sapping masculine cultures of Conservatism.Footnote 110 A further reason for these gender tensions was the lack of coordination that existed between the WUO and central party authorities, leading to friction during election campaigns.Footnote 111 Nevertheless, such animosities were starting to ease by 1926. The WUO was brought into the party organization that year, resulting in increased cooperation with Conservative Central Office and a clearer demarcation of women agents’ responsibilities, which had previously tended to clash with those of constituency agents.Footnote 112 By the mid-1920s there were also signs that Conservatives were engaging more effectively with male associational cultures. These years saw a revival of interest in the National Conservative League, a working men's organization, which had expanded in a piecemeal fashion before 1914. It did particularly well in County Durham as a social center for antisocialist men.Footnote 113 In Birmingham, a Unionist Workers League complemented the work of the Women's Unionist Institutes. From 1924, the Ladywood branch held separate meetings for male canvassers, encouraging them to combat the socialist claim that only Labour could speak for working men.Footnote 114

Philip Williamson has argued that the period after 1923 marked a sea change in the Conservatives’ image. As party leader, Baldwin was able to transform the party's identity, creating an inclusive and consensual brand of Conservatism that sought to promote the interests of nation and empire rather than class.Footnote 115 Williamson claims that, although Baldwin's chief means of spreading this vision was through his own speeches, he also encouraged auxiliary organizations such as the WUO to educate the country on civic values.Footnote 116 Although there is much merit in Williamson's thesis that the party sought to develop a “positive” appeal to the electorate, it is more helpful to see Baldwin's discourse as being created and mediated through conversations with Conservative groups like the WUO rather than emanating directly from the party leader.

As a backbencher representing Bewdley before the war, Baldwin held close relations with WUTRA. A thriving women's organization existed in the constituency, which played a vital role in distributing literature, registration work, campaigning in outlying villages, and fundraising.Footnote 117 After the war, Baldwin continued to enjoy good relations with the Conservative female organization. He and his wife appeared regularly in the party women's journal Home and Politics.Footnote 118 Most famously, as chancellor of the exchequer, in June 1923, Baldwin issued an appeal to his “Sister Chancellors of the Exchequer.” In explaining the potentially rather arid issue of why the sugar duty had not been reduced, he wrote: “Every woman is a Chancellor of the Exchequer in her own right as housewife. I am, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the housewife of the nation. Women can realise my task if they imagine themselves living in a house which is mortgaged to the hilt. I have many clients for my favours.”Footnote 119

Baldwin's cultivation of the WUO made sense as its organization provided a basis to disseminate the consensual Conservatism he favored. Before Baldwin became party leader in 1923, Annie Chamberlain's Unionist Women's Institutes were already promoting a brand of Conservative activism that attempted to inculcate values of good citizenship, to break down traditional class barriers, and to promote a positive appeal. In its coverage of the 1923 election, Home and Politics presented Baldwin as the embodiment of constructive leadership, putting the cause of nation above party or class interest.Footnote 120 Without the support of the WUO, an organization that was able to root its appeal in community activism and identification with locality, it is likely that Baldwin's discourse would have had less purchase on the ground.

British politics underwent unprecedented upheavals during the opening decades of the twentieth century, but historians have too rarely asked how parties adapted to this environment on the ground. This article has analyzed the changing culture of Conservative women's associations before, during, and after the Great War. Historians of the Conservative party, such as David Jarvis, have been reluctant to traverse the war, and they thereby exaggerate the extent to which the 1920s marked a watershed in the party's relationship with women. The story of the women's Conservative organizations was instead one of gradual progression, as they steadily remolded their appeal to meet the challenges of the party's rivals and an expanding franchise. WUTRA had offered new opportunities for women to participate in Conservative activism during the Edwardian period, yet its dominant social culture nonetheless seemed poorly suited to the challenge of appealing to the greatly expanded post-1918 electorate. Before the war, WUTRA had struggled to reach out beyond its county and suburban support base and create a social culture truly attuned to the urban working-class housewife. After 1918, however, women such as Annie Chamberlain, working at a local level, developed a Conservatism better suited to the identities of urban Britain.

Historians of Conservatism during this period have tended to view the party through its national appeals. Yet the women's Conservative organizations encouraged a highly localized politics, especially after 1918 when the WUO came to focus on municipal affairs. Given the continued importance of local politics, the party's identity and social culture varied across the country. McKibbin is right to argue that hostile antisocialist rhetoric played a significant role in shaping the Conservatives’ post-1918 electoral success. Before the war, WUTRA had been keen to project socialism as a leading menace to the home, and this discourse continued to flourish in its heartlands after 1918. Even in areas where Labour presented a moderate face, Conservatives were not entirely averse to claiming that their electoral foes were in thrall to socialist doctrine. Leeds electors were reminded that the Labour council in nearby Bradford had engaged in “extravagant and prodigal expenditure.” The apparent rise in socialist “rowdyism” at elections was also used to suggest that extremist elements within the labor movement were gaining in confidence, particularly in the run up to the 1924 election.Footnote 121

Nonetheless, McKibbin neglects Labour's intensive, and often effective, attempts to challenge the validity of these antisocialist cries. The party made significant inroads in urban Britain during the early 1920s, even coming close to winning the Birmingham seat of Ladywood at the 1924 general election despite the missionary zeal of Annie Chamberlain. Such achievements indicated that the Conservatives could not rely on their prewar appeals even in supposed strongholds like Birmingham. The Conservatives’ success in appealing to women in urban Britain during the 1920s was generally not based on the negative, nationally promoted appeals that McKibbin has highlighted. Instead, Conservative women in urban constituencies were able to use their experiences in wartime nonparty movements to develop a more democratic, community-focused culture that could appeal across the classes. In areas such as Leeds and Birmingham, local activists provided an effective alternative to the belligerent antisocialist rhetoric promoted by the central office, which despite its success in county seats and the suburbs, did not appear to chime with the reality of Labour's moderate identity in these cities. For all of Labour's success in urban Britain, the Conservatives continued to win a substantial proportion of the working-class vote in the 1920s, and they made key breakthroughs in former Liberal heartlands like Leeds, by highlighting their progressive credentials.

By 1928, the Conservative women's organization claimed nearly one million supporters. The WUO's membership at this point was around four times the size of its Labour rival and dwarfed the Women's National Liberal Federation, with fewer than 100,000 members.Footnote 122 Although women's role as workers was rarely mentioned by the WUO, their positions as citizens and consumers featured regularly in Conservative rhetoric. The influence of the WUO's consumer-based discourse may have been aided in part by the limited female franchise before 1928. Recent work has demonstrated that the workplace played an important role in shaping young women's identities during the interwar period.Footnote 123 This may have aided Labour over the long term. Nonetheless, the Conservatives retained their confidence in addressing women primarily as citizens and consumers throughout the 1920s. In publications aimed at young “flapper” voters in 1928, images of home, family, and conspicuous consumption predominated.Footnote 124 Citizen-consumer identities were ultimately more universal and less class specific than cultures of womanhood forged in the workplace. The popular following enjoyed by the WUO during the 1920s in turn helped to give Baldwin's rather abstract discourse a coherence and meaningful identity on the ground. Through the work of women like Annie Chamberlain, the WUO played a key role in promoting Baldwin's message that Conservatism cared for the good of nation rather than the factional interests of class. Far from being an inert force, as has been traditionally argued, women activists were trailblazers who played a vital role in reshaping the identity of Conservatism in the early twentieth century, expanding the social bases of its appeal, and enabling it to adapt to an age of mass politics.