Suffragettes At Home:’ Representations of Domestic Labour in the Feminist Press, Britain 1908-1914

In 1910, the Vote (the newspaper of the Women’s Freedom League) launched a photography competition inviting their suffragette readers to send in photographs of themselves engaged in domestic labour. The result was a bizarre series of images depicting the leaders of the militant suffrage movement performing mundane household tasks, such as cleaning the stove and cooking a vegetarian dinner. Whether this competition, entitled ‘Suffragettes At Home’, was intended seriously or as a joke remains unclear, and historians have interpreted it in markedly contradictory ways. In this paper I examine the ‘Suffragettes At Home’ series as a way into exploring the contradictions and complexities of first wave feminists’ attitude to the ‘problem’ of housework. While representations of domestic labour were ubiquitous across the feminist press during this period, reflecting an important reality in the lives of its female readership, the new figure of the modern emancipated woman was most commonly depicted as detesting housework. This in turn touched on the wider and more fundamental problem of who should perform the necessary reproductive labour once feminists had succeeded in their struggle to liberate women from the confines of the home.
Laura Schwartz is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. She researches the history of British feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and is the author of Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s’ as Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2013) and A Serious Endeavour: Gender, Education and Community at St Hughs, 1886-2011 (Profile Books, 2011). Her current research looks at the relationship between ‘first wave’ feminism and early domestic workers’ struggles.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice/Hull Chair and the departments of History and Feminist Studies.

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