For many people, organisations dedicated to women’s issues, and feminist groups, are one and the same. The first British Women’s Institute (WI) was founded in Anglesey in September 1915, to encourage the rural community to engage with food production for the war effort. By the end of World War One, 760 local WIs had been established with 50,000 members.[1] The ideology of the early Women’s Institute was based upon three doctrines: nationhood, community and domesticity. As an article of 1918 from The Times put it,
‘A Women’s Institute is a number of countrywomen banded together to promote the good of their country, of their neighbourhood, and of their own homes.’[2]
While there is no doubt that the Women’s Institute is about women, the word feminist is curiously absent from the official National Federation website. Moreover, if you search the word ‘feminist’ or ‘feminism’ on the website, you will find no results.[3] In a controversial book first published in 1997, historian Maggie Andrews argued that the WI was The Acceptable Face of Feminism.[4] The assertion that the WI is feminist divided reviewers; while some felt ‘it was high time that the Women’s Institute movement was claimed by feminism’[5], others questioned ‘why did this book ever see the light of publication?’[6]
The crux of the issue seems to be fundamental disagreement about what constitutes ‘feminism’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
‘feminism’ is the ‘advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex’.
In addition, the OED defines feminism as ‘the movement associated with this’.[7] Historian Caitríona Beaumont has sought to widen the term ‘Women’s Movement’ to include organisations that were not explicitly ‘feminist.’[8] Critics of Andrews sought to point out that ‘Not everything done by women, or in the name of women, is ipso factor feminist.’[9] In contrast journalist Janet Street-Porter in a newspaper article of agreed that the present-day WI is feminist, because it empowers women.[10] How far, however, is the empowerment of women to be considered synonymous with feminism? In my opinion, empowering women is not the same as feminism unless it is specifically done with the aim of establishing social and political equalities between women and men.
Certainly, there was some overlap between the early WI and the suffrage movement, or, in other words, the first wave of feminism. Their official hymn, Jerusalem, was also taken up by the suffragists.[11] In an online timeline of their history, the WI stress their suffrage heritage. Early leaders of the movement included suffrage supporters Lady Denham, the first National Chairman, and Grace Hadow, her Vice Chairman. Similarly, the first President of Hutton and Howick WI in Lancashire was Edith Rigby, a former suffragette who was imprisoned seven times for militancy, including planting a bomb, and was forcibly fed after hunger striking.[12] Indeed, suffragist writer Ray Strachey reflected on the WI in her history of the Women’s Movement, first published in 1928, noting
‘These institutes, democratic in theory and practice, became tremendously popular, and gave to women of the rural districts exactly the same stimulus they required. [. . . ] It is not surprising that great numbers of those who had worked in the Suffrage Movement turned their energies to this field.’ [13]
Despite the obvious efforts of the WI to stress their roots in the suffrage movement, their timeline makes no mention of second-wave feminism. Unlike the suffrage movement, feminists of the mid-to-late twentieth century sought to eradicate traditional gender roles that saw women associated with housework, childcare and the home. To Andrews, the WI’s emphasis on domesticity was feminist, because it elevated the status of housework.[14] However, this view is in direct opposition to the views of some of the most vocal feminists of the second-wave, who sought to entirely uproot gender roles that saw women confined to the home. Indeed, it appears the WI is happy to associate itself with the suffrage movement, but shies away from an association with the more radical, controversial second wave of feminism.
The WI today does not use the word feminism, but certainly many of the causes they support could be deemed so. For instance, the WI supports the No More Violence Against Women campaign, and Women Reaching Women, an international project to tackle global poverty, specifically focussing on issues that affect women. The WI produces their own leaflet on the history of their campaigns, in which they include support for Equal Pay reforms in the mid-twentieth century and from the 1920s, campaigns for more female police officers.[15] These issues are ‘feminist’ in the sense that they are clearly inequality issues between men and women. Other campaigns, however, are distinctly not women’s or gender issues, including championing local libraries under threat from cuts, and SOS for Honeybees, research into the health of bees.
Clearly, there are WI campaigns that would rightly be termed feminist, and indubitably there must be members that identify with the term. The organisation itself, however, is not. For me, the term ‘feminist’ is so clearly loaded with political implications it would not be right to enforce it on an institution that clearly rejects the term. Indeed, looking back at their history, it is clear that at certain points in history, especially during second-wave feminism, the aims of the institute were not in harmony with mainstream feminism. This is not to say that it is anti-feminist, but it is not feminist either.
By Katie Carpenter.
Katie is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London and an intern for the Citizens Project.
[1] Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928-64 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013).
[2] ‘Women’s Institutes. A New Movement in Rural England’, The Times, issue 41734, 11 March 1918, 5.
[3] National Federation of Women’s Institutes, www.thewi.org.uk (accessed 1/12/2017).
[4] Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement. New and rev. ed. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2015).
[5] Lynne Thomas, ‘Review: The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement’, Women’s History Review, 8, 4 (1999): 742.
[6] Filio Diamanti, ‘Review: The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement’, Capital and Class, 20, 65 (1998): 197.
[7] ‘Feminism’, Entry in Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com (accessed 1/12/2017).
[8] Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens, 3.
[9] Diamanti, ‘Review’, 197.
[10] Janet Street-Porter, ‘The Women’s Institute could teach Labour a thing or two about inclusivity’, The Independent, 18 September 2015 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-womens-institute-could-teach-labour-a-thing-or-two-about-inclusivity-10508444.html (accessed 1/12/2017)
[11] Lorna Gibson, ‘The Women’s Institute and Jerusalem’s Suffrage Past’, Women’s History Review, 15, 2 (2006): 323-335.
[12] Annie Stamper, ‘The WI and the Women’s Suffrage Movement’ (13/04/2007) [PDF] www.thewi.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/145290/The-WI-and-the-Womens-Suffrage-movement.pdf (accessed 01/12/2017).
[13] Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (Portway and Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1974),
[14] Maggie Morgan, ‘Jam Making, Cuthbert Rabbit and Cakes: Redefining Domestic Labour in the Women’s Institute, 1915-60’, Rural History, 7, 2 (1996): 207-219.
[15] NFWI, ‘The WI as a force for change’ (December 2014) [Leaflet, PDF]
www.thewi.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/111949/CampaignAchievementsFINAL.pdf (accessed 01/12/2017).
