“Millions of working housewives”: The International Co-operative Women’s Guild and household labour in the interwar period

Abstract

The article focuses on household labour as one of the key agendas of the International Co-operative Women’s Guild (ICWG) and on the contributions Central and Eastern European countries made to this agenda in the interwar period. I argue that ICWG women made household labour a policy issue in its own right and provided space for debates between women of diverse ideological positions coming from different political and economic systems and national contexts. Zooming in on key publications and paying attention to the organizational dynamics and complex relationship between communists and social democrats in the ICWG, I first explore how the ICWG discussed household labour and the solutions it offered to reduce the burden of such work. In the second part of the analysis, I argue that because it was crucial to their work, ICWG women inserted aspects of household labour into international discussions on women’s and/or labour-related issues. By doing so, they tried to 1) establish themselves as experts on household labour-based issues and 2) advance how topics such as popular nutrition and maternal deaths were approached in international settings.