All of a sudden, the WI is cool and radical

Membership is on the rise again as the organisation’s version of feminism strikes a chord in modern Britain

Can the Women’s Institute be sexy? Or, at least, can the domesticity so often associated with the WI (and so often derided down the years by some feminists), be fashionable, cool and, what’s more, radical? The answer, I have always thought, is yes. Now, it seems the rest of the world is catching up. The latest figures reveal that WI membership is on the increase again, and the realisation is dawning that the kitchen is not necessarily a jail cell.

Look around you today. Domesticity has a central place in British culture: knitting has become trendy; The Great

British Bake Off is a phenomenon that grips the nation, watched by many millions more than tune in for Match

of the Day; middle-class kitchens heave under the weight of assorted cookery books; and cupcake baking has even made it on to the agenda for hen weekends. It’s clear that the WI’s vision of feminism is coming into its own.

This is a battle that the WI has been fighting for many decades, and which was first made explicit in the war years. As a member explained to the WI magazine Home and Country in 1941, feminism could be rooted not just in equal rights. It was also important “to show that women doing their own traditional and specific job of running a household and bringing up a family should be considered as important, as responsible and as much worthy of respect as women doing the kind of job that can be done equally well by either sex; and that their work is just as vital if not more so.”

The WI’s determination to advance this version of feminism, with its celebration of domesticity, led to campaigns for, among other things, sick pay for housewives in 1945 and to remove turnstiles from public loos in the Fifties (they are remarkably inconvenient if you are trying to manage small children and pushchairs).

The battle between such “brands” of feminism still wasn’t settled 30 years ago, when I wrote a history of the WI, and caused a fuss with the title: The

Acceptable Face of Feminism. But as if to prove how far the bliss of domesticity has since been recognised, the book got an altogether more friendly reception when it was republished for the WI’s centenary last year.

The truth is that the quiet but determined radicalism of the WI has been underestimated for more than 100 years. The potential of the organisation to change the lives of rural women was recognised by early suffragettes such as Lady Isabelle Margesson who, having chaired a meeting in 1914 at which Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested amid scenes of near riot, went on to set up Worcestershire’s first WI in Barnt Green. Similarly Edith Rigby, whose suffragette activities included setting fire to the stands at Blackburn Rovers football club and being a guest at his majesty’s pleasure some seven times, was a founder member and president of Hutton and Howith WI in Lancashire.

In the Twenties the WI’s democratic structure was viewed as disturbingly radical. Its campaign for piped water, sewerage and rural council house buildings was considered to be manipulated by “socialistically inclined women”. Such was their revolutionary spirit that another letter to Home and Country in 1928 (signed a “Mere man”) complained: “I mix with men, many of whom are husbands of Institute members and the things they say about the Institute are unprintable. One told me this morning that damned Institute is the curse of a married man’s life.” And as the largest women’s movement in the post-suffrage era, the National Federation of Women’s Institutes became a natural outlet for campaigns for equal pay or equal compensation for war injuries.

But the radicalism of the WI did not involve the wholesale rejection of the domestic world. Today, in fact, its members deploy domestic pursuits radically – like the Shoreditch Sisters branch, which famously produced a quilt to express its opposition to genital mutilation. Now, those who did reject it are flocking back.

And is it any wonder, when so many women have discovered that the working world involves micromanagement, performance reviews, zero-hours contracts and endless demands conveyed electronically to us wherever we are? Viewed like that, domesticity isn’t such a bad thing. Or at least work isn’t quite as much fun as we all thought.