4 - The price of depression: consumer politics in inter-war Britain

Summary

Just as unemployment was a cause of poverty in inter-war Britain, so too were fluctuating prices felt to add to the hardships of consumers. In the late 1930s, the Labour Party and the trade unions attempted to mobilise women in a series of cost-of-living campaigns meant to bring pressure on the government's food policy. In a 1937 pamphlet, My Family's Food Costs More and More, a woman is seen forlornly examining her purse. She is told that her plight mirrors that of the farmer and the worker in the food industry, all of whom have been exploited by ‘big business’, ‘the middlemen’ and ‘profiteering food combines’. ‘What can the housewife do about it?’ asked the Labour Party:

Nobody knows the bitter results of rising food prices better than the housewives. They know that the week's food money buys less and less solid nourishment; and they know what the effect will be sooner or later on their families.

Nobody can do more about it than the housewives. There are millions of them. They hold together the homes of Britain. The Government dare not ignore their influence if they all protest together.

The appeal to the housewife was part of a broader propaganda campaign to show that ‘food policy is part of socialism’. Women were to strengthen the labour movement in unity with their trade union husbands.