This chapter considers how Anne Lister negotiated a place and identity for herself in (and beyond) Halifax society through her engagement in associational activity. This chapter positions Lister’s intellectual activity in the wider context of the opportunities for women’s participation in civic and intellectual life in this period, on a local and regional level, by considering her membership of more formal networks such as the York Friendly Society and the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society, alongside informal ones of prominent local families. Lister’s status in her home town of Halifax was particular and unusual owing to the relatively open secret of her sexual nonconformity, as well as her propertied status as the owner of Shibden Hall. Building on the important work by Jill Liddington in Female Fortune (1998), which establishes Lister’s construction of a landed gentry identity that could compete with her fellow landowners, this chapter examines how far this exceptionality was able to carry her in evading the usual gendered constraints of intellectual life, and the ways in which she deployed traditionally patriarchal forms of power in accessing, promoting and disseminating civic projects such as the new ‘Lit and Phil’.

Drawing upon the case studies of Ilford, Epping, Birmingham Moseley and Liverpool East Toxteth, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in suburban, predominantly middle-class constituencies. In the 1920s, as chapter 2 argued, suburban Conservatives rejected Baldwin’s attempts to appeal to voters along apolitical lines and instead urged a robust party stance; however, their own struggle to rehabilitate the conspicuous partisanship that had characterised the civic culture of Edwardian Conservatism – and which they interpreted as apathy among ‘known’ local Conservatives - led many activists to doubt the future prospects of Conservatism in the face of Labour competition. Chapter 5 argues that 1931 proved a turning point. The experience of the general election of that year initiated Conservative activists to the advantages of articulating a non-party variety of anti-socialism that matched the cross-party makeup of the National Government. It also encouraged them to cultivate an ostensibly non-party presence in the associational life of the suburbs, including in the new housing estates. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, the National Government continued to challenge the suburban Conservative activist in some ways: National anti-socialism could be as much a source of competition as cooperation between local Conservatives and Liberals, and the government’s policy of Indian constitutional reform antagonised elements within the party. Even so, by 1935, the Conservatives’ suburban grassroots, so often the voice of diehard Conservatism, remained wedded to the National Government and looked enthusiastically to Baldwin as both the embodiment and facilitator of its ‘national’ appeal.

Chapter 6 “Associationalism (1983–2013)” reveals the limits of RJ’s institutionalization, and further highlights the ambiguity and reciprocity of the IRI’s state-society relations and associational life. While many of RJ’s former revolutionary activists and war veterans were absorbed into the expanding bureaucracy, some of them established and joined volunteer groups and civic associations at the grassroots level. Though claiming to be politically and financially independent, these organizations were established with the encouragement and backing of the IRI’s factionalized elites. While appropriating RJ’s developmental and populist rhetoric, ideology, and practice, these organizations helped political elites in their efforts to gain popular legitimacy, political support, and electoral votes by mobilizing and socializing youth, students, veterans, villagers, and other citizens. As an unintended consequence, these organizations exerted bottom-up pressures and demands on the political elites whom they had supported for increased and improved public goods and social services, and, in the process, represented a seedbed of authentic and autonomous activism and lobbying.