Opening Up the National Co-operative Archive: Co-operative Woman, Visual Culture and the Co-operative Movement in Interwar Britain

Darnley, Joanne (2020) Opening Up the National Co-operative Archive: Co-operative Woman, Visual Culture and the Co-operative Movement in Interwar Britain. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This project explores the National Co-operative Archive (NCA) in order to challenge traditional archival perceptions and open up the NCA to fresh audiences through new ways of knowing. The NCA, established in 2000 and located in Holyoake House Manchester since 2001, holds the national print collections of the co-operative movement in Britain. The project aims to broaden the reach of what is a substantial educational and ideological resource for the co-operative movement and society. To do so it negotiates two distinct approaches in the context of the co-operative movement: i) visual analysis ii) participatory collage-making. Visual analysis examines how the gender identity of co-operative woman was represented in the setting of home and work in specific co-operative publications between 1919-1939, arguing that fluid and diverse visual representations of cooperative woman constructed a political continuum which reached beyond being a married member of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. The project’s main focus is Woman’s Outlook (1919-1967) the women’s periodical of the co-operative movement, together with other co-operative publications: The Manchester and Salford Equitable Society Monthly Herald (1896-1960), The Wheatsheaf: A Monthly Co-operative Record & Magazine (1896-1964), and Ourselves: C.W.S. Employees’ Journal (1925-1939) and alongside its wider print culture. These publications are compared and contrasted with the high circulation commercial women’s magazine Woman’s Weekly (1911- to date), and Labour Woman, (1913-1971), the women’s periodical of the Labour Party. Participatory collagemaking explores the interface between archival pra ctice, the academic investigation and the disciplinary boundaries of the Arts and Humanities, Design and Education in order to open up different spaces for new voices participants’ perceptions of the NCA. and alter The project offers potentially significan for other archives and contributes substantive new insights to studies of cot lessons operative woman, the cocooperative movement, the archive, visual culture, collaboration and production, women’s periodicals and design history.