Jam and Jerusalem - The Lasting Legacy of the Women's Institute

Jam and Jerusalem - The Lasting Legacy of the Women's Institute 

By C. A. Asbrey

Madge Roberston Watt

On September the 11th, in Cardiff, Wales, a woman called Madge Robertson Watt started a woman's group. The humble origins gave no indication of the potent force for change it was to become even though she was a deep believer in the potential of women working together. Her leadership harnessed the power of women to deal with the ravages of war, but went on to address many other social matters impacting ordinary families. It was an exclusively female organisation, with only Admiral Richard Greville Arthur Wellington Stapleton-Cotton and his dog, Tinker, being the only fully paid-up male members. They were instrumental in the setting up of the first meeting in 1915. The admiral was in a wheelchair, but Tinker's role is unclear.  

Members of the WI in a Performance of Aladdin in 1939

Madge was an immigrant from Canada. An important point, as Canada already had a Women's Institute, founded by Adelaide Hoodless. Adelaide had been inspired to start the Canadian Women's Institute after the death of her fourteen-month-old son. The official cause was given as meningitis, but talk of a 'summer ailment' or contaminated milk persisted for a long time. Whatever the cause, the tragic death spurred her to start the movement in Canada to ensure that new mothers had knowledge, support, and information to prevent further tragedies. Madge Watt had similar aims when she worked with a few like-minded ladies to start a movement in the UK.

WW1 had started in 1914 for the UK. The war took men away from their families and workplaces, causing women to step up in the national interest. They worked in factories, farms, railways, lorries and busses. The women's institute campaigned for the first female police officers who appeared during WW1 due to a shortage of men to fill posts, the first arresting a man on her way to her way to work. Madge saw that rural women needed to make a concerted effort to counteract the food shortages caused by blockades and the sinking of supply vessels to the UK. She was eloquent and driven, and the first institute started in the beautifully Welsh named Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. Google the pronunciation. You won't be disappointed.

You may not be aware that the shortages became so acute in the UK that the government brought in rationing, with even the king and queen being issued with ration books in 1918. The Women's Institute spread quickly, and rural women maximised food production by raising productivity from thirty-five percent to sixty percent.

But producing it was only half the story. Preserving it and producing recipes that stretched food as far as possible became a specialty of the Women's Institute. By the end of the war in 1918, there were over a hundred institutes, and Madge was Chief Organiser under the Board of Agriculture. They made an enormous impact on feeding the country, but she didn't stop there just because the war had ended. She started the Women's Institute School in Sussex in 1918, with the aim of ensuring that women maximised their own skills and talents. She was quoted in a famous speech as saying, "I always tell them, in getting out a programme, to remember these points: Something to hear. Something to see. Something to do. This provides for everyone. I explain the glorious unity of the Women's Institute Organization, and then how the home is the beginning of all that the country will be."

The school not only taught women how to share recipes, home tips, enjoy arts and crafts, and enjoy new hobbies, it also trained women to be lead administrators in an ever-growing organisation, to network, to work together to advance a common cause in a way that was new to women at that time. They learned how to do accounts, and circumvented the British class system in recognising the merit over status. By the end of WW2 the demand for courses outstretched the accommodation and facilities. The aim was always based around women using their abilities to help their families, their communities, and their country. And after WW1 they set to work to do exactly that.

Their first major venture into politics was a campaign for decent, sanitary housing for men returning from the war. The slogan, "Homes fit for heroes" became a byword for the national housing crisis. Most housing stock for the working classes consisted of cheap Victorian houses thrown up during the industrial revolution. They were shoddily-built, most had little or no sanitation, and were over-crowded. Prime Minister Lloyd George promised a better standard of living for all, and the Women's Institute organised to ensure he stood by his word.

But that was not their only movement. The Pankhursts, the very scions of the female suffrage movement in the UK, spoke regularly to groups. The way women stepped up to fill male roles in WW1, and provided much-needed food, weapons, and expertise made it hard to resist calls to allow women the vote. The institute was not the only road to suffrage by any means, but they were another brick in the wall, as well as a way of reaching recruits who would never have previously attended a political meeting. Women gained a vocabulary to articulate their wants, and husbands came to appreciate the need for their wives to have a vote. The 1920s were also the point at which the hymn 'Jerusalem' became associated with the Women's Institute, and that had also been adopted by the Suffragettes in the UK, sung at all meetings. It gave us the saying 'Jam and Jerusalem' for the Women's Institute, as they were famous for both. Women in the UK were granted the vote in 1928. They also worked to get women on juries, and to run for parish and locals councils to influence the spending of public money on things that the communities needed.

In the forties and fifties the Women's institute was instrumental in powering Britain's war effort. Britain has been reliant on food imports since the eighteenth century, so by the early twentieth century people were in serious danger of being starved out of fighting the Nazis unless momentous efforts could be made. With food supplies once again cut off, the Women's Institute helped in rationing, food production in home gardens and public spaces. They explored recipes to make use of literally every scrap, on ways to grow food in unexpected places, and on how to preserve food to prevent wastage. Foraging became huge and the Women's Institute produced guides and lessons on how to do almost everything to do with make-do-and-mend. They sorted housing and food for refugees, the bombed-out, children evacuated from cities, and were omnipresent with tea and sympathy throughout the blitz for the emergency workers. Sugar was extremely scarce, with the ration only allowing people eight ounces a week, but the Women's Institute convinced the government to allow their members access to fourteen-thousand tons of sugar to preserve the sixteen-thousand tons of berries picked from hedgerows from rotting. It was a vital extra food source, at a time of great need. All the extra produce was sent to depots to be fairly distributed. And that was all on top of the normal rotas women had in taking turns in first aid, hospitals, and schools. They went the extra mile for their families and society, and once the war was over, they were respected for it.

After WW2 they continued sharing recipes, presenting women with new book groups, hobbies, and crafts, but they did not become less socially active. In the 1940s the Women's Institute demanded equal pay; something that didn't come to fruition until the Equal Pay Acy of 1970 which only addressed certain elements of the disparity. That fight continues.

They aligned with many groups that improved life in the local community, Help the Aged, the anti-litter group Keep Britain Tidy, Freedom from Hunger, adult literacy, anti-pollution groups, recycling, food banks, AIDS, mental health, and even formed groups inside prisons to give incarcerated women skills, comradeship, support, and a way to move forward.

Public health was one of their founding principles. They have shops and volunteers in almost all hospitals, campaigned against smoking in public places, lobbied the government to have every woman in the country regularly screened for cervical cancer, were active in HIV and AIDS awareness, worked to increase the numbers of midwives in the UK, for people with mental health problems to be in proper care rather than custody, and acted against human trafficking.

The organisation now has groups in almost every town and village in the country, with famous members including Queen Elizabeth II, and the present Queen Camilla. Camilla joined after the organisation was highlighted in the film, Calendar girls, which was based on a real group in the Yorkshire Dales who organised a charity calendar after the death of one of their member's husband. They started a craze for novelty nude calendars, but their was the first, and raised over three-million pounds for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (now Blood Cancer UK), the UK's leading blood cancer charity. The Princess of Wales attends meetings in Anmer. Historian Lucy Worsley is also a member and said, "One hundred years old this September, the WI has managed to be both part of the establishment, and, at the same time, a deeply subversive organisation."

The women's institute is typical of many female organisations; cosy and mundane on the outside, but quietly creating a revolution against anything that hurts the weakest in society. Prime Minister Tony Blair found that out to his cost when he thought he was going to get cake and an easy ride when he addressed the national conference in 2000. At first he got a warm welcome, but the audience soon heckled, booed, and slow-clapped when he tried to treat the speech as a party political broadcast—despite being warned not to do so. They weren't having any of it, and refused to be used by any politician for his own ends. Blair described the women's institute as "the most terrifying audience I have seen." It was a doubly stupid act, considering the institute's spokeswoman, Sangeeta Haindl said, "Our chair warned that if he tried to make it political he would get short shrift." 

And if that shrift had been any shorter, they'd have been throwing things.

The membership may have been dented slightly by second wave feminism in the 70s, but the original aim was to give women a voice, so it could be posited that they were victims of their own success. The story of the women's institute is very much part of the story of feminism in the UK, and they were successful. The membership may be down from the glory years, but with the success of Calendar Girls and a presence at high profile political meetings they are still a force to be reckoned with.

Lucy Worsley with the Shoreditch WI