Beatrice Webb

"Within a trade, in the absence of any Common Rule, competition between firms leads, as we have seen, to the adoption of practices by which the whole industry is deteriorated. The enforcement of a common minimum standard throughout the trade not only stops the degradation, but in every way conduces to industrial efficiency."

"The only woman who appears regularly in the New Statesman in the early months is its co-founder Beatrice Webb. She is represented in her partnership with Sidney Webb and their solid 22-part series “What is Socialism?”, which dominates the first months of the magazine. Just one instalment of this series is devoted to, as they call it, "freedom for the woman". In its dogged lines, I find both what must have been most attractive and what may have been most alienating about feminism 100 years ago. What is attractive is the insistence on material emancipation. After centuries of mystification of the angel of the house, the Webbs are fiercely sure that there is, quite simply, a "loss of personal dignity and personal freedom . . . inherent in dependence on the caprice of another . . . The childbearing woman, like the wage earner, must be set free from economic subjection." Fifty years before Betty Frie­dan told American housewives the same thing, Beatrice Webb suggested to British housewives that economic dependence was not romantic. Elsewhere in her life and writing, Webb was often conflicted about feminism and the woman’s role beyond the home. Yet this is a straightforward message of material independence. Even now, we often see Daily Mail columnists bridling at the idea that being financially dependent involves any loss of personal freedom. What a call to arms this must have been 100 years ago."