The consumers’ league campaigns in the UK and the USA were both originally rooted in a form of ethical shopping that remains instantly recognisable in the present day, as it advocated common and accessible practices such as choosing goods with a guarantee of ethical production and treating workers in service industries with consideration. What is striking about the development of both of these campaigns, however, is that the strategy of ethical consumption was quickly superseded by other forms of action. In these, the consumer identity continued to matter as a unifying concept, but the essential point of shopping quickly lost much of its original relevance. I suggest here that this shift could be made due to the opportunities the consumer identity offered – especially to a specific cohort of non-wage-earning women – for transformation not only into an activist identity, but into proof of citizenship.

Introducing his edited collection The Making of the Consumer (2006), Frank Trentmann pointed to the development, roughly since 1980, of ‘a dramatic turn to the “active” or “citizen” consumer – a creative, confident and rational being articulating personal identity and serving the public interest’. This trend has also been embraced in historical readings of consumer movements; for example, it is a useful way of framing the reversal of the narrative of consumer guilt. As they generally did not have access to more usual identifiers of citizenship, such as a professional identity or voting rights, the non-wage-earning women who were the key subjects of consumer guilt mobilised the potential of their consumer power. When the movement was adopted by women who were accustomed to wielding social and economic influence based on their status, it also connected neatly to earlier of influence in charitable and philanthropic initiatives. This was particularly relevant to the idea of consumers acting on behalf of workers who were portrayed as unable to represent their own interests. This development belonged, once again, very strongly to the gendered perception of the consumers’ league movement. This is the case especially for the movement as it emerged in the USA, but the same idea is also present, and becomes increasingly influential, in the UK campaigns led by Clementina Black.

Well-informed about international developments in activist initiatives and strategies to combat labour exploitation, Clementina Black was certainly aware of the achievements of the consumers’ league scheme in the US since the 1890s. In 1906 she acknowledged that ‘[i]n New York, where the Consumers’ League is supported by ladies of wealth and influence, it has been more successful’; she adds that ‘the movement is now being copied, with some enthusiasm apparently, in France’. As Black and the Women's Trade Union Association/Women's Industrial Council became disillusioned with the potential of trade unionism to alter women's working conditions, they focused more on the need for influential and official support to achieve changes across the board. While her own socio-economic analysis had led Black to reject the consumers’ league as a workable model to achieve her activist ambitions in the UK, the conclusion that she and the WIC eventually reached had much in common with that of the US National Consumers’ League. She decided that while the goodwill of consumer activism could raise awareness around workplace exploitation, changes to workers’ conditions could only be upheld and enforced if they were enshrined in law. For Black, however, this meant dispensing altogether with trying to persuade consumers that their individual purchasing choices could make any substantial difference. Instead, her new strategy was to confront a broad public with the knowledge that the system in which they made their purchases was inevitably and inextricably linked with sweating practices. This reflects the thinking that Sheila C. Blackburn identified as the third stage in the understanding of sweated labour, following its ‘discovery’ in the 1840s and ‘rediscovery’ from the 1880s: the idea that sweating was an inherent and entrenched part of unregulated capitalism. The direct aim of campaigns to increase awareness of this reality was to put popular pressure on legislators to eliminate the ‘sweating system’ altogether. In Black's view, this would be best achieved by introducing a minimum wage to eliminate underpayment, the root problem of the sweating system.

The most high-profile tool Black and her associates used to raise public awareness of sweating in the first decade of the twentieth century was the sensational ‘Sweated Industries Exhibition’.

Consumer activism has an enduring appeal. The concept combines ideas of collectivism linked to the perceived universality of the act of shopping with the potential to make a social, economic or political difference through individual actions. It inspires a sense of people power that can function within the status quo, so its attraction can work across political boundaries. It can shapeshift to fit a range of situations and reformist agendas, targeting issues from labour conditions to environmentalism, from animal welfare to public health, and any intersections between them. It can be made to apply to different socio-economic groups, from the ethical consumerism that calls on shoppers to pay more for ethically produced goods to structures of cooperative buying. It can work at levels from the hyperlocal to the global, from neighbourhood shop to stock market. It serves many aims to many activists, from increasing community influence to appeasing individual guilt. It can even change its own identity to fit these models, not least because, as sociologist Jeffrey Haydu remarks, ‘it demands less time and carries less risk than does collective public protest’. The notion of ethical shopping allows some proponents to avoid the label of activism altogether, while it enables others to embrace an activist identity based on their consumer choices.

Historicising consumer activism

Much of this book was written during the coronavirus pandemic that grew to global proportions in 2020. The first months of the emergency pandemic response raised their own unique calls to consumer activism while also bringing to the fore many of the socio-economic problems that have inspired consumer activism since the eighteenth century. Mutual aid groups organised the neighbourly action of shopping on behalf of local vulnerable people. Meanwhile, attention was drawn to conditions in service industries, particularly delivery services, on which individuals suddenly became more reliant than ever – including those who had previously used them as a convenience or luxury, as well as those who had always depended on them because of disabilities, for instance. The already long-standing call to boycott specific online retailers and large-scale delivery services was renewed as news emerged that workers in this industry might lack such protections as sick pay and, as a result, were prevented from self-isolating if they were infected or vulnerable to the virus.

The implication reflected in notions such as Clementina Black's of the ‘human machine’, that the welfare of the individual should be guarded to achieve the long-term effective functioning of an economic system, is also conspicuous in the legal discourse around protective measures for workers in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. So too was the idea that it was up to more prominent and powerful social groups – not themselves likely to be part of the ‘machine’ of labouring people – to safeguard it. It surfaces, for example, in the foreword to Maud Nathan's Story of an Epoch-Making Movement by the prominent progressive Democrat Newton D. Baker. Baker's career moved between state appointments and campaign roles: he had been president of the National Consumers’ League as well as mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, and Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. This experience of both official government and unofficial influences on it lent weight to his assessment of the impact of the NCL. For example, he states:

Baker's language here reads as gendered, with the notion of the NCL as a helpmeet to the state that supplied both information and ‘sympathy and support’ to protect the national ‘health and welfare’. There is a sense of motherliness in this caring role for the NCL as well as of motherhood in the idea of protecting the national health.

This framing readily lends itself to be understood in a context of the NCL's own engagement with such ideas around gendered protection, which had shaped its landmark legal intervention for protective labour laws for women. The United States Supreme Court case of Muller v. Oregon (1908), a legal dispute in which the NCL interceded to defend a state-level maximum working hours law for women, forms the focus of this chapter.

The consumers’ league movement originated in the UK as a consumer activist project directed against labour exploitation. It was spearheaded by London-based labour activist Clementina Black from 1887. Black's initiative was not the first of its kind: there are several earlier and contemporary examples of organised consumer campaigns that sought to improve living and working conditions, including middle-class activity on behalf of exploited workers but also initiatives led by workers to improve their own situations. The impactful cooperative movement, for instance, had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to give working-class consumers greater control over the quality and prices of the products available to them. Black proposed her Consumers’ League within a few years of the formation in 1883 of the Women's Co-operative Guild, a collective which had grown out of the Co-operative Society with the aim of allowing married working-class women to exercise their purchasing power as a pressure group within the cooperative movement.

Black was a middle-class woman but was deeply involved in trade unionism and later suffrage campaigns, and her work shows that she was strongly cognisant of working-class women's organisation to defend their own community and class interests. Her Consumers’ League occupies an unusual intermediary position between campaigns fought by workers and on their behalf, as she tried to involve middle-class consumers in a project that was separate from, but designed to support, the organisation of workers for better wages and conditions by directing their purchasing power towards businesses that adhered to trade union standards. For several years from 1887 onwards, Black invested significant energy into developing her proposals for a consumers’ league, with considerable emphasis on publishing her ideas in a range of periodicals. The scheme achieved a wide appeal that led to versions of it being adopted by different organisations in several countries. Black herself, however, rapidly grew disillusioned with the idea, finding it insufficiently impactful, and by the twentieth century she was putting her efforts into alternative schemes and campaigns aimed at effecting legal change to combat labour exploitation. This chapter explores both how she designed her proposals to appeal to readers, and how this targeting of popular success sits alongside her conclusion that the scheme itself was not viable after all.