La consumatrice in rivolta. La politicizzazione del consumo e il ruolo della donna nel pensiero di Teresa Billington-Greig

Abstract

Between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Century, in Great Britain consumption was a relevant topic on which various women’s movements and radical thinkers spoke their mind. Teresa Billington-Greig, a prolific author and for a certain period also a fervent suffragette, gave to consumption and consumers a central political role in the struggle against capitalism. In her writings she mainly analyzed the causes of the exclusion of women from the political sphere and the reasons of the failure of the workers’ revolt. According to the author, the “economic divorce” between production and consumption was an artifice created by the ruling class, which resulted not only in the division of consumers and workers, but also in the exclusion of women, a category strongly connected to the sphere of consumption, from the political struggle. Re-evaluating consumption as a political moment was therefore a way to fight against the domination of the profiteer and to re-evaluate the role of women in the political sphere, because only women’s liberation would have allowed the creation of a free society.