Women’s Institute is not all jam and Jerusalem

Jun 3 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

About 6,000 Women’s Institute members will arrive in Liverpool tomorrow for their first annual conference in the city. Emma Pinch finds out if it’s still all jam and Jerusalem at the WI

MIDDLE-AGED, middle-class women with stout morals, a fondness for jam and a propensity for posing naked in calendars.

With 500 new members joining every month and 17 new branches having sprung up since January, it’s a stereotype that the Women’s Institute is keen to shed. Younger women are picking up the baton these days, shaping branches according to what they want to get from the WI – from pole dancing in Shoreditch to chocolate-tasting in Winsford.

But it’s underpinned by a wish to return to traditional values for many young women, according to former national chair Helen Carey, an ex-teacher and leading light at Whitley WI, in Cheshire.

She first joined in 1964 as a 23-year-old English and Latin graduate, attracted by the rural links and strong campaigning arm of the organisation. She was chair when Tony Blair was famously slow-handclapped in 2000 at the WI national conference at Wembley.

Before 1965, membership of the WI was restricted to villages of populations of 4,000 or less.

“I saw it as a rural organisation when I joined,” says Helen. “There were a lot of crafts like patchwork, toy making and embroidery and we called everyone Mr and Mrs somebody instead of by their first names, as we do now. We would run up curtains for the village hall and raise money for local causes.”

Now, just as then, campaigns have always been astutely chosen and ahead of their time.

This year’s AGM will include resolutions on lobbying for a ban on sea-bed trawling in certain areas of the oceans, and another concerning the inappropriate imprisonment of mentally ill offenders.

“They’ve always campaigned hard, particularly about the environment,” says Helen. “In the 1920s they lobbied for the plumage bill, not killing birds for their feathers that women would put round their necks.

“In the 1930s, they were asking for improved water supplies for villages and the preservation of ancient buildings. They had one about better rural access to free family planning in the 60s. Being part of a large voice on matters like this is very attractive to members.”

She points out that the aim has always been to liberate rather than stereotype women.

“The reason people did crafts was to make a bit of pin money from the items they made during the Depression,” she says. “It was a cottage industry that made women more independent.”

After losing direction in latter years, she says, there’s been a recent return to more established values, and the Institute has seen a 60% rise in women going to its residential college in Oxfordshire to study cooking, as well as career-enhancement skills like public speaking. “In a way, we have gone back to our roots,” says Helen. “We probably lost the plot in the 80s and 90s because we had the feminist movement coming along and single issue groups and we’ve always had a spectrum of interests.

“We had to get back to where we had come from. Some of the newer members do want to do the cookery and the jam. People want to get back to basics, especially if times are tight, like now.”

Older traditions of the WI have been adapted or discarded, however – not always easy transitions for older members.

There are reports that a Wirral group’s plans to introduce wine tasting were scuppered because of the disapprobation of older, traditionalist groups nearby.

Says Helen: “You are always going to get a slight suspicion when people start doing things differently, not just in the WI. We have to move on from that. You don’t always have to sing Jerusalem.

“The words I’ve always hated are ‘but we’ve always done it like that’. One of the only things that we do that we’ve always done is give a voice to women and improve the quality and aims of their lives.”

THE WI Annual Conference takes place this week at the Echo Arena Liverpool.

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