The New Orleans Housewives’ League: Building and Burning Bridges

About this Event:

Gessler’s talk traces women’s cooperatives’ sorely overlooked contributions to female political institution-building and women’s enfranchisement during New Orleans’s interwar years. During the Progressive Era, local women’s civic and social clubs discussed their direct experience with gender discrimination and studied international women’s movements for economic and political empowerment. At the same time, in the wake of World War I demilitarization, Americans’ cost of living skyrocketed as the federal government removed wartime price controls and expanding chain grocery stores shuttered small businesses. In direct response, in 1919, female community leaders formed the Housewives’ League Co-operative Store as part of their vision to create a female-led, democratic cooperative economy. For two years, the grocery store lowered consumer prices, fostered a welcoming space for women to socialize, and helped reform the city’s production, distribution, and consumption systems. However, even as some cooperative members strove to build coalitions across class, racial, and geographic divides, this talk also examines how entrenched racial and ethnic hierarchies just as often threatened to undermine the liberatory aspects of the League’s cooperative agenda.

About the Speaker:

Anne Gessler is the director of the First-Year Seminar Program and a clinical associate professor in the Humanities Program and Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She received her doctorate in American Studies and a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin in 2015. She has published in Utopian Studies, American Studies in Scandinavia, Radio Journal, Feminist Media Studies, and Journal of Southern History. Engaging with women’s and gender studies, social movement history, and consumer activism, her book, Cooperatives in New Orleans: Collective Action and Urban Development, traces the impact of New Orleans neighborhood cooperatives on the city’s urban development (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020). Her current research examines the evolution of New Orleans interwar disability advocacy through the lens of the Sophie Gumbel Training School.

This lecture is made possible with support from the New Orleans Recreation and Culture Fund.

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