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about the development of both of these campaigns, however, is that the strategy of ethical consumption was quickly superseded by other forms of action.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.