Townswomen's guilds, emerging out of the women's suffrage movement and modelled on the remarkably successful rural women's institutes, were founded in 1928 with a programme of ‘comradeship, arts and crafts and citizenship’ for the urban ordinary housewife. Membership began to fall in the 1970s as structural rigidity came under challenge and younger women failed to come forward. Learning how to serve had begun to yield to women's changing aspirations and increasing economic emancipation.

A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.