Postwar reconstruction planners treated women’s material conditions and communal life as grounds for emancipation.

Evidence

Th e women’s committee’s impressive scheme encompassed rules on windows, ventilation, and “laborsaving devices” for the housewife, such as the American “kitchen cabinet” that would save “unnecessary walking to and fro” (ibid., 9). Most importantly, the committee experimented with “wide possibilities of communal life”— gardens, playgrounds, social centers— since its members believed that “full attention should be given to the organisation of the resources available for social and intellectual development” (ibid., 20). Th e committee stressed the material conditions for women’s emancipation. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 292

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later argument that austerity in the 1920s crushed these reconstruction-era emancipatory plans — anticipates the book’s core thesis about austerity as a class weapon. — connects to: Postwar reconstructionists saw the war’s social gains as a foundation for permanent social justice — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 240; Postwar reconstruction committees voiced working-class demands for communal living and cooperative trade. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 295

Broader Connections

• Postwar reconstruction committees voiced working-class demands for communal living and cooperative trade. #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 295