The New Orleans Housewives’ League: White Women’s Political Equality and Consumer Reform

Chapter two explores how early- to mid-twentieth century New Orleans socialists grappled with two central questions: could an embattled Rochdale consumer cooperative model thrive within a capitalist system, or should it presage a fundamental social, political, and economic transformation? The chapter traces cooperatives overlooked contributions to Progressive female economic institution-building and white women’s enfranchisement during the 1910s and 1920s. White Uptown New Orleanian women studied contemporary American and British socialists who equitably wove women, laborers, and agricultural producers into a national economic plan encompassing cooperative housing, production, health insurance, medical care, and education. Specifically, educated, affluent, and ethnically heterogenous cooperative activists replicated CLUSA’s chain store cooperative networks, which they folded into a broad-based consumer rights platform modernizing and expanding the city’s grocery retail industry and public market system.

RESTARTING NATIONAL PROJECTS AS A CONDITION FOR ECONOMIC GROWTH

The article describes two priority lines for action to restart national projects. First, it is necessary to move to the five-year national economic plan as a system of national projects. Second, we need new national projects, because the existing 13 projects do not cover some tasks formulated in the decrees of the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin. We are talking about such tasks as increasing the real incomes of Russians and overcoming poverty, about ensuring a technological breakthrough. The author notes that we need a system of national projects, focusing on key sectors of the Russian economy, primarily in mechanical engineering. We also need new national projects to ncrease investments in the fixed capital and human capital (in the "knowledge economy"). Moreover, it is necessary to adjust the content and system of measures for some existing national projects.