Sustainability solutionist, author and co-founder of the global change-agency Futerra. Read my new book The Solutionists, How Business Can Fix The Future.
In 1820s Birmingham, England, a household might expect a knock on the door from a local women’s group. Their request?. Sweetening tea and cakes with it, they explained, was keeping the transatlantic slave trade alive. That sugar boycott took off, with women – the main food purchasers – refusing to buy slave-grown sugar. Kitchen-table speeches spread the word and hand-printed petitions made the rounds.
But, as the many female abolitionists of 18th and 19th century Britain demonstrate, performance isn’t everything when it comes to making change. Women have always cared about injustice, about moral necessity and about environmental balance – and back when we couldn’t stand for office, publish writing or even vote, we could use the power we had. For women, this has been the power of the household.
But purchasing power is still power, and wielded well, it can change everything. It’s time to respect that way of change-making, even if it doesn’t fit the male-dominated hero story. Women account for. And we’re not just talking food or kids’ toys – women are responsible for more than half of home computer and car purchases. Women’s household power runs to the tune of $20 trillion globally. Marketers, of course, want in: brands know how to target their advertising to female power-purchasers.
And it is another way to exclude women. Sustainable living is a channel available to women whose lower pay makes it difficult to strike; whose childcare responsibilities mean civil disobedience puts the whole family at risk. It is a place that remains safe, in contrast to the political corridors of power where womenOur households may be separate from one another, yes; but our money is spent en-masse, collected and counted and written into annual reports.
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