The consumers’ league movement originated in the UK as a consumer activist project directed against labour exploitation. It was spearheaded by London-based labour activist Clementina Black from 1887. Black's initiative was not the first of its kind: there are several earlier and contemporary examples of organised consumer campaigns that sought to improve living and working conditions, including middle-class activity on behalf of exploited workers but also initiatives led by workers to improve their own situations. The impactful cooperative movement, for instance, had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to give working-class consumers greater control over the quality and prices of the products available to them. Black proposed her Consumers’ League within a few years of the formation in 1883 of the Women's Co-operative Guild, a collective which had grown out of the Co-operative Society with the aim of allowing married working-class women to exercise their purchasing power as a pressure group within the cooperative movement.

Black was a middle-class woman but was deeply involved in trade unionism and later suffrage campaigns, and her work shows that she was strongly cognisant of working-class women's organisation to defend their own community and class interests. Her Consumers’ League occupies an unusual intermediary position between campaigns fought by workers and on their behalf, as she tried to involve middle-class consumers in a project that was separate from, but designed to support, the organisation of workers for better wages and conditions by directing their purchasing power towards businesses that adhered to trade union standards. For several years from 1887 onwards, Black invested significant energy into developing her proposals for a consumers’ league, with considerable emphasis on publishing her ideas in a range of periodicals. The scheme achieved a wide appeal that led to versions of it being adopted by different organisations in several countries. Black herself, however, rapidly grew disillusioned with the idea, finding it insufficiently impactful, and by the twentieth century she was putting her efforts into alternative schemes and campaigns aimed at effecting legal change to combat labour exploitation. This chapter explores both how she designed her proposals to appeal to readers, and how this targeting of popular success sits alongside her conclusion that the scheme itself was not viable after all.