Lucy Delap

• Lecturer at University of Cambridge

Historians of the Women’s Liberation Movement have long stressed its decentralized form, with a deliberate refusal of the infrastructure of leaders and formal institutions. Instead, like other social movements of the 1970s and 80 s, periodicals, networks of friends, and informal meeting places tended to provide the impetus for the development and d...

This major work of academic reference provides the first comprehensive survey of political thought in Europe, North America and Asia in the century following the French Revolution. Written by a distinguished team of international scholars, this Cambridge History is the latest in a sequence of volumes firmly established as the principal reference so...

For those who by the end of the twentieth century came to be termed “survivors” of child sexual abuse, different genres and forms have been available to narrate and evaluate that abuse. This article explores the reception and practical results of such disclosures: the unpredictable effects of telling, and the strategies of containment, silencing, o...

The research on which this report is based was commissioned by the Historical Child Abuse Team of HM Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS), to inform its response to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Its aim was to enhance HMPPS’s own institutional memory, and to suggest avenues for improved practice in safeguarding children in...

The chapter argues that disabled people displayed resistance to stereotypes of tragic singleness, asexuality and child-like sexual innocence and insisted upon rights to (sexual) intimacies. Their determination to marry is consonant with the turn historians have identified towards the central importance of sex and love in the mid to late twentieth c...

For the first issue of the renamed journal, Modern British History co-editor Erik Linstrum convened a group of scholars to reflect on the past, present, and possible futures of the field. The resulting contributions make no claim to provide a comprehensive or representative survey. Rather, they offer a variety of perspectives on where modern Britis...

One of the co-editors of this special issue of Histoire sociale / Social History, Marc Calvini-Lefebvre, is currently running a digital mapping project which seeks to crowdsource information about the sites of memory dedicated to the suffrage movement around the world and geolocate them on an open-software map. His initiative is one of many digital...

How can a sprawling megacity be captured as a historical entity in any meaningful sense? In Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher, it is perhaps no surprise that John Davis opts for a series of essays that weave their way across two decades of dramatic change for London and Londoners. Whittled down to sixteen, there must have been m...

This article surveys the experiences of historical actors labelled ‘mentally defective’ and ‘mentally handicapped’ in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. It decentres institutions and experiences of segregation, and instead foregrounds employment as a way to historicise and make visible the experiences of individuals with intellectu...

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw significant innovations in theorisation and politicisation of sexual violence. This article examines the impact of feminist work on rape and male sexuality in Britain, witnessed through the ‘sex lives’ of male supporters of the women’s movement. I draw on oral histories, life writing and anti-sexist men...

This article analyses the ‘business praxis’ of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, one of UK feminism’s most enduring cultural institutions. It discusses the diverse ways Spare Rib sustained itself financially (or not), with reference to the role of advertising, distribution, revenue and wages. I explore how Spare Rib developed ethical approaches to b...

This article investigates the different genres and narrative forms that have been available across the twentieth century to narrate and evaluate sexual abuse of children, by those who, by the end of the century, came to be termed ‘survivors’ of such abuse. I explore the reception and practical results of disclosure – the unpredictable effects of te...

Feminism posed powerful political and emotional challenges to progressive men in the 1970s and 1980s. This article investigates politically and personally motivated attempts to ‘feel differently’ by men in Britain who identified as ‘anti-sexist’ and aligned themselves with the Women’s Liberation Movement. This rescripting of emotions was a central...

This article reflects on methodological and ethical issues that have shaped a collaborative project which aims to chart social, legal and political responses to child sexual abuse in England and Wales across the twentieth century. The etymological problem of searching for child sexual abuse in the historical archive is discussed, given that the ter...

Genius in its nineteenth-and twentieth-century formations has powerful connotations of elitism, and is likely to have boundaries that exclude the socially marginalized or disempowered. It was a common assumption in Victorian and Edwardian Britain that women were by nature unlikely to display genius. Nonetheless, “genius” proved a captivating and, o...

In this article, we examine the experience of History 8c Policy, (www.his- toryandpolicy.org), an organisation set up a decade ago in Britain to enable insights from academic historians to inform policymaking processes. We firstly address the manner in which historians can contribute to 'evidence-based' policymaking, both as providers of historical...

A 1912 tribute to W. T. Stead in the 'Contemporary Review' claimed that ‘he lay outside conventional movements, and was singularly detached from normal currents of political influence. He did not belong to anybody.’ Not only was this true across the range of reforms and causes Stead expressed support for, but also in more specific contexts. As a ch...

In February 1957, the St James’ branch of the Church of England Men’s Society (CEMS) met in Bolton to discuss what one member described as ‘the great picture by Holman Hunt “THE SHADOW OF DEATH”’.1 Hunt had depicted Jesus as a muscular craftsman in the early 1870s, and nearly a century later his image was still resonating with this body of provinci...

Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain investigates the influence of religion on the formation of men as gendered and sexual beings. It surveys a geographical and historical period — twentieth-century Britain — which has witnessed profound changes in both religious cultures and the gender order. This is a century which...

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This article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges...

The relationships of physical and emotional labour which exist between children, parents and domestic workers are historically fluid. Different styles of parenting, discourses of social class, and material contexts of care have given rise to very diverse degrees of delegation of childcare to servants. Servants themselves have often invested emotion...

This book tells the story of lives and labour within twentieth-century British homes. From great houses to suburbs and slums, it charts the interactions of servants and employers and the intense controversies and emotions they inspired. Historians have seen domestic service as an obsolete or redundant sector from the middle of the twentieth century...

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw significant change in the ‘public conversation’ about women’s rights and freedoms. The tendency to measure progress and changes in public opinion through the daily press and through the pages of their own periodicals stems back to the impact Bessie Rayner Parkes attributed to the English Woman’s...

Votes for Women, the Englishwoman, and the Freewoman were only three divergent examples of the wide range of feminist periodicals published between the end of the nineteenth century and the interwar years in Britain.1 While a growing body of scholarship dealing with feminist print media in the period has emerged in recent years, it is remarkable th...

Highlighting the contributions of feminist media history to media studies and related disciplines, this book focuses on feminist periodicals emerging from or reacting to the Edwardian suffrage campaign and situates them in the context of current debates about the public sphere, social movements, and media history. © Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap and Le...

BinghamAdrian. Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 298. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 49 Issue 1 - Lucy Delap

Beatrice Webb, born in 1858 to a servant-keeping family, recalled her development of consciousness of social station through observing her mother’s exercise of domestic authority. Webb wrote, “As life unfolded I became aware that I belonged to a class of persons who habitually gave orders, but who seldom, if ever, executed the orders of other peopl...

R.A. Scott-James’s 1913 analysis of the influence of an ever-proliferating and segmented — but intricately interwoven — newspaper and periodical press offers a useful point of departure for understanding the highly self-conscious debates about print culture in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as well as the complexities facing res...

In this chapter, the early twentieth-century formulations of ‘feminism’ are explored, as an identity developed in active defiance of ‘suffragism’. While some suffragists later came to identify as feminists, for a brief period feminism provided an intellectual and political space for a very different kind of Edwardian politics, heavily influenced by...

The Freewoman has commonly been read as an example of New Woman periodical publishing, through its focus on women's sexuality and autonomy from men. The journal appears to offer a more daring, twentieth-century and modern ‘new woman’, more willing than even her 1890s counterpart to embrace free unions or sexual experimentation. The Freewoman's extr...

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed women's claims to political, cultural and social rights and agency, as well as the growth of imperial and anti-imperial nationalisms within the metropole and colonial locations. This article draws on three case studies, the black nationalist journalism of the 1830s in the United States, the black abo...

This paper critically examines the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revival of chivalry in Britain, with a particular emphasis on chivalry at sea. It gives a history to the so-called 'eternal law of the sea', the chivalric code of 'women and children first' during shipwrecks. For most of the nineteenth century, chivalry at sea had been organ...

This article highlights anti-feminism as a neglected source in British debates about gender in the early twentieth century. It examines Edwardian feminism and anti-feminism within the ‘little magazines’ of ‘advanced’ or modernist circles, and explores the lack of conceptual distinctness of thinkers who identified themselves, or have been subsequent...

This article examines the development of the idea of the ‘superwoman’ among British Edwardian feminists and contextualizes it within the aristocratic political thought of the day. I examine the idea of the ‘genius’ and the ‘superman’ in order to shed light on why, for some Edwardian feminists, the ideal feminist agent was to be an elite, discerning...