Women and Work in Britain since 1840
Abstract
The first book of its kind to study this period, Gerry Holloway's essential student resource works chronologically from the early 1840s to the end of the twentieth century and examines over 150 years of women's employment history. With suggestions for research topics, an annotated bibliography to aid further research, and a chronology of important events which places the subject in a broader historical context, Gerry Holloway considers how factors such as class, age, marital status, race and locality, along with wider economic and political issues, have affected women's job opportunities and status. Key themes and issues that run through the book include: Continuity and change. The sexual division of labour. Women as a cheap labour force. Women's perceived primary role of motherhood. Women and trade unions. Equality and difference. Education and training. Students of women's studies, gender studies and history will find this a fascinating and invaluable addition to their reading material.
... Additionally, during the period 1939 and 1945, no major reforms were made to provide an institutional foundation for the concept of employment equality for women. The Equal Pay Campaign was delayed by politicians and, according to Holloway (2007), traditional stereotypes regarding women's ability to work, continued to prevail. Even the 1942 Beveridge Report (The National Archives, 2022), which recommended significant changes to the social welfare system and was applauded by mainstream women's organisations for recognising the essential but unpaid work undertaken by the British housewife, was infused with sexism. ...
... Alternatively, it is argued that although the war may have offered many occupational opportunities for women, gender role stereotyping remained prevalent when assigning employment positions. According to Holloway (2007), the division of labour meant that women in contrast to many men, continued to occupy lower paid, unskilled roles. Additionally, in the aftermath of World War One and the interwar years, the number of women in the workforce sharply declined as returning servicemen reclaimed their jobs (Rose, 2000). ...
... Traditionally, the spatial separation of work and home helped to construct and reinforce societal gender roles. The gendered division of paid employment carved a system of patriarchal power where men went out to work while women stayed at home charged with domesticity and motherhood (Holloway, 2007). Central to the division of labour between women and men was the perspective that for women, marriage and motherhood were seen as their basic mission, profession and most important of all duties, a view that had extended in part up to the end of the 19 th Century. ...
Although women's participation in the workforce has steadily grown in recent decades and their representation in senior leadership positions has risen, much of the research continues to focus on explaining the barriers that prevents their upward advancement. In contrast, understanding what has enabled women to reach the top, has received much less attention. Due to this gap, the aim of this study was to explore and understand the lived experiences of women who have become senior leaders. An Heideggerian interpretative phenomenological approach was adopted. Purposive sampling was used to select eleven women from across the British Isles who were employed in positions at director level or above in the Finance, Education, Health, Law, Sports and Culture sectors. Braun and Clarke's six phase approach to reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse data from semi-structured interviews conducted during 2018-2019. The study found that three personal attributes were instrumental to the women's career advancement into senior leadership, which formed the basis to propose a novel framework. Resilience provided them with the ability to combat challenges, overcome hurdles and bounce back from adversity. Ambition gave the women a sense of purpose, the desire for success, a determination to seek out new opportunities and the courage to push themselves beyond their comfort zone. Wisdom armed them with an intuitive, authentic and superior understanding of themselves and a moral, social and emotional maturity. This study contributes to knowledge and practice by presenting the Resilience, Ambition and Wisdom (RAW) Framework for women's leadership success and identifying the value of early professional coaching for career advancement. It also emphasises the importance of resilience and ambition combined, for career mobility and highlights the value of wisdom for women's leadership practice. Recommendations from this study are that the RAW framework is used at an individual and an organisational level to guide the development of resilience, ambition and wisdom. Women should engage in early career coaching to help them gain focus, alleviate failure anxieties and develop effective leadership strategies. Organisations should proactively promote coaching as part of their roles in helping these individuals access positions of responsibility early in their careers. Further research examining the emerging RAW framework including the development of a self-assessment scale and the relationship between personality type temperament and women's career advancement, is also recommended. 3
... She believed that mass media, together with psychologists, created this image of women as being fulfilled only by staying at home, but that the reality was millions of deeply un-fulfilled, housebound women 2 . However, a recent revision within the historiography is changing this image, and historians have now identified the period as one of conflict and negotiation (Thane, 1994(Thane, , 2003Holloway, 2005). By shedding new light on the post-war woman, this work is thus challenging previous assumptions about the housewife. ...
... As Gerry Holloway (2005) has observed, 'this need for women's labour during the war threw up some difficult contradictions for a society wedded to the belief that a woman's place was in the home' (p.13). The debate clearly continued in the post-war period where particularly the issue of working married women was heavily debated. ...
Within British women’s history, historians have illuminated the complexity of British post-war society and the particular role played by women within it. Studies show that the post-war woman was considered a significant citizen, crucial for the rebuilding of Britain, both as a worker and as a mother. Building on work within women’s and radio history, the aim of my research is to explore the relationship between the BBC and women in this period. In this paper, I will argue that, through radio, British women were given a voice, as workers and as housewives. This was, however, not without difficulties. The paper also highlights the complexity of the female radio audience and the struggle that faced broadcasters. The material under discussion reflects the changes and negotiations that were taking place in society at that time, and the paper emphasises the important role played by female listeners and by women’s radio in Britain.
... Gender discrimination was addressed directly in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s with the passing of the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) followed by several amendments. But according to Gerry Holloway (2005) the legislation had limited value and she notes in particular the following problems: although in theory all work is now open to women, in practice gender segregation still exists and today women are still over-represented in low status and low skill jobs. Although this is not overt discrimination in terms of practices like promotion it arises from the type of jobs women are recruited into in the first place and the roles within the company they are represented in (Crompton, 1997;Holloway 2005;McKinsey and Company, 2016). ...
... But according to Gerry Holloway (2005) the legislation had limited value and she notes in particular the following problems: although in theory all work is now open to women, in practice gender segregation still exists and today women are still over-represented in low status and low skill jobs. Although this is not overt discrimination in terms of practices like promotion it arises from the type of jobs women are recruited into in the first place and the roles within the company they are represented in (Crompton, 1997;Holloway 2005;McKinsey and Company, 2016). ...
Age, Gender and Sexuality through the Life Course argues that the gendered structure of temporality (defined in the dual sense of everyday time as well as age and stage of life) is a key factor underpinning the stalling of the gender revolution. Taking as its central focus the idealised young woman who serves as the mascot of contemporary success, this book demonstrates how the celebration of the Girl is (i) representative of social mobility, educational and professional achievement; (ii) possesses diligence, docility and emotional intelligence, and (iii) displays a reassuring sexuality and youthfulness - but is constructed from the outset to have a fleetingly short life span. Pickard undertakes a theoretical and empirical exploration of the contemporary female experience of education, work, motherhood, sexuality, the challenge of having-it-all. Furthermore, through additional analysis of the transitional ‘reproductive regime’ from youth into mid-life and beyond, this insightful monograph aims to demonstrate how age and time set very clear limits to what is possible and desirable for the female self; yet how the latter factors also, if used reflexively, can provide the key means of resisting and challenging patriarchy. This book is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience located in gender studies, age studies, culture studies, sociology and psychology; accessible for advanced undergraduates and beyond.
... 4 The general pattern that emerges from our data, as visualized in the effect plots of the linear mixed models (Figures 1 and 2) is a diachronic convergence between the sexes. This is presumably related to the historical convergence between sex roles (Carmichael et al. 2014;Delap and Morgan 2013;Holloway 2005;Mahood 1995). In our data, the convergence at the lexical level has been mainly brought about by women converging with men, in line with recent findings by Degaetano-Ortlieb et al. (2021), but in contrast to what one would expect on the basis of Biber and Burges's (2000) finding that recent times have witnessed a development towards a more 'involved' style, which is associated more with women than with men. ...
Differences in language use between men and women have been studied intensely. We take stock of the findings and venture into less charted territory. First, we broaden the scope from well-known lexical features to the domain of syntax. Second, we take a diachronic perspective, looking at changes between 1880 and 1999. Based on a corpus of written Dutch by prolific writers, we find statistically robust differences: men’s style can be characterized as more complex, with the exception of lexical diversity. Through the years, however, there is growing convergence for all linguistic metrics. In the discussion section, we look at different explanations for the observed trends.
... "Summerfield interviewed twenty-two women who had served in the forces during the war, most of whom said that their wartime experiences had changed them and made them more independent and confident of their abilities." [9] For some women, the War provides them with the opportunity to work outside the "women's work" before they expect to get married, and may combine work and family in the future. For others, it is likely to delay the establishment of marriage and family for them to create their self value. ...
... If physiotherapy was regarded as an alternative to studying medicine and since the professionals belonged to the same social class as the doctors, future research could explore how shared values may have affected their outlook on the role of physiotherapy in health care and led to their insistence on being distinct from similar occupational groups. An orientation framework for such an approach is provided by more recent research in gender history on "female professions", which has demonstrated the complexity of desired identities as shaped by societal discourses expressing dichotomous gender stereotypes, and the scope of action of women in their distinct lifeworld (Holloway;Simonton, 2006Simonton, , 2011Watts, 2007). ...
Background: The history of physiotherapy in Germany dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when German physicians discovered Swedish medical gymnastics as a therapeutic treatment modality. From the early 20th century onwards, physiotherapy slowly began to establish itself as a field of activity specifically for women of the middle classes who provided assistive services to medical doctors.Method: Extensive overview of published and unpublished research on the history of German physiotherapy as well as select primary sources from the 19th and 20th centuries. Additionally reference is made to historical research regarding the emergence of the physical culture and life reform movements, as well as on gender research regarding upper and middle class female employment opportunities in the social and health care sector. Findings: This study outlines the two leitmotifs of physiotherapy’s incorporation into the medical sector (i.e. medicalisation) and its (self-)image as a “female profession” (i.e. feminisation) as two intertwined historical phenomena shaping the critical period when physiotherapy assumed its role as a health profession in Germany. These developments from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries resulted in the emergence of a “female profession” with a distinct focus on the role of movement as a treatment modality.Discussion: Critical engagement with a handed down professional self-image is needed. On the basis of my historiographical overview, I suggest a future research agenda which would result in a more appropriate understanding of early physiotherapists in Germany as historical agents.
... By contrast, dear, which merely reflects power symmetry and closeness, is more often used by female speakers when addressing men. If we assume that gender inequality was an integral part of British society in the period between 1899 and 1912 (Thompson 1990;Mahood 1995;Holloway 2005;Davis 2014), it is not surprising that inequality is also reflected in the address system, as a core resource for realizing social deixis. Recall that for the analysis of the alternation between dear and my dear, only those instances of dear in which it does not modify other address terms have been selected. ...
This paper investigates the use of my as part of address formulae by means of a corpus consisting of eight British English plays published between 1899 and 1912. For each conversational turn, address terms, speaker, addressee, power and solidarity dynamics, and speech acts have been identified. The address terms most frequently modified by my have been selected for further investigation, which allows an analysis of the alternation between dear and my dear , as well as my lord/lady and your lordship/ladyship . Results show that, when my has impact on the power dimension, the address formula with my construes the addressee as less powerful than the speaker. When my has impact on the solidarity dimension, the address formula with my construes the addressee as a close interlocutor. The functional import of my varies depending on the address term it modifies, which is consistent with its function as a modulating element.
... To do so, they employed women to work as domestic servants, whose labour behind the scenes carrying out manual, dirty and time-consuming tasks gave respite to the 'lady of the house' and allowed her to assume the role of the tranquil and contented housewife and mother. In the UK, these domestic servants came from the poor working classes and, in the US (where domesticity was similarly prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), they were often women of colour (Staples, 2007;Holloway, 2007). ...
Women's domestic work is largely deemed to be a ‘labour of love’ and lacking any value outside the private family. This reflects an ‘ideology of domesticity’, whereby women's natural place is deemed to be in an imagined private sphere. In this paper, I examine the status of housework in the context of asserting property rights in the home upon relationship breakdown. Using Valverde's legal chronotope as a lens, I argue that the ideology of domesticity is not merely present in legal discourse, but also takes on material form through the spatiotemporal ordering of the home. Housework is spatially and temporally concealed behind the powerful veneer of the imagined ideal family home, with corresponding invisibility in the law. For domestic work to be acknowledged, the individual often has to demonstrate that her work transgresses boundaries between private and public. However, as I argue, this transgression is particularly difficult for women, who remain spatiotemporally anchored in the home.
... These people ensured that psychological theories of social development in children were developed thoroughly in Britain, in particular in London. One important point to mention here, especially given the overall low employment for women throughout the 1920s (less than 30 per cent of the total workforce and predominantly unmarried), 77 is the fact that most of them were professional women seeking to develop new fields of professional activity and new domains of knowledge in which to thrive. Child psychology was one important area in which they could do so. ...
... Of the 20 girls within our SIS sample, the majority went on, like the boys in our sample, to live regular working-class lives. For women in this period, this typically involved working in an unskilled job until they married and then, if they went on to have children, combining unpaid care work with informal casual work, such as charing, cleaning, child-minding or taking in laundry or piecework (Holloway, 2007;Todd, 2005). For working-class women, marriage and motherhood was as much a form of work as a set of affective relationships. ...
The adult outcomes of children raised in care are a matter of much concern in Britain today. Care leavers account for a quarter of the adult prison population, a tenth of the young homeless population, and over two thirds of sex workers (Centre for Social Justice, 2015: 4). This article argues that, by contrast, the first generation of boys and girls passing through the early care system were more likely to have experienced a modest improvement in their life chances. It explores three key questions. First, what mechanisms shaped adult outcomes of care in the past? Second, did these vary by gender? Third, what might life course approaches to these issues gain from engaging both with historical- and gender-inflected analysis? The article draws on our wider analysis of the life courses and life chances of 400 adults who passed through the early youth justice and care systems as children in the northwest of England from the 1860s to the 1920s. These systems were closely interlinked. Within that, the article focuses on the experiences of a subgroup sent to a more care-oriented institution. It compares their collective outcomes with those of the wider group and within-group by gender. It offers a selection of case studies of women’s lives before and after care to highlight the value of, and challenges involved in, undertaking gender analysis in life course research of this kind. © 2018, Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies. All rights reserved.
... Yet, the success of trade unionism in recruiting members has varied over time and space. Women are generally thought to be less inclined to unionize, particularly when it comes to joining the early trade unions (Goldin 1990;Holloway 2005). Women's underrepresentation arguably contributed to greater earnings differentials and occupational segregation (Burnette 2008) and was used as an argument for the introduction of gender-biased protective labor legislation (Wikander et al. 1995). ...
Women are generally seen as less inclined to join trade unions. This study matches firm–worker data from the Swedish cigar and printing industries around 1900 and examines information on men and women holding the same jobs; such data are rare but important for understanding gender gaps. The results explain the gender gap in union membership among compositors, but not among cigar workers. Differences in union membership varied considerably across firms, with the largest differences found in low-union-density cigar firms where indirect costs (that is, uncertainty and risk) accrued in particular to women workers. The lack of gender differences in mutual aid membership indicates that women were not hard to organize but avoided organizations associated with greater risk for employer retaliation and uncertain returns according to a cost–benefit analysis.
... Nonetheless it qualified that the encouragement of girls in further education should take place "if only to bring the numbers up to what they should be in subjects traditionally regarded as suitable for girls" (1957 White paper, quoted in Holloway 2005 p. 203). Throughout the 1960s, however, most young women continued to enter work directly from school, and the number of women in training courses actually declined (Holloway 2005). ...
The UK’s comparatively open and flexible education system provides more options for individuals from less advantaged backgrounds to participate, and has a high uptake of tertiary and adult education. However, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds remain proportionately under-represented at the highest levels of post-compulsory education. The complex relationship between expansion, the diversification of educational systems and freedom of choice in modern liberal societies means that the background from which students are drawn remains highly relevant to their progression. Multiple options and qualitative differences between courses and institutions puts the onus on students and parents to make correct career decisions - if students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are found more often in less prestigious educational pathways, then prestigious higher level institutions are likely to remain exclusive. The major contribution of my dissertation is the development of an overview of UKeducational and labour market pathway formation and its influence on individuals’ educational trajectories and social positions. More specifically, I expand on Kerckhoff’s (1993) work on “Diverging Pathways: Social Structure and Career Deflections”, taking into account changes since the introduction of the comprehensive system, gender differences and adult education. I further the distinction between a pathway and a trajectory in life-course research and elaborate on the debated question of “persistent inequality”, taking the theoretical perspective of “effectively maintained inequality” (Lucas 2001) into account. Finally, I consider the role of interactions between different types of inequality (cumulating dimensions). This thesis finds that students from more educated backgrounds are more likely to choose academic subjects and pathways early, which influences their performance and further progression opportunities. It also finds that men and women differ regarding educational pathways, that vertical gender inequalities and horizontal gender differences at first labour market entry have remained relatively stable over the latter half of the 20th century. And finally, that adult education and learning is subject to a “Matthew effect” (Merton 1968).
... Their deliberations repay careful study by challenging persistent simplifications of the role of post-war psychiatry in governing women's attitudes to work, assumptions about the interplay between medicine and patriarchy that have been complicated by other research (Allen, 1986;Busfield, 1988). Social and cultural histories of Britain during the 1940s and 1950s have emphasized the nuanced and conflicting messages about work and domesticity which women encountered in their everyday lives, but have rarely recognized that medical narratives could be correspondingly complex (Holloway, 2005;Spencer, 2005;Beaumont, 2013Beaumont, , 2015. Clinical pluralism at the national level was fostered in part by exposure to arguments generated within other cultural contexts, as doctors and researchers made use of international networks, events and organizations to form and disseminate their ideas. ...
Post-war medical debates about the psychiatric consequences of married women’s economic behaviour witnessed far more divergence and collision between perspectives than has often been acknowledged. Practitioners who approached women primarily as facilitators of family health—as wives and mothers—were mistrustful of the competing demands presented by paid employment. They were faced by a growing spectrum of opinion, however, which represented women as atrophying in the confines of domestic life, and which positioned work as a therapeutic act. Advocates of work tapped into anxieties about family instability by emphasizing the dangers posed by frustrated housewives, shifting clinical faith away from full-time motherhood, but nevertheless allowing responsibilities towards husbands and children to continue to frame argument about women’s behaviour. Doctors, researchers and social critics, in this context, became preoccupied with questions of balance, mapping a path which sought to harmonize public and private fulfilment, identity and responsibility. This article traces this discursive shift through a series of conferences held by the Medical Women’s International Association during the early-to-mid 1950s, connecting debates in Britain with systems of broader intellectual exchange. It enriches and complicates historical knowledge of post-war relationships between medicine and feminism, at the same time as offering a conceptual and linguistic context for modern discussion about work-life balance and gender. This article is published as part of a collection entitled “On balance: lifestyle, mental health and wellbeing”.
... Fifteen hour days were common for shop assistants and a working week of over 100 hours was not unusual for waitresses. Most domestic servants had little free time and a working day in the sweated industries could be up to 16 hours for around three shillings a week (Parratt 1998; Holloway 2005). Rather than eliminating women's paid employment, state regulation, the poor law and factory reform forced women into even lower paid, more exploitative, " sweated " homework, thereby imposing on them a " double load " above and beyond their family responsibilities. ...
In 1873, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine extolled the values of swimming for women and gave advice on the best form of bathing dress, one which preserved modesty and met the demands of contemporary fashion. This essentially impractical type of bathing outfit has been the subject of much of the historiography surrounding female swimming costumes but it was not the only swimming dress on show during the “long” Victorian period. The women of all classes who participated in more serious swimming required something functional rather than fashionable while working-class professional natationists, who appeared regularly in water shows throughout the country, wore attire that combined functionality, tight to the body while allowing freedom of movement, with public appeal, a critical consideration for female exhibitors. Their activities and costumes challenged prevailing notions of “separate spheres” and this paper explores Victorian aquatic dress in the context of class, gender and social space.
... A number of writers have noted the significance of colonial women's migration in the elaboration of a racialized and gendered discourse of the British nation in the immediate postwar period (Brah 1996;Holdsworth and Dale 1997;Grosfoguel 1998;Webster 1998;Jones 2001;Holloway 2005). For example, in relation to South Asian women, Avtar Brah has highlighted how the immigration and settlement of diverse immigrant populations has differently inserted them into the British nation and British economy (Brah 1996). ...
This article deploys an intersectional, transnational, and postcolonial approach to uncovering what is repressed and connoted in recent pronouncements that multiculturalism in Britain has failed and that it is time for Britain to return to a lost, indigenous, “active, muscular liberalism,” one that must now reassert its authority at home and abroad. To grasp what is at stake in calls for the reinvigoration of an active, muscular liberalism as simultaneously the indigenous personality and identity of not only the British “people” and nation, but indelibly of the West, they must be located within the history of British colonialism and its intersections with white, Western, imperial patriarchy. This article does so by explicating the intersections of gender, race, and class in the post-1945 double-inscription of metropole and colony in British liberalizing social reform and national reconstruction projects, symbolized by two major British government reports published in the 1940s. These are the Moyne Report (GBCO 1945), which shaped the transition of Britain's Caribbean territories from colonial to independent nations, and the Beveridge Report (Beveridge 1942), which shaped the modern British welfare state. What becomes apparent in both reports is how ethnically and racially differentiated categories of women were produced, targeted, and deployed in British metropolitan and colonial state discourses concerning the management of women and reform of racial rule at home and abroad.
... Nonetheless it qualified that the encouragement of girls in further education should take place 'if only to bring the numbers up to what they should be in subjects traditionally regarded as suitable for girls ' (1957White paper, quoted in Holloway 2005. Throughout the 1960s, however, most young women continued to enter work directly from school, and the number of women in training courses actually declined (Holloway 2005). ...
Second workshop presentation: McMullin, P. and Kilpi-Jakonen, E. (2015). The consequences of shifting education and economic structures for gender differences at labor market entry: The British case study.In: H.-P. Blossfeld, J. Skopek, M. Triventi, and S. Buchholz (Eds.), Gender, Education and Employment: An International Comparison of School-To-Work Transitions (2015). Cheltenham, UK/Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. http://edulife.eui.eu/Workshops/Reportonthe4theduLIFEworkshop.aspx
... Nonetheless it qualified that the encouragement of girls in further education should take place 'if only to bring the numbers up to what they should be in subjects traditionally regarded as suitable for girls ' (1957White paper, quoted in Holloway 2005. Throughout the 1960s, however, most young women continued to enter work directly from school, and the number of women in training courses actually declined (Holloway 2005). ...
INTRODUCTION
As outlined in Chapter 1 of this book, women’s educational attainment levels reached or even surpassed those of men in the latter half of the 20th century in most Western societies (Vincent-Lancrin 2009). Nevertheless, the gender wage gap still stands: Generally speaking, women earn less than their male counterparts (18 per cent at median earnings) in the UK (OECD 2012). This difference is often attributed to family formation. It is based on the assumption that, despite higher levels of investment in education, women will have to prioritize their families (at some point) during their career. The Women, Employment and Society Survey 1980 indicated that, on average, women in Britain spent 7 of the typical 8 years between leaving full time education and the birth of their first child working full time. This varies only slightly with level of education, because delay in first birth (due to longer periods in education) is not offset entirely by a shorter period in the labor force (Martin and Roberts 1984). This is a key period in understanding how women’s careers develop and how initial education contributes to their careers when family concerns may not necessarily be their first priority.
This chapter aims to explore vertical gender inequalities (using wages and CAMSIS scores) and horizontal gender differences (occupational field) in the first significant job an individual obtains after leaving initial education in Great Britain. It will also examine the role of educational pathways in
determining these differences. We use retrospective data from the BHPS to establish changes over time with respect to gender differences at labor market entry. Additionally we take a novel approach by following the youngest members of the British Household Panel Study in order to study education trajectories and labor market entry.
This article analyses how Labour women MPs championed the needs of ‘the housewife’ in parliament in order to improve the lives of women, especially working-class women, during the Attlee administration. Relying on personal experience to make their case, these women spoke as housewives, not just for housewives, using gendered experiences for political ends. This article examines how they applied the politics of housewifery to two specific contemporary economic challenges: the cost of living and the impact of taxation. In doing so, and in contrast to the established literature, it shows how far Labour women were prepared to challenge party and government policy on behalf of women. It thus contributes to historiographical debates about the Labour party’s relationship to consumerism and affluence as well as gender and austerity. Building on Brian Harrison’s influential study of interwar women MPs, it also responds to a recent call made by Miles Taylor in this journal for more attention to women as legislators in the post-war period. Methodologically, it emphasizes the benefits of qualitative analysis of ‘big data’ sources.
How did ideas of masculinity shape the British legal profession and the wider expectations of the white-collar professional? Brotherhood of Barristers examines the cultural history of the Inns of Court – four legal societies whose rituals of symbolic brotherhood took place in their supposedly ancient halls. These societies invented traditions to create a sense of belonging among members – or, conversely, to marginalize those who did not fit the profession's ideals. Ren Pepitone examines the legal profession's efforts to maintain an exclusive, masculine culture in the face of sweeping social changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilizing established sources such as institutional records alongside diaries, guidebooks, and newspapers, this book looks afresh at the gendered operations of Victorian professional life. Brotherhood of Barristers incorporates a diverse array of historical actors, from the bar's most high-flying to struggling law students, disbarred barristers, political radicals, and women's rights campaigners.
Travel occurs for many reasons, some not always obvious, and the intended purpose of a journey can have a significant influence on both the nature and experience of mobility. A journey may be undertaken to fulfil a particular commitment such as work or school; to visit a friend or relative; to go to a specific destination for a new experience; or simply to travel for the pleasure of the journey itself. Many journeys have multiple purposes. In this chapter, we use personal diaries to show how the reasons why travel was undertaken could influence the nature and experience of the journey. Much mobility, such as daily travel to work or to school, is routine and required. However, diary entries show that such travel could also be highly varied and, in some cases, complex, although the degree of detail that diarists provided for routine travel tended to decline over the period of a diary as a journey became less novel. We also consider discretionary travel: those journeys that people chose to undertake, perhaps for pleasure or for a perceived obligation. Travel for leisure and romance were prominent in this category, with long diary entries that variously reflected the pleasure and novelty of such travel.
Dans ses nouvelles, W. Somerset Maugham s’essaie à différents types de narration dont les traits stylistiques saillants peuvent être considérés comme caractéristiques de son écriture. Trois nouvelles en particulier portent sur l’évolution ambiguë du rôle des femmes entre la fin du dix-neuvième siècle et la deuxième guerre mondiale: “Daisy” (1896), “The Creative Impulse” (1926) et “The Colonel’s Lady” (1946). Abordant de manière volontairement oblique et partielle les succès et déboires de ses protagonistes, ces nouvelles s’attachent à montrer la difficulté qu’il y a à faire entendre la voix des femmes dans la sphère culturelle—que ces dernières soit créatrices ou consommatrices d’art et de littérature. L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser comment la construction des personnages et les techniques narratives habilement mises en œuvre dans ces textes permettent de dépasser les a priori victoriens autour des « New Women », de subvertir le principe de contrôle narratif masculin et de sensibiliser les lecteurs à l’émergence des femmes dans la sphère publique et politique.
In this essay, we offer a comparative analysis of women service workers in early cinema in Britain and the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s. Although this period has been the subject of much important scholarship in film history over the past several decades, women’s experiences as box office attendants, cashiers, cigarette girls, purveyors of ice cream and sweets, and especially as usherettes, constitute an under-researched field. Tracing the narratives surrounding women’s work in a wide variety of capacities in early cinema auditoriums can illuminate much about how women were perceived as employees and sexualized as objects of the gaze of male patrons, while, at the same time, acting as spectators and mediators with a privileged perspective on both the screen and the audience. In pursuing this line of inquiry, we draw not only on existing scholarship, but also on our own original research on industry journals, girls’ and women’s popular magazines, star and fan culture, and changing conditions for women’s labor and leisure in the interwar period.
For more than 100 years, tripe was one of the most popular foods in the Northwest of England. In 1920, independent tripe shops were amalgamated into the United Cattle Products (UCP). Using promotional advertising in local newspapers, this paper examines UCP’s tripe marketing strategies. To counter claims that tripe was unclean, ads stressed tripe’s attributes of purity, quality and freshness; nutrition; digestion; economy; timesaving; and taste. An examination of images reveals a message that tripe is cooked in middle-class homes by stay-at-home moms and enthusiastically eaten by white-collar fathers and children, so fulfilling working people’s aspirational social needs for a happy home and family. UCP’s advertising also connected tripe to higher order needs of self-esteem and actualisation by validating such moral qualities as perseverance and endurance, qualities especially espoused by people in the industrial Northwest as part of their work ethic. UCP finally closed in the 1990s. Ostensibly, its decline is linked to cheap industrial meats. But a deeper and more disturbing cause of tripe’s decline may lie in what can be seen as the constant and arguably unethical undermining of a community’s foodways by the prejudicial forces of disdain (social class stigmatisation), disgust (social control), and ridicule.
London’s working-class youth grew up in a city that in the 1960s began to move away from the London their parents had known during their own childhood. This chapter illustrates how the making of a post-Victorian Britain can be viewed as a project that took place and was materialised across a variety of social sub-systems, and it covers topics such as urban planning and the cultural life of cities. It reconstructs, firstly, the ways in which politicians and creatives formed a symbolic relationship between urban working-class youth and modern town planning, and in the process popularised a concept of urban modernism in the 1960s in which ordinary working-class kids had become “hopeful passengers” who were shifting London’s self-narrative from its role as the former hub of the British Empire into that of a world leader in terms of global teen and popular culture. Secondly, therefore, it looks at the impact of internal migration on London’s transformation into a global city known for cultural production, as well as the ways in which themes of new urban modernism, such as increasing physical mobility among working-class people, interacted with modern youth identities. Thirdly, this chapter introduces the reader to the rise and fall of the “Swinging London” narrative and discusses its role as the invention of a former imperial metropolis in a period which was dominated by the decline of the Empire. It describes how the city and its key actors, from local authorities to business owners, started to see London’s reinvention as a new weapon at a time when competition between global cities called for efficient city marketing, and examines the extent to which the new image of the capital interacted with its historical past.
Neurodevelopmental classifications and the collective idea of neurodivergence can be seen as a ‘moving target’. In our understanding, this means that it responds to the needs of society as well as potentially infinite neurological differences between humans. Therefore, rather than assume that neurodiversity exists according to the existing clinical categories of autism and related conditions (that are often centred around autism as the exemplary kind of neurodivergence), we leave the possibility open that there are other forms of difference that have yet to be defined. In the paper we explore how neurodiversity has been described as a collective property of brains, as we try to negotiate between us what it is to be human and how we can work together to ensure our flourishing and to alleviate suffering. We consider implications of this understanding of neurodiversity for autism research, and propose that we unpick the analogy between neurodiversity and biodiversity.
This article examines romance and social aspiration in British domestic magazine Woman’s Weekly during the interwar period. Between 1918 and 1939, Cinderella romance was the dominant fictional genre in Woman’s Weekly, which featured at least one complete story and one serial instalment in each weekly issue. These romances work through the social ambitions of the magazine’s target readers: lower-middle-class housewives on low incomes, who aspire towards class promotion. Assuming a social framework within which a woman’s status is determined by the status of her husband, and assuming a reading experience in which the heroine functions as the reader’s avatar, the social aspirations of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers emerge in the socio-economic status of the magazine’s fictional romance heroes. Surveyed using the ‘distant reading’ process pioneered by Franco Moretti, a sample of Woman’s Weekly Cinderella romances issued during 1918–19, 1928, and 1938–39 reveals shifts and complexities in these aspirations across the interwar period. Notably, these shifts and complexities reflect changes within Britain’s class system, and the assumed position of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers within it. Whilst Woman’s Weekly’s Cinderella romance fiction fulfils its target readers’ social aspirations in fantasy, the magazine’s lifestyle content promises to realize them in actuality, by supplying the products and behaviours associated with aspirational lifestyles. Showing how the anticipation and fulfilment of narrative resolution that underpins Cinderella romance narratives might shape one imaginary reader’s experience of reading Woman’s Weekly, I argue that it is the romantic promise of social elevation that attracts readers to the magazine, and ensures their long-term loyalty. The extent to which the magazine can fulfil this promise for real is, however, questionable.
This chapter explores sexual harassment as a workplace problem in both psychological and feminist research. It examines how the new normal of working lives, and shifts in ideals of the “good” worker, have shaped how sexual harassment is understood. Of particular importance is how neoliberal feminism, which primarily addresses professional and privileged women, dovetailed with initial traction of #MeToo. This chapter explores the complexities of intersectional power relations that are relevant for understanding less privileged women’s experiences of challenging sexual harassment. It focuses on how intersectional power relations can be minimised and obscured by recourse to women’s self-empowerment in postfeminist and neoliberal feminist discourse.
Combining feminist political economy and life-course perspectives, this mixed-methods study critically examines the extent to which extended working life policies take account of women’s experiences of paid and unpaid work. I explore how decisions to extend working life are shaped by gendered social structures and norms across the life course among women in the Newcastle Thousand Families Study, a UK early baby-boom birth cohort. Among this cohort of women currently transitioning into retirement, analysis of longitudinal survey data identifies a range of mid- and later-life factors that impact on the likelihood of women working beyond state-pension age. In-depth life-course interviews identify further complex and interacting gendered life-course experiences, not captured in the survey data, which act to necessitate, encourage, enable or constrain extended working. I conclude that, if women are to extend their working lives, ‘joined-up’ policies are required, addressing gendered inequalities across the life course.
Where are all the Women? An Analysis of Gender Disparity and the Lack of Female Participation in Automotive Design
This chapter identifies the importance of the wider royal family for the success of individual monarchical institutions, with a focus on Britain’s Queen consort. It argues that active contributions made by a whole family, displayed as being united behind the monarch, were of significant value in reinforcing positive perceptions of the monarchy and demonstrating its relevance to contemporary concerns. From the start, Queen Mary played an active leadership role in the Great War. She not only ensured a public understanding that her husband was supported by his immediate family in the war effort, but also took a lead in demonstrating to the British public that the Royal Family as a whole, not just the King, were both appreciative of and actively and practically engaged with the war effort. Emphasis is often put on the contributions of women suffrage activists to inspiring their sisters to come forward and work for victory. This chapter demonstrates that for a majority of women both in Britain and the Empire, it was the Queen who acted as a crucial leadership symbol for their war efforts. Queen Mary from the start, sought to depict herself as emblematic of British womanhood generally, and in backing up her husband’s efforts to engage directly with his army and navy, she thereby broadened the public profile and usefulness of the Royal Family both in Britain itself and throughout the Empire. This helped to provide a very positive image for the female ‘stay-at-homes’, showing that they too had a total involvement in the war effort even if they were not engaged in high profile activity such as becoming a nurse on the Front Line, or volunteering to work in munitions factories. The Queen’s apparently indefatigable efforts to involve British women in being ‘useful’ in war included more traditional work like caring for the wounded and raising funds for war-related good causes. But it also led her into taking active steps (aided by ‘Red’ Mary Macarthur) to assist working women in Britain, and to her involvement with the formalisation of women’s roles in the Army Auxiliary Corps, with the formation of Queen Mary’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps—giving it her name to mark her approval of its members and its efforts. This chapter thus provides an assessment of the contribution made by women who did not challenge the traditional stereotypes of femininity, and who felt supported and confirmed in their usefulness in war by the royal role model provided by Queen Mary.
This article first explores the layers of meaning woven into the intricate and colorful doilies handcrafted by Caribbean women immigrants to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, revealing the importance of these everyday material objects in Caribbean women’s critical practices of self-making in an often hostile racist environment. The author, the child of this generation of women, then proceeds to re-use these objects in her own critical re-reading and re-memorying practices, revealing the complex intersections and ambiguities of gender, race, class, nation, and empire in the post-war politics of “women’s work” in Britain.
In this chapter, I argue that integrating the rise of finance into Victorian literature courses allows students to recognize how literature captures abstract historical and economic shifts at the level of human experience, and to reflect critically on the literature using their own experiences with the modern credit economy. By discussing novels explicitly or implicitly engaged with the Victorian credit economy, I explore how connecting Victorian experiences of financialization to their effects in everyday life—from how people lived and worked to the ways in which rationalization and calculation affected their understanding of their social world—makes finance a crucial topic in the literature classroom.
This article uses archive research, which brings together programme reconstruction and institutional and biographical research, to look at Stephens’ role in leading the expansion of women’s programmes, and to examine available traces of the difficult professional negotiations encountered in her attempts to broaden the range and quality of programmes that addressed women. Further, the article highlights the crucial importance of feminist archiving policies in ensuring both the preservation of women’s programmes and developing critical histories of television for women.
This essay attempts to contribute to the study of gender and development by developing a systematic theory of the division of work between men and women in the global North and the global South. There is an extensive literature on women's work and development; this literature consists of rich case studies that do not attempt to identify general principles that apply to women's work as a whole. In formal employment settings, women are most likely to be excluded from settings where employers are buffered from labor costs and do not have to utilize cheap labor. In the global North, this means settings that are capital-intensive, where raw material and machinery costs reduce the importance of wage costs in total budgets. In the global South, petroleum lowers the importance of wage costs, promoting male employment, while export orientation increases the importance of cheap labor, promoting female employment. Family firms and female self-employment have their own dynamics, which are discussed.
This chapter is the first of two historical sociology chapters that use genealogy to historicize the meanings of freedom, Black British identity and Black womanhood presented in the previous chapters. As an ontology of the present, the aim of these two chapters is to identify the conjunctures informing the changing temporalities of what we have identified as liberal-colonial governmentality, as it has targeted and sought to shape African Caribbean women as both subjects of freedom and subjects of British liberal-colonial rule—that is, racial governmentality. These two chapters also reveal the double articulation of the colonial relation in which British ideas of freedom, race, gender and citizenship have been elaborated and reformed within a colonial circulation of power, interests and influence, in which the interests of the metropole and the colonies have been mutually dependant. The insights gained from this long view will then be used in the remaining chapters to assist in reframing our understanding of the present defined by neoliberal conceptions of freedom, and the postcolonial legacies of empire in contemporary multicultural Britain. This chapter addresses the post-war period of mass immigration of Caribbean people to Britain, focusing on the immigrant woman rather than the immigrant man, who for a long time was the central figure of the immigrant in British migration discourse. The chapter explores the role of post-war social policy across the British Empire and within Britain, Reading the Moyne Report in the mid-twentieth-century articulations of patriarchal racial rule and British liberal nation-building, in which the status of women, gender relations and the family were central to modernizing welfare reforms and the management of ‘race’ at home and abroad.
In 1908 the newspaper Votes for Women published a poem written by Winfred Auld, entitled ‘The Fighting Suffragist to the Frightened Politician’. In the first of seven stanzas, Auld pointedly observed that during a period of 60 years suffragists had ‘fought a quiet campaign’ in which they had ‘Petitioned humbly for their rights’—but to no avail. The remaining verses amounted to a statement of intent: women had had enough of the government’s empty pledges, there was ‘but one thing left to do—To fight.’
The pressures of both World War I and World War II made the British Post Office a central concern in national politics. Yet this development has received little attention in the historiography of the Post Office or the British state. The demands of war and expectations for service from individuals living in a consumer society raised questions as to how to improve technology and infrastructure to satisfy these divergent needs. The Post Office’s position as a department within the Civil Service meant that debates over the nature of technology, and the levels of spending required to sustain and improve Post Office services inevitably led to heated discussions concerning the practicalities of increased spending during the economic downturns of the 1920s and 1930s, and the subsequent pre-war planning period from 1937. This article will explore these issues by examining the nature of the Government-Post Office relationship in this period, and trace how the relationship evolved to accommodate the growing needs of the domestic and wartime economy. It will show the growing centrality of the Post Office to the nation’s communications planning. Moreover, it will demonstrate how a mixture of new technology, and an adaptation of working practices helped it adapt to both the peacetime economy of the 1920s, and the pressures of the World War II.
From its beginnings in 1923, the BBC employed a sizeable female workforce. The majority were in support roles as typists, secretaries and clerks but, during the 1920s and 1930s, a significant number held important posts. As a modern industry, the BBC took a largely progressive approach towards the ‘career women’ on its staff, many of whom were in jobs that were developed specifically for the new medium of broadcasting. Women worked as drama producers, advertising representatives and Children’s Hour Organisers. They were talent spotters, press officers and documentary makers. Three women attained Director status while others held significant administrative positions. This article considers in what ways it was the modernity and novelty of broadcasting, combined with changing employment possibilities and attitudes towards women evident after the First World War, that combined to create the conditions in which they could excel.
In February 1915, Home Office pathologist, Dr Bernard Spilsbury, conducted a post-mortem on the body of a man who had been poisoned while employed in the manufacture of the explosive, trinitrotoluene (TNT). Dr Thomas Legge, Medical Inspector of Factories, who was present at the post-mortem, concurred with Spilsbury’s conclusion that the man’s death was due to a form of toxic jaundice, liver disease caused by exposure to TNT.1 Most contact with this substance however took place, not in the manufacture of TNT, but in munitions factories, where large numbers of women were employed in filling explosive shells. Legge began investigating whether similar cases of liver disease had occurred amongst these workers and by the summer of that year had identified 46 such cases, including two deaths.2 Toxic jaundice was immediately designated a notifiable disease, requiring cases to be officially reported to the Home Office. By the end of 1918 a further 430 cases, of which 111 were fatal, had been recorded.3
Throughout the twentieth century there was a significant decline in the number of women employed in agriculture in Britain and although the WLA temporarily replenished their numbers, the transitory nature of the organisation was part of a larger trend in agriculture that both preceded and followed the war. The loss of women from the countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the result of the undervaluation of women in the farming industry and the belief that women could find better employment opportunities in the towns and cities.1 The loss of women from the land was especially prevalent in areas where primogeniture persisted.2 The decreasing number of women employed in farming does not mean that women ceased to play an integral part in farm life. In the early twentieth century family farms were labour intensive, and with a shrinking domestic market and agricultural labour force, hiring outsiders was unprofitable. With decreased hiring of both men and women, the farmer’s female relatives were called upon to fill the labour gap.3 Their work, however, was constrained to a narrow range of jobs, including feeding animals, caring for the household and children, and operating some machinery that had traditionally been operated by men. While the work of female relatives expanded in the early twentieth century, it typically remained within the realm of female domestic duties.
The achievements of female suffrage on equal terms with men, women’s entry into parliament, local government and at all levels of the work force, including professions, such as law and medicine, meant that when the first issue of Woman was published in June 1937 women’s public presence as citizens was already evident. The novelty of female entry into what, until the first decades of the twentieth century, had been predominantly a masculine public realm did not pass unnoticed in the commercial press, and from the early 1920s women’s achievements in sports, the arts, and government, as well as the latest innovations in female dress, were regularly splashed across the media, including newspapers and magazines.
This chapter will deal with the long, complex trajectory of women’s waged and unwaged work. Studies show that women have historically provided for their families and the family economy to a considerable degree. As a high IMR coincided with northern women’s introduction to industrialisation, contemporaries made, and historians have continued to make, strong connections between women’s work and a high infant mortality rate, with particular emphasis being placed on the culpability of factory work.
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