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‘[Go] behind the glamorous shop fronts and the glitzy shop floors of Britain’s department stores... Here the hidden history is revealed.’ Saga Magazine Meet the shopgirls and hear their incredible true stories of life behind the counter. In this lively and colourful history, we join shopgirl Chili Bouchier on her journey from the small ladies’ department at Harrods to star of the silver screen, and experience the raw courage of John Lewis’ Miss Austin during the Blitz in the West End. We follow Margaret Bondfield as she goes undercover, fiercely championing the rights of her fellow shopgirls; and stand alongside the impoverished interwar chain store assistants who stole stockings to supplement their meagre wages. And we celebrate with the art school entrepreneurs who kick-started the boutique movement of the swinging ’60s and made the shop floor their own. Here, these wonderful tales of friendship, hardship and triumph are revealed as never before. For fans of nostalgic history and memoir, including Call the Midwife; Mollie Moran's Aprons and Silver Spoons; and The Sugar Girls
Mike Moore's insight as Director-General of the World Trade Organization contributes to the globalization debate.
Published to tie in with the forthcoming BBC series, Shopgirls is a nostalgic, sweeping history full of the life stories of the women behind the counters of Britain's most famous -- and not so famous -- stores. Shopgirls should be heroines, as celebrated as steelworkers in the Industrial Revolution. A million of us were shop assistants by the turn of the twentieth century and since then retail has grown exponentially to become Britain's largest area of economic activity. But the young women at the heart of this economic and cultural revolution, the shop assistants themselves, have largely been ignored. Shopgirls will tell the story of the lives of the girls who have worked behind the counters of our nation's shops from the drapery stores of the 1860s when young women's employment outside the home was taking off, through the Edwardian era's tumultuous social upheavals, two world wars and all the way to the working class revolution of the 1960s and the shock of the Biba bombing. This lively and ambitious book sets out to uncover the shopgirls' life stories, work cultures and economic contributions in a way never done before.
In this highly readable and illuminating book, Anne Louise Booth looks at the status of society women during the Victorian period, the expectations and limitations they faced, and the ways in which these norms were challenged and boundaries were pushed.
"First published in 2014 by the Penguin Group"--Title page verso.
The Real Ireland is the first study of Irish documentary film, but more than that, it is a study of Ireland itself--of how the idea of Ireland evolved throughout the twentieth century and how documentary cinema both recorded and participated in the process of change. More than just a film studies work, it is a discussion of history, politics and culture, which also explores the philosophical roots of the documentary idea, and how this idea informs concepts of society, self and nation. It features rare and previously unseen illustrations and a detailed documentary filmography, the first of its kind in print anywhere.
Underneath the dreaming spires of Oxford’s world-famous university, generations of women have lived their lives, fighting for the right to study there, and for a role within the city’s educational, political and social spheres. Although a few of these women’s names have been recorded for posterity, they have been largely because of their association with worthy or famous men; in this book, though, their own lives are detailed, along with those who have been largely omitted from history. Women’s lives have always been less recorded than those of men; where a woman helped her husband with his business, this help may not have been formally recorded in the census returns, and the details...
This book serves as an introduction to the extraordinary diversity of women’s activism. Paula Bartley's original research is supported by a range of writing to provide a powerful impression of the actions taken by groups of women from across the social and political spectrum, making the book invaluable to both students and interested readers. These women set out to make a difference to their locality, their country and sometimes the world. The story of women’s activism embodies stimulating accounts of progress and reversals, of commitment and uncertainty, of competing rights and challenging wrongs. The story of women’s activism is not tidy or well-ordered. It is messy and unorthodox. And full of surprises.
“A unique and inherently fascinating history that brings a particular aspect of the role of women in law enforcement up out of obscurity.” —Midwest Book Review The 1857 Divorce Act paved the way for a new career for women: that of the private detective. To divorce, you needed proof of adultery—and men soon realized that women were adept at infiltrating households and befriending wives, learning secrets and finding evidence. Over the course of the next century, women became increasingly confident in gaining work as private detectives, moving from largely unrecognized helpers to the police and to male detectives, to becoming owners of their own detective agencies. In fiction, they were...
This book examines the performance of ‘Britishness’ on the musical stage. Covering a tumultuous period in British history, it offers a fresh look at the vitality and centrality of the musical stage, as a global phenomenon in late-Victorian popular culture and beyond. Through a re-examination of over fifty archival play-scripts, the book comprises seven interconnected stories told in two parts. Part One focuses on domestic and personal identities of ‘Britishness’, and how implicit anxieties and contradictions of nationhood, class and gender were staged as part of the popular cultural condition. Broadening in scope, Part Two offers a revisionary reading of Empire and Otherness on the musical stage, and concludes with a consideration of the Great War and the interwar period, as musical theatre performed a nostalgia for a particular kind of ‘Britishness’, reflecting the anxieties of a nation in decline.