You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Work on the miners' Lock-Out of 1926 tends to focus on the perspective of the National Union of Mineworkers, while nothing has been written which attempts to examine, for example, how miner's wives coped for six months without pay. This book investigates the Lock-Out from the perspective of gender relations.
This woman-centered history of Britain in the 20th century traces the changing concept of femininity in different chronological time periods. Women are focused on as agents for social change, and each chapter has a section on the women's movement. A separate chapter is devoted to each of the World Wars. After reviewing women's progress over the last hundred years, the book explores the question: Have women gained equality?
During the Second World War over 1.5 million of women found themselves thrust into a male working world, having to learn new skills within a matter of weeks. Their contribution to the war effort often remains unheralded, but it is without doubt that these women played a central role in an Allied victory. Kathleen Church-Bliss and Elsie Whiteman were two such women, who volunteered for war work and after a training course in engineering found themselves in an aircraft components factory. Thrown into a whole new world of industrial work, they kept a joint diary providing a unique insight into life in a wartime factory. It tells the tale of the poor conditions suffered on the factory floor, as well as the general disorganisation and bad management of this essential part of the war effort. They also describe how war work opened up a whole new world of social freedom for many women. This diary, tragic and humorous, brings women's war work vividly to life.
This book offers a detailed examination of the interaction between socialism and feminism through the lens of one particular socialist organisation, the Communist Party of Great Britain, from its foundation in 1920 until the outbreak of the Second World War. The study of socialism and feminism in the CPGB can be divided into four major areas – the party’s concept of socialism and the role of women in a future society; the party’s relationship to the feminist movement; the work of the party in relation to specific women’s issues; and how the sexual division of labour operated within the party. The author here defines and explains the socialist and feminist traditions in Britain and describes the ways in which they interacted, both at the level of theory and of practice. Sources from party press and reports to interviews with party members and non-party written and oral evidence and accounts feed into this thorough chronological treatment which outlays the changes within the CPGB during the 1920s and 30s in relation to feminism.
The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a particular set of economic and social circumstances in which women were unequally treated in the home, the workplace and in culture and wider society. As part of the WLM, women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society, making their concerns apparent through consciousness-raising and activism. This important time in women’s history is revisited in this collection, which looks afresh at the diversity of the movement and the ways in which feminism of the time might be reconsidered and historicised. The contributions her...
This study explores the meaning of class to women's liberationists' identities and activism, both nationally and regionally, using a previously neglected feminist cluster in North East England as a case study. Stevenson demonstrates that British feminism was shaped fundamentally by its relationship to class politics. Feminists recognised how post-war changes in the economy and gender roles were reshaping class and the Women's Liberation Movement attempted to remake class politics in response. However, class differences between the women involved, linked to occupation, education and background, remained intractable obstacles causing tensions within groups, fragmentations into specific class-based groups and the ultimate failure of the movement to coalesce into a coherent coalition with labour politics, despite great levels of solidarity around particular struggles.
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Women's Activism and "Second Wave" Feminism situates late 20th-century feminisms within a global framework of women's activism. Its chapters, written by leading international scholars, demonstrate how issues of heterogeneity, transnationalism, and intersectionality have transformed understandings of historical feminism. It is no longer possible to imagine that feminism has ever fostered an unproblematic sisterhood among women blind to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality and citizenship status. The chapters in this collection modify the "wave" metaphor in some cases and in ...
The Second World War is often seen as a period of emancipation, because of the influx of women into paid work, and because the state took steps to relieve women of domestic work. This study challenges such a picture. The state approached the removal of women from the domestic sphere with extreme caution, in spite of the desperate need for women’s labour in war work. Women’s own preferences were frequently neglected or distorted in the search for a compromise between production and patriarchy. However, the enduring practices of paying women less and treating them as an inferior category of workers led to growth in the numbers and proportions of women employed after the war in many areas of work. Penny Summerfield concludes that the war accelerated the segregation of women in 'inferior' sectors of work, and inflated the expectation that working women would bear the double burden without a redistribution of responsibility for the domestic sphere between men, women and the state. First published in 1984, this is an important book for students of history, sociology and women’s studies at all levels.
Combining evidence from primary research, with an emphasis on personal testimony, with work of specialist scholars in social, economic, political and cultural history, this study examines the changing meaning of femininity within the broad historical time periods of the 20th century. Each chronological chapter maps out developments for women at work, in the family, sexuality, education, feminism and other political movements.
In The Women and Men of 1926 Sue Bruley recounts the social history of the mining communities in south Wales during the 1926 lockout. Relying on hitherto unpublished oral testimony as well as other archival material, Bruley investigates how households coped with the lockout and assesses the impact that it had on gender relations. Individual chapters consider topics such as school canteens, miners' lodges, recreational activities, picketing, and politics.