Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900-50, explores the meanings and experience of home and private life for women who grew up in England before 1950. It considers the extent to which class, suburbanisation and historical moment as well as gender constructed women's understanding of domesticity, and discusses the part played by conceptions of home and private life in the shaping of identities. Oral narratives, fiction, autobiography and diaries are used in conjunction with psychoanalytic, linguistic and historical explanations of women's lives to map a psychological as well as a social history of women's relationship to the home in the early part of this century.
This title explores the meanings and experience of home and private life for women who grew up in England before 1950. It considers the extent to which class, surburbanization and historical moment as well as gender constructed women's understanding of domesticity, and discusses the part played by conceptions of home and private life in the shaping of identities. Oral narratives, fiction, autobiography and diaries are used in conjunction with psychoanalytic, linguistic and historical explanations of women's lives to map a psychological as well as a social history of women's relationship to the home in the early part of the 20th century.
This fascinating account of young women's lives challenges existing assumptions about working class life and womanhood in England between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the 1950s. Selina Todd uses extensive oral histories and autobiographical material.
The new histories of love and romance offered within this edited collection illustrate the many changes, but also the surprising continuities in understandings of love, romance, affection, intimacy and sex from the First World War until the beginning of the Women's Liberation movement.
Fathers are often neglected in histories of family life in Britain. Family Men provides the first academic study of fathers and families in the period from the First World War to the end of the 1950s. It takes a thematic approach, examining different aspects of fatherhood, from the duties it encompassed to the ways in which it related to men's identities. The historical approach is socio-cultural: each chapter examines a wide range of historical source materials in order to analyse both cultural representations of fatherhood and related social norms, as well as exploring the practices and experiences of individuals and families. It uncovers the debates surrounding parenting and family life and tells the stories of men and their children. While many historians have examined men's relationship to the home and family in histories of gender, family life, domestic spaces, and class cultures more generally, few have specifically examined fathers as crucial family members, as historical actors, and as emotional individuals. The history of fatherhood is extremely significant to contemporary debate: assumptions about fatherhood in the past are constantly used to support arguments about the state of fatherhood today and the need for change or otherwise in the future. Laura King charts men's changing experiences of fatherhood, suggesting that although the roles and responsibilities fulfilled by men did not shift rapidly, their relationships, position in the family, and identities underwent significant change between the start of the First World War and the 1960s.
Health and the Modern Home explores shifting and contentious debates about the impact of the domestic environment on health in the modern period. Drawing on recent scholarship, contributors expose the socio-political context in which the physical and emotional environment of "the modern home" and "family" became implicated in the maintenance of health and in the aetiology and pathogenesis of diverse psychological and physical conditions. In addition, they critically analyze the manner in which the expression and articulation of medical concerns about the domestic environment served to legitimate particular political and ideological positions.
Women have been important contributors to and readers of magazines since the development of the periodical press in the nineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, millions of women read the weeklies and monthlies that focused on supposedly "feminine concerns" of the home, family and appearance. In the decades that followed, feminist scholars criticized such publications as at best conservative and at worst regressive in their treatment of gender norms and ideals. However, this perspective obscures the heterogeneity of the magazine industry itself and women’s experiences of it, both as readers and as journalists. This collection explores such diversity, highlighting the differing and at times contradictory images and understandings of women in a range of magazines and women’s contributions to magazines in a number of contexts from late nineteenth century publications to twenty-first century titles in Britain, North America, continental Europe and Australia.
Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain is the social history of the last century through the eyes of those who served. From the butler, the footman, the maid and the cook of 1900 to the au pairs, cleaners and childminders who took their place seventy years later, a previously unheard class offers a fresh perspective on a dramatic century. Here, the voices of servants and domestic staff, largely ignored by history, are at last brought to life: their daily household routines, attitudes towards their employers, and to each other, throw into sharp and intimate relief the period of feverish social change through which they lived. Sweeping in its scope, extensively researched and brilliantly observed,Servants is an original and fascinating portrait of twentieth-century Britain; an authoritative history that will change and challenge the way we look at society.
This first major study of girls' health in modern Britain explores how debates and advice on healthy girlhood shaped ideas about the lives of young women from the 1870s to the 1920s, as theories concerning the biological limitations of female adolescence were challenged and girls moved into new arenas in the workplace, sport and recreation.
Ideal homes investigates the tastes and aspirations of the suburban communities that emerged in Britain after the First World War. It explores how new class and gender identities were forged through the architecture and decoration of the home. This edition includes a chapter on researching the history of your own house.
