1
MA CONTEMPORARY BRITISH HISTORY
GENDER AND BRITISH SOCIETY 1900- c1950.
Useful introductions and general surveys
Ina Zweininger-Bargielowska ed. Women in Twentieth Century Britain (2001)
Martin Pugh Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914-1999 ( 2nd edn 2000).
Harold L. Smith The British Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1866-1928 (1998)
Sue Bruley Women in Britain since 1900 (1999).
Krista Cowman Women in British Politics, c. 1689-1979 (2010) .
E.Breitenbach and P. Thane eds Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the
Twentieth Century. What Difference did the Vote Make? (2010)
The women’s movement before 1914
Sandra Stanley Holton Feminism and Democracy.Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics
in Britain, 1900-1918. (1986).
Suffrage Days. Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
Martin Pugh The March of the Women. A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for
Women’s Suffrage, 1866-1914. (2000).
Laura E. Nym Mayhall The Militant Suffrage Movement. Citizenship and Resistance in
Britain, 1860-1930.(2003).
June Purvis Emmeline Pankhurst (2002).
Julia Bush Women Against the Vote. Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain.(2007).
Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage (1978).
June Hannam and Karen Hunt Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s. (2002)
M.Boussahba-Bravard ed. Suffrage Outside Suffragism. Women’s Vote in Britain, 18801914.
Jill Liddington and Jill Norris One Hand Tied Behind Us : The Rise of the Women’s
Suffrage Movement.(1978) Focusses on working class women.
Pat Thane ‘The social, political and economic status of women, 1900-1914’ in Paul
Johnson ed. Twentieth Century Britain. Economic, Social and Cultural Change.1994),
94-110.
Tickner, Lisa, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914
(1987). Beautifully illustrated analysis of suffragist use of spectacle.
Crossing the pre and post 1918 periods:
June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton eds Votes for Women (2000)
Laura E.Nym Mayhall The Militant Suffrage Movement. Citizenship and Resistance in
Britain, 1860-1930. (2003). Doesn’t include much after 1918.
Amanda Vickery ed. Women, Privilege and Power. British Politics 1750 to the Present.
(2002).
2
Selected Comparative Studies
Gisela Bock Women in European History ( 2002).
Richard J.Evans The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933(1976)
RJ Evans The Feminists . Comparative essays.
Nancy C. Cott The Grounding of Modern Feminism ( 1987). USA
S. Koven and S.Michel eds. Mothers of a New World. Maternalist politics and the
Origins of Welfare States (1993).Essays on a number of European Countries, US and
Australia.
Gisela Bock and Pat Thane Maternity and Gender Policies. Women and the Rise of the
European Welfare States, 1880s -1950s (1991).
G. Duby and M. Perrot A History of Women in the West . Vol V. Towards a Cultural
Identity in the 20th century. (1994). Essays on a number of countries.
For reference:
Crawford, Elizabeth, The women’s suffrage movement - a reference guide 1866-1928
(1999)
Olive Banks The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists. Vol 1. 1800-1930(1985).
Topics for Reading and Discussion.
Assess the impact of World War One on Gender Relations.
M.R Higonnet et al eds Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1987) Essays
on a number of countries.
R.Wall and J. Winter eds. The Upheaval of War. Family, Work and Welfare in Europe,
1914-18. (1988) includes a number of essays on the experience of women and other
important related topics.
B. Melman Borderlines. Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930 (1998)
another collection of comparative essays.
G. Braybon and P. Summerfield Out of the Cage. Women’s Experiences in Two Wars
(1987) .
Angela Woolacott On Her their Lives Depend. Munitions Workers in the Great
War.(1994)
Sylvia Pankhurst. The Home Front. A contemporary account by a feminist socialist.
J.M.Winter The Great War and the British People , for the wider context.
S.Kingsley Kent Making Peace:The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain ( 1993)
Braybon, Gail, Women Workers in the First World War: The British Experience (1981)
Gould, Jenny, ‘Women’s Military Services in First World War Britain’ in M. Higonnet and
J. Jenson (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and The Two World Wars (1987), 114125
Grayzel, Susan R., ‘ “The Outward and Visible Sign of her Patriotism”: Women, Uniforms
and National Service during the First World War’, Twentieth Century British
History 8 (1997), 145-164
3
Lomas, Janis, ‘ “Delicate Duties”: Issues of Class and Respectability in Government Policy
Towards the Wives and Widows of British Soldiers in the Era of the Great War’,
Women’s History Review 9 (2000), 123-146
Pedersen, Susan, ‘Gender, Welfare and Citizenship during the Great War’, American
Historical Review 95 (1990),
Thom, Deborah, ‘Women’s Employment in War-Time Britain’, in Richard Wall and jay
Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War (1986).
Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (1998)
Did the women’s movement decline in inter-war Britain?
Adrian Bingham Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-war Britain.(2004)
Sex,Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918-1978(2009).
Cheryl Law Suffrage and Power. The Women’s Movement , 1918-28.(1997).
Martin Pugh Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914-99.( 2nd edition, 2000).
Harold Smith ed. British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (1990)
J. Alberti Beyond Suffrage. Feminists in War and Peace. 1914-28 (1989)
O. Banks The Politics of British Feminism ,1918-70 (1993)
B. Harrison Prudent Revolutionaries. Portraits of British feminists between the Wars.
(1987)
D. Spender There’s Always been a Women’s Movement this Century. (1983).
S. Kingsley Kent ‘The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War One and the Demise of
British Feminism’ Journal of British Studies ,27, July 1988
Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Inter-war Britain (1993)
Pamela M. Graves Labour Women. Women in British Working Class Politics, 1918-1939
(1994)
See essay by Pat Thane in HL Smith ed., above, on Labour Party women in this period;
and essays in Koven and Michel eds ( above) and Bock and Thane eds, below.
Pat Thane ‘Women, liberalism and citizenship, 1918-1930’. in E. Biagini ed. Citizenship
and Community. Liberals, radicals and collective identities in the British Isles, 18651931. (1996)
‘What Difference did the Vote Make?’ in A. Vickery ed. Women, Privilege and
Power. British Politics, 1750 to the Present’. (2001)
D.Jarvis ‘” Behind Every Great party”: Women and Conservatism in Twentieth-Century
Britain’. In A. Vickery (above).
Maggie Andrews The Acceptable Face of Feminism .The Women’s Institute as a Social
Movement.(1997).
O. Banks Faces of Feminism. A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (1981)
Becoming a Feminist. Social origins of First-wave Feminism (1986)
Alberti, Johanna, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914-28 (1989). A study
of fourteen feminists active in politics in the 1920s and their different perspectives
Bartley, Paula, Votes for Women, 1860-1928 (1998)
Beaumont, Caitriona, ‘Citizens not Feminists: The Boundaries Negotiated between
Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women’s Organisations in England,
1928-29’, Women’s History Review 9 (2000)
Caine, Barbara English Feminism (1997), ch. 4
4
Cook, K. and Evans, N., ‘“The petty antics of the bell-ringing boisterous band”? The
women’s suffrage movement in Wales, 1890-1918’, in Angela V. John, ed., Our
Mothers’ Land: Chapters in Welsh Women’s History, 1830-1939 (1991),
Dyhouse, Carol, ‘The British Federation of University Women and the Status of Women in
Universities, 1907-1939’, Women’s History Review 4 (1995), 465-485
Dyhouse, Carol, ‘Driving Ambition: Women in Pursuit of a Medical Education, 18901939’, Women’s History Review 7 (1998), 321-343
Dyhouse, Carol, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939 (1995)
Harrison, Brian, ‘Women’s suffrage at Westminster, 1866-1928’, in M. Bentley and J.
Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain: Ten Studies (1983), 80122
Hilton, Matthew, ‘The Female Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in TwentiethCentury Britain’, Historical Journal 45 (2002), 103-128
Hirshfield, Claire, ‘A fractured faith: Liberal Party women and the suffrage issue in Britain,
1892-1914’, Gender and History 2.2 (1980), 173-97
Jones, Helen, Women in British Public Life, 1914-50: Gender, Power and Social Policy
(2000)
King, Elspeth, “The Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement,” in Esther Breitenbach and
Eleanor Gordon, ed., Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society, 1800-1945 (1992),
121-150
Contemporary writing:
R. Strachey The Cause (1928)
E. Rathbone The Disinherited Family (1924).
Vera Brittain Testament of Youth ( a middle class woman’s experience of the first world
war)
Testament of Experience (her experience of the interwar years)
Winifred Holtby South Riding a novel of this period by a friend of Vera Brittain
Chew, Doris Nield, ed., Ada Nield Chew: The Life and Writings of a Working Woman
(1945)
Hall, Ruth, ed., Dear Dr Stopes: Sex in the 1920s (1978)
Were there significant changes in British women’s life experiences in the 1920s and
30s?
Alison Light Forever England. Feminity, Literature and Conservatism between the
Wars.(1991)
B. Melman Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs.
Miriam Glucksmann Women Assemble. Women and factory work in the 1930s.
Carol Dyhouse No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939.(1995).
Sally Alexander Becoming a Woman (1994) Essays on 19th and 20th c women’s history.
Women’s Co-operative Guild Maternity. Letters from Working Women. (1915). On
conditions of child-bearing and child-rearing
Life as We Have Known it (1931). More testaments of working class women.
Both of the above ed. by Margaret Llewellyn Davies.
5
M. Spring-Rice Working Class Wives (1939) Survey of the health conditions of working
class women.
C. Dyhouse Feminism and the Family in England. 1880-1939. (1989)
E. Roberts Women’s Work 1840-1940
A. John ed. Unequal Opportunities.Women’s Employment in England 1800-1918(1986)
Jane Lewis Women in England 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change. (1984).
M.Vicinus Independent Women.Work and Community for Single Women, 18501920.(1985).
J. Lewis ed. Labour and Love .Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940
(1986).
B. Caine Destined to be Wives. The Sisters of Beatrice Webb. (1986)
Carl Chinn They Worked all their Lives . Women of the Urban Poor in England, 18801939 (1988). Uses oral histories.
E. Roberts A Woman’s Place. An Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890-1940
(1984).
Ellen Ross Love and Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London 1870-1918 (1993).
E. Gordon and E. Breitenbach The World is Ill-divided. Women’s work in Scotland in the
19th and 20th centuries. (1990)
Out of Bounds. Women in Scottish Society. 1800-1945.(1992).
Hera Cook The Long Sexual Revolution. English Women, Sex and Contraception, 18001975.(2004).
Kate Fisher Birth control, sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960. (2006).
Selina Todd Young Women, Work and Family in England, 1918-1950(2005).
Alexander, Sally, ‘Becoming a Woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s’, in David
Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Metropolis London (1989), 245-271 ; also
in her Becoming a Woman (1994)
Brooke, Stephen, ‘ “A New World for Women”: Abortion Law Reform in Britain during
the 1930s’, American Historical Review 106 (2001), 431-459
Bourke, Joanna, ‘Home: Domestic Spaces’, in her Working Class Cultures in Britain, 18901960 (1994), 62-97
Clapson, Mark, ‘Working-Class Women’s Experiences of Moving to New Housing Estates
in England since 1919’, Twentieth-Century British History 10 (1999), 345-365
Giles, Judy, ‘A Home of One’s Own: Women and Domesticity in England, 1918-1950’,
Women’s Studies International Forum 16 (1993), 238-53
Giles, Judy, ‘Help for Housewives: Domestic Service and the Reconstruction of
Domesticity in Britain, 1940-50’, Women’s History Review 10 (2001), 299-323
Giles, Judy, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900-50 (1995)
Glucksmann, Miriam, ‘In a Class of their Own? Women Workers in the new Industries in
Inter-war Britain’, Feminist Review 24 (1986), 7-37
Glucksmann, Miriam, Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in
Inter-War Britain (1990)
Glucksmann, Miriam A., “Some Do, Some Don’t (But in Fact They All Do Really); Some
Will, Some Won’t; Some Have, Some Haven’t: Women, Men, Work, and Washing
Machines in Inter-War Britain,” Gender and History 7 (1995), 275-294
6
Hatton, Timothy J. & Roy E. Bailey, ‘Women’s Work in Census and Survey, 1911-1931’,
Economic History Review 54 (2001), 87-107
Hughes, Ann, and Karen Hunt, ‘A Culture Transformed? Women’s Lives in Wythenshawe
in the 1930s’, from Andrew Davies and Steven Fielding, eds., Workers’ Worlds:
Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880-1939 (1992), 74-101
Lambertz, Jan, ‘The Hidden Economy of Dockland Families: Liverpool in the 1930s’, in
Pat Hudson and W.R. Lee, eds., Women’s Work and the Family Economy in
Historical Perspective (1990), 271-290
Savage, Mike, ‘Trade Unionism, Sex Segregation, and the State: Women’s Employment in
“New Industries” in Inter-War Britain’, Social History 13 (1988), 209-30
Spender, Dale, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century(1983)
Willmott, Phyllis, Growing Up in a London Village: Family Life between the Wars (1979)
Annmarie Hughes ‘Representations and counter-representations of domestic violence on
Clydeside between the two world wars’ Labour History Review, August 2004, 169-183.
‘Fragmented feminists? The influence of class and political identity in
relations between the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society and the Independent
Labour Party in the West of Scotland, c.1919-1032.’ Women’s History Review.(2005) pp. 731.
Louise Jackson Women Police . Gender, welfare and surveillance in the twentieth
century.(2006).
The Impact of World War 2.
Background reading: Calder, Angus, The People’s War, 1939-45 (1969)
Hayes, Nick & Jeff Hill, eds. Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War
(1999).
Carruthers, Susan L., ‘“Manning the Factories”: Propaganda and Policy on the Employment
of Women, 1939-1947’, History 75 (1990), 232-256
Day, Ann, ‘The Forgotten “Mateys”: Women Workers in Portsmouth Dockyards, 1939-45’,
Women’s History Review 7 (1998)
De Groot, Gerard J., ‘ “I love the scent of cordite in your hair”: Gender Dynamics in Mixed
Anti-Aircraft Batteries during the Second World War’, History (1997), 73-92
Gubar, Susan, ‘“This is my Rifle, This is my Gun”: World War II and the Blitz on Women’
in M. Higonnet and J. Jenson (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and The Two World
Wars (1987), 227-259
Hinton, James, ‘Voluntarism and the Welfare/Warfare State: Women’s Voluntary Services
in the 1940s’, Twentieth-Century British History 9 (1998), 274-305
Langhamer, Claire, ‘ “A public house is for all classes, men and women alike”: Women,
Leisure and Drink in Second World War England’, Women’s History Review 12
(2003), 423-443
Minns, Rayne, Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front, 1939-45 (1980)
Riley, Denise, ‘The free mothers: pronatalism and working mothers in industry at the end of
the last war in Britain’, History Workshop Journal 11 (1981), 59-118
Riley, Denise, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and the Mother (1983)
Smith, Harold L., ‘The Effect of the War on the Status of Women’, in Smith, ed., War and
Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (1986)
7
Sokoloff, Sally, ‘ “How are they at home?”: Community, State and Servicemen’s Wives in
England, 1939-45’, Women’s History Review 8 (1999)
Summerfield, Penelope, ‘Women, Work and Welfare: A Study of Child Care and Shopping
in Britain in the Second World War’, Journal of Social History 17 (1983), 249-270
Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives. Discourse and subjectivity in oral
histories of the second world war. (1998).
‘Women, War and Social Change: Women in Britain in World War II’, in Arthur
Marwick, ed., Total War and Social Change (1988)
Women Workers in the Second War (1984).
And Corinna Peniston-Bird, ‘Women in the Firing Line: The Home Guard and the
Defence of Gender Boundaries in Britain in the Second World War’, Women’s
History Review 9 (2000), 231-255