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"Women -- Employment -- Great Britain -- History"
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Women's work
Women's Work challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour, informed the lives and writing of a number of middling and genteel women authors publishing between 1750 and 1830. This book provides a particularly rich, yet largely neglected, seam of texts for exploring the vexed relationship between gender, work and writing. The four chapters that follow contain thoroughly contextualized case studies of the treatment of manual, intellectual and domestic labour in the work and careers of Sarah Scott, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and women applicants to the writer's charity, the Literary Fund. By making women's work visible in our studies of female-authored fiction of the period, Batchelor reveals the crucial role that these women played in articulating debates about the gendered division of labour, the (in)compatibility of women's domestic and professional lives and the status and true value of women's work that shaped eighteenth-century culture as surely as they shape our own.
eBook
Eve in overalls : women at work in the Second World War
\"First published in 1942, Eve in Overalls highlights the huge contribution made by women to the war effort - from air-raid wardens, signallers, electricians and drivers, to roles in the Navy, Air Force and territorial services. Eve in Overalls reflects a time when women in the workplace were viewed with curiosity and fascination, and the style and language can seem amusing, sometimes shocking, to readers today. This is a fascinating and eye-opening insight into the dedicated and hardworking women who helped Britain win the war.\"-- Back cover.
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Women Workers in the First World War
Commentators writing soon after the outbreak of the First World War about the classic problems of women's employment (low pay, lack of career structure, exclusion from \"men's jobs\") frequently went on to say that the war had \"changed all this\", and that women's position would never be the same again.
This book looks at how and why women were employed, and in what ways society's attitudes towards women workers did or did not change during the war. Contrary to the mythology of the war, which portrayed women as popular workers, rewarded with the vote for their splendid work, the author shows that most employers were extremely reluctant to take on women workers, and remained cynical about their performance. The book considers attitudes towards women's work as held throughout society. It examines the prejudices of government, trade unions and employers, and considers society's views about the kinds of work women should be doing, and their \"wider role\" as the \"mothers of the race\". First published in 1981, this is an important book for anyone interested in women's history, or the social history of the twentieth century.
Companion volumes, Women Workers in the Second World War by Penny Summerfield, and Out of the Cage: Women's Experiences in Two World Wars by Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, are also published by Routledge.
eBook
Programmed inequality : how Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing
In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. Marie Hicks's Programmed inequality explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user - the civil service and sprawling public sector -- to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Programmed inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field has grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.
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Women and Work in Britain since 1840
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.
1. Introduction 2. ‘Fit Work for Women’ Working Class Women and Paid Work in the Mid Nineteenth Century 3. The Problem of the ‘Superfluous Women’ 4. Women Organizing: Trade Unions and Other Industrial Organizations 5. Equal or Different? Divisive Issues in the Industrial Women’s Movement 6. Women’s Work Before the First World War 7. Out of the Cage? Women’s Experience of Work During the First World War 8. Women’s Work in the Interwar Period 9. Women’s Employment in World War Two: Continuity or Change? 10. Back to Home and Duty again? 11. Women’s Employment in the 1950s and 1960s 12. Women’s Work in the Age of Equal Opportunities: 1969 to the End of the Century 13. Women’s Work since the 1840s. Appendix 1: Chronology of Important Dates. Appendix 2: Brief Biographies of Some Key Women
Gerry Holloway is a lecturer in Life History and Women's Studies at the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Sussex. She has written extensively on women’s history and the feminist movement and is on the Committee of the Women’s History Network.
eBook
Women, work and the Victorian periodical : living by the press
\"Covering a wide range of magazine work by women, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry. The common thread running through the chapters is the question of how women negotiated the relationship between their public and private selves. Quite often, that relationship turns out to be one of tension and contrast. In order to generate an income, women constructed fictional identities and voiced norms and ideals to which they themselves did not always adhere. Restoring a voice to overlooked authors and adopting new perspectives towards canonical figures, this book traces the different ways in which these women reinvented themselves in the press and addresses the various circumstances that led them to do so\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Bound by Our Constitution
What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British.
Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges preconceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state--and a momentum for public policy--unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy.
eBook
Working lives : gender, migration and employment in Britain, 1945-2007
Full of unique and compelling insights into the working lives of migrant women in the UK, this book draws on more than two decades of in-depth research to explore the changing nature of women's employment in post-war Britain.
* A first-rate example of theoretically located empirical analysis of labour market change in contemporary Britain
* Includes compelling case studies that combine historical documentation of social change with fascinating first-hand accounts of women's working lives over decades
* Integrates information gleaned from more than two decades of in-depth research
* Revealing comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in the lives of immigrant working women in post-war Britain
* Features real-life accounts of women's under-reported experiences of migration
eBook
Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century
Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries between domestic and fine art production, they crafted subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private, artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour and creativity in the period. Ultimately, how women faced the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations, trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related art-industries reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to professional artistry.
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