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This book draws upon original research into women's workplace protest to deliver a new account of working-class women's political identity and participation in post-war England. Focusing on the voices and experiences of women who fought for equal pay, skill recognition and the right to work between 1968 and 1985, it explores why working-class women engaged in such action when they did, and it analyses the impact of workplace protest on women's political identity. A combination of oral history and written sources are used to illuminate how everyday experiences of gender and class antagonism shaped working-class women's political identity and participation. The book contributes a fresh understanding of the relationship between feminism, workplace activism and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985.

From 1865 to 1945, a number of prominent marriages united American heiresses and members of the British aristocracy. In Informal Ambassadors, author Dana Cooper examines the lives and marriages of the American-born, British-wed Lady Jennie Jerome Churchill, Mary Endicott Chamberlain, Vicereine Mary Leiter Curzon, Duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, and Lady Nancy Astor. This cohort of women surprised their families - both British and American - by exhibiting an extraordinary degree of agency in a period that placed women solidly outside the boundaries of politics and diplomacy. Without the formal title of diplomat or membership in Parliament, these women nonetheless exerted significant influence in the male-dominated arena of foreign affairs and international politics. As the wives of leading members of the British aristocracy, they had uncompromised and unlimited access to the eyes and ears of individuals at the highest level in Great Britain - the very decision makers who formulated and implemented foreign policy with their home country. Collectively and individually, these informal ambassadors worked to improve relations at the turn of the twentieth century, and by no coincidence, the United States and Great Britain began to view one another less as adversaries and more as allies. Combining diplomatic history with gender and women's history, Informal Ambassadors demonstrates not only that could women act as transnational envoys at a time when they could not apply for State Department employment but that they influenced Anglo-American relations to a degree never before considered by historians.

This book is the first archive-based account of the charged debates around race in the women's movement in England during the 'second wave' period.Examining both the white and the Black women's movement through a source base that includes original oral histories and extensive research using feminist periodicals, this book seeks to unpack.

Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

This Book Explores the Contribution that five conservative, voluntary and popular women's organisations made to women's lives and to the campaign for women's rights throughout the period 1928-64. The five groups included in this study are: the Mothers' Union, the Catholic Women's League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women's Institutes and the National Union of Townswomen's Guilds. The book challenges existing histories of the women's movement that suggest the movement went into decline during the inter-war period only to be revived by the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s. It is argued that the term 'women's movement' must be revised to allow a broader understanding of female agency encompassing feminist, political, religious and conservative women's groups who campaigned to improve the status of women throughout the twentieth century. Housewives and citizens provides an analysis of the way in which these five voluntary women's organisations adopted the concept of democratic citizenship, with its rights and duties, to validate their demands for reform. Their involvement in a number of campaigns relating to social, welfare and economic rights is explored and assessed. The book provides a radical reassessment of this period of women's history and in doing so makes a significant contribution to on-going debates about the shape and the impact of the women's movement in twentieth-century Britain. The book is essential reading for those interested in modern British history, voluntary action and the history of the women's movement. Book jacket

Charlotte Stopes was the first woman in Scotland to get a university qualification. She devoted her life to studying Shakespeare and the promotion of women in public life. Though Charlotte is largely forgotten, her daughter Marie is well known. Green asserts that Marie's success can only be understood in relation to the achievements of her mother.

The period between the publication in 1957 of the liberalising Wolfenden Report and the introduction in 1987 of the homophobic Section 28 was characterised by unprecedented optimism and political activism among lesbians and gay men in Britain. But the law and its shortcomings never determined their whole political and cultural agenda and Radical Records explores the diverse and sometimes conflicting attempts of lesbian and gay people to build a new world for themselves and those they loved. The contributors recount their own personal narratives of how they struggled to re-define their identities, to explore non-traditional expressions of intimacy, to reclaim public spaces, to engage with the HIV epidemic, to build alliances and, generally, to make radical transformations of their lives. The re-issue of this important work, first published in 1988, gives its readers an opportunity to re-visit that turbulent time through the voices of its participants. 1. Introduction 2. Battling for Wolfenden 3. Scotland: Against the Odds 4. Memoirs of an Anti-Heroine 5. A Community of Interests 6. Coming to Terms 7. Separatism: A Look Back at Anger 8. Faltering From the Closet 9. The Importance of Being Lesbian 10. Living on the Fringes – in More Ways than One 11. Oi! What About us? 12. ‘Irrespective of Race, Sex, Sexuality…’ 13. Voices in my Ear 14. The Liberation of Affection 15. Amnesia and Antagonism: Anti-Lesbianism in the Youth Service 16. Lesbian Mothers: The Fight for Child Custody 17. Parrot Cries 18. Normal Channels 19. The Should We, Shouldn’t We? Debate 20. One Step to Heaven 21. Somewhere over the Rainbow 22. No Going Back ‘A stimulating criss-crossing of history and biographies.’ - Mary McIntosh

The continuing under-representation of women in political and public life remains a matter of concern across a wide range of countries, including the UK and Ireland. Within the UK it is a topical issue as political parties currently debate strategies, often controversial, which will increase women's representation. At the same time, devolution has ushered in significant change in the level of women's representation in Scotland and Wales and improved representation for women in Northern Ireland. That such increases in women's representation in political institutions have been slow in coming is indisputable, given that full enfranchisement of women on equal terms with men was achieved in Ireland in 1921 and in the UK in 1928.

This original and exciting book examines the processes of nation building in the British West Indies. It argues that nation building was a more complex and messy affair, involving women and men in a range of social and cultural activities, in a variety of migratory settings, within a unique geo-political context. Taking as a case study Barbados which, in the 1930s, was the most economically impoverished, racially divided, socially disadvantaged and politically conservative of the British West Indian colonies, *Empire and nation-building* tells the messy, multiple stories of how a colony progressed to a nation. It is the first book to tell all sides of the independence story and will be of interest to specialists and non-specialists interested in the history of Empire, the Caribbean, of de-colonisation and nation building.