Book Review: Brazil in the Global Nuclear Order, 1945–2018 by Carlo Patti

Abstract

methodology overall, approaching personal testimony as core evidence rather than supplementary source material. Nevertheless, a strength of the book is its ability to incorporate other modes of evidence, for example sociological studies, alongside women’s life stories. Worth’s aspiration – to move beyond an approach to women’s oral history that emphasises subjectivity and the ascription of meaning to memory – is valuable, yet it renders the author somewhat invisible in the creation of the oral history evidence on which the book is based. After all, oral history is an intersubjective process, where evidence is created in dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee. Where Worth does place herself into the text, she does so with grace, for example elucidating how she did not set out to explore the welfare state per se, with the theme instead emerging organically in interview after interview. Any discussion regarding the British welfare state is inherently political and this perspective is also echoed in EveWorth’s book, in which she states that women’s life experiences are inherently politicised. The Welfare State Generation is a thoroughly British history, which provides food for thought at a time when welfare provisions are once again at the top of the political agenda. Worth does not place developments in the UK into dialogue with broader global changes of the post-war era, instead astutely choosing to delve into one country’s past in an in-depth manner. This important work will hopefully inspire similar studies in other national contexts, enabling broader comparisons between welfare states and the generations of people who have built and benefitted from them.