Twentieth Century British History最新文献

The twentieth century saw substantial changes in the educational and occupational opportunities available to women in Britain. These may have been supposed to foster new patterns of female mobility. Yet studies of women's intergenerational mobility are rare and tend not to focus on education. This article develops a historically informed gauge of educational attainment-the Educational Cohort Code (ECC). Applying that gauge to the experiences of women in twentieth-century UK, we make two key claims: first, that despite the prevalence of narratives of progress and mobility in individual and collective accounts of women's education, there were considerable intergenerational continuities in women's educational status across the period. Second, that the expansion of educational opportunities across the twentieth century had a differential impact for women and for men and that this differentiation destabilizes categorizations of class solely based on male occupational hierarchies. By applying the ECC method to family data, rather than focusing only on individuals, the article identifies trends within families and the possible influence of family cultures of education and employment on intergenerational mobility.

Of late, historians of twentieth-century Britain have made increasing use of archived material from sociological research. Such use is examined in the case of the Affluent Worker study. It is argued that established historiographical practice needs to be maintained, and careful consideration given to the provenance and purposes of the documentary material that is drawn upon-with close reference to the context, objectives, and design of the original research. So far as the Affluent Worker study is concerned, such a consideration has not always been adequate, and with untoward consequences. Further, where, as with the Affluent Worker study, the original research was of a survey-based, quantitative kind, serious methodological differences regarding data analysis can arise. These become most apparent where the re-use of the relics of such research is aimed at qualifying the conclusions of its authors or at critically 'deconstructing' the research processes in which they were involved.

The literature on the role of women in the First World War, and the war's effect on gender roles, considers conservative and socialist feminism, the expansion of the franchise in 1918 and 1928, and state welfare policies. However, there has been less work on the women of the Left who participated in the war effort, and who used nationalism to push for socialist and feminist objectives. These women have been understudied for various reasons: as women, they were often disregarded by military and political historians, and as enablers a conflict they have usually been overlooked by historians of gender and of the Left. This article is concerned with these women, and examines the extent, nature and significance of their participation within the war effort and their use of nationalism to advance socialist and feminist objectives. It analyses how their actions during the conflict affected the gender, class and political frameworks of the time, both in the lead-up to the Representation of the People Act 1918, and in the first years of female enfranchisement. Based on extensive use of the files of the War, Emergency: Workers' National Committee and on the publications of the labour and co-operative movements, it argues that a substantial section of the female labour movement articulated a sense of British nationalism in the years during and after the First World War, utilized this to advance their political, economic, and feminist objectives, and in doing so challenged political orthodoxy and prevailing gender roles.