Abstract
This ‘long weekend’ of British history witnessed many important shifts towards contemporary society. But there was a sense in which the First World War could not be left behind. The individual and collective mourning, visible everywhere in human grief and stone memorials, were the outward signs of a society which could never quite come to terms with the trauma of the so-called Great War. Historians are still assessing the impact of the war on British society. Recently, Susan Kingsley Kent has put new emphasis on the paramount need to reassert traditional gender differences after their apparent blurring during the duration of the conflict.1 This has led to a vigorous debate about the nature of ‘new’ feminism in these years. It is apparent, however, that ‘first wave’ feminism as a mass movement was dead, but feminist issues were still doggedly pursued by a dedicated group of predominantly middle-class women.
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Notes and References
S. Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
See, for example: M. Hewins, After the Queen; Memories of a Working Girl (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1985);
E. Chamberlain, 29 Inman Road (London: Virago, 1990);
P. Willmott, Growing Up in A London Village: Family Life Between the Wars (London: Peter Owen, 1979);
W. Foley, A Child in the Forest (London: BBC, 1974);
R. Gamble, Chelsea Child, an Autobiography (London: BBC, 1979);
M. Wade, To the Miner Born (Stocksfield, Northumberland: Oriel, 1984);
M. Powell, Below Stairs (London: Peter Davies, 1968).
Published as M. Spring Rice, Working Class Wives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939).
R. Hall (ed.), Dear Dr Stopes: Sex in the 1920s (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). This volume also includes letters from men.
For example: E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women 1890–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984);
D. Gittins, Fair Sex, Family Size and Structure, 1900–1939 (London: Hutchinson 1982);
M. Glucksmann, Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-war Britain (London: Routledge, 1990);
P. Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
D. Beddoes, Back to Home and Duty (London: Pandora, 1989) p. 48.
M. Kozak, Women Munition Workers during the First World War, with Special Reference to Engineering (Hull: PhD Thesis, University of Hull, 1976) p. 365.
D. Thom, Women Munition Workers at Woolwich Arsenal in the 1914–1918 War (MA Thesis: University of Warwick, 1975) pp. 123–7.
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I. Clephane, Towards Sex Freedom (London: John Lane, 1935) pp. 200–1.
S. Bruley, Leninism, Stalinism and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1920–1939 (New York: Garland Press, 1986).
S. Bruley, ‘Gender, Class and Party, the Communist Party and the Crisis in the Cotton Industry between the Two World Wars’, Women’s History Review, vol. 2, no. 1, 1993, pp. 86–7.
The exception is A. Hutt, The Post-War History of the British Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1937).
A. Deacon, In Search of the Scrounger (London: Bell, 1976) p. 82.
This topic is explored in more detail in S. Bruley, ‘A Woman’s Right to Work? The Role of Women in the Unemployed Movement between the Wars’ in S. Oldfield (ed.), This Working-Day World, Women’s Lives and Culture(s) in Britain 1914–1945 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994).
N. Branson and M. Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (London: Collins Panther, 1973, first published 1971), p. 126.
T. Davy ‘“A Cissy Job for Men; A Nice Job for Girls”: Women Shorthand Typists in London, 1900–1939’ in L. Davidoff and B. Westover (eds) Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words: Women’s History and Women’s Work (London: Macmillan, 1986) p. 142.
H. Keane, Deeds Not Words: The Lives of Suffragette Teachers (London: Pluto, 1990), see Chap. 7.
A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London (Allen and Unwin: London, 1973) p. 159.
J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain 1900–1950 (London: Macmillan, 1995) p. 24.
P. Ayers and J. Lambertz, ‘Marriage Relations, Money and Domestic Violence in Working Class Liverpool, 1919–39’ in J. Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love, Women’s Experience of Home and Family 1850–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
O. Banks, Faces of Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) pp. 183–4.
M. Stopes, Married Love (London: A. Fifield, 1918) p. 50.
S. Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985) p. 120.
S. Humphries, A Secret World of Sex (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988) p. 65.
J. Weeks, Coming Out, Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977) p. 109, pp. 107–11 has an account of the trial.
For details see S. Cline, Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (London: John Murray, 1997).
B. Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) p. 7.
E. Rathbone, Disinherited Family (first published 1924, Falling Wall Press edition: Bristol, 1986) p. 147.
V. Bryson, Feminist Political Theory (London: Macmillan, 1992) p. 105; also see next reference.
J. Lewis, Women in England 1970–1950 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1984) p. 104.
H. Smith, ‘British Feminism in the 1920s ’ in H. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990) p. 60.
W. Holtby, Women (London: John Lane, 1934) p. 146.
E. Summerskill, A Woman’s World, Her Memoirs (Heinemann: London, 1967) p. 61.
Quoted in J. Alberti, Eleanor Rathbone (London: Sage, 1996) p. 96.
For details see S. Bruley, ‘Women against War and Fascism; Communism, Feminism and the People’s Front’ in J. Fyrth (ed.), Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985).
P. Hollis, Ladies Elect, Women in English Local Government 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) p. 478.
M. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood (New York: Putnam, 1920) p. 7.
For details see D. Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, My Quest for Liberty and Love (Virago: London, 1977), Chap. 9, and P. Graves (1994), Chap. 3.
P. Fryer, The Birth Controllers (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965) p. 263.
See S. Rowbotham, A New World for Women: Stella Browne - Socialist Feminist (London: Pluto, 1977).
J. Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace 1914–1928 (Macmillan: London, 1989) p. 197.
M. Joannou, ‘Ladies Please Don’t Smash These Windows’: Women’s Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918–1938 (Berg: Oxford, 1995), see Chap. 1.
V. Woolf, Three Guineas (first published 1938; Oxford: Oxford University Press edition 1992) p. 313.
S. Bruley (1980) p.251 and J. Liddington, Selina Cooper, The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel (London: Virago, 1984) pp. 410–11.
For details see International Brigade Archive at the Marx Memorial Library, London. Also J. Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain: The Aid Spain Movement in Britain 1936–39 (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1986).
L. Manning, A Life for Education, An Autobiography (London: Gollancz, 1970) Chap. X.
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© 1999 Sue Bruley
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Bruley, S. (1999). A New Femininity, 1919–1939. In: Women in Britain since 1900. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27743-8_4
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