Homes, food and domesticity: rethinking the housewife in twentieth century Britain

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, Sarah Crook’s important analysis of the challenges of balancing parenting during the pandemic: Sarah Crook, ‘Parenting During the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020: Academia, Labour and Care Work’, Women’s History Review 29, (2020): 1226–38.

2 For a recent, helpful overview of this historiography, see: June Purvis, ‘‘A Glass Half Full’? Women's history in the UK’, Women’s History Review 27 (2018): 88–108.

3 Ann Oakley, Housewife (London: Penguin, 1974); The Sociology of Housework (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).

4 Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Maternity: Letters from Working-Women (London: Virago, 1978);

Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women (London: Virago Modern Classics Edition, 2012).

5 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987).

6 See for example Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998 and 2015); Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women's Movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Karen Hunt, ‘Negotiating the Boundaries of the Domestic: British Socialist Women and the Politics of Consumption’, Women's History Review 9 (2000): 389–410; Gillian Scott, Feminism, Femininity and the Politics of Working Women: The Women's Co-Operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War (London: Routledge, 2005); Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

7 See for example Susan Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Karen Hunt, ‘A Heroine at Home: The Housewife on the First World War Home Front’, in The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences Since 1914, eds. Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (London: Palgrave, 2013), 73–91; Jennifer Purcell, Domestic Soldiers: Six Women's Lives in the Second World War (London: Constable, 2011); Sonya O. Rose, Which People's War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

8 See for example: Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (London: Berg, 2004); Clare Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Post-War Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005), 341–63; Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

9 Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race and National Identity 1945–64 (London: Routledge, 1998).

10 See for example Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions (London: Routledge, 2003); Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009); Maggie Andrews, Domesticating the Airwaves: Broadcasting, Domesticity and Femininity (London: Continuum, 2012).

11 Emine Saner, ‘Deborah Haynes's Son Charlie Went on TV to Ask for 'Two Biscuits'. Did He Ever Get Them?’ Guardian, December 17, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/17/deborah-haynes-son-charlie-went-on-tv-to-ask-for-two-biscuits-did-he-ever-get-them (accessed September 26, 2023).

12 Crook, ‘Parenting During the Pandemic’, 1232; see also Jocalyn Clark, ‘How Pandemic Publishing Struck a Blow to the Visibility of Women’s Expertise’, The British Medical Journal 381 (2023): 778 https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj.p788.short

13 Charlotte Wildman and Eloise Moss, ‘Challenging Domesticity in Britain, 1890–1990’, Women’s History Review 32 (2023): 445–54.

14 Wildman and Moss, ‘Challenging Domesticity’, 446.

15 Maggie Andrews, ‘Worcestershire’s Women: Local Studies and the Gender Politics of the First World War and its Legacy’, History 104 (2020): 851–70.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maggie Andrews

Maggie Andrews is emeritus professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester. Her work covers the social and cultural history of twentieth century Britain and a key focus of her research is domesticity and femininity. She is the author of a range of publications including a feminist history of the Women's Institute movement, The Acceptable Face of Feminism (Lawrence and Wishart, 2015), Domesticating the Airwaves, (Continuum, 2012) and Women and Evacuation in the Second World War Femininity, Domesticity and Motherhood, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Janis Lomas

Janis Lomas is an Independent Researcher and previously worked as a Social and Women's Historian at the University of Birmingham. She has written several books with Maggie Andrews including Widows: Poverty, Power and Politics (History Press, 2020); Hidden Heroines: the Forgotten Suffragettes (Robert Hale, 2018); and A History of Women in 100 Objects (History Press, 2018).

Anna Muggeridge

Anna Muggeridge is Lecturer in History at the University of Worcester. Her work explores women’s political activism at the local level. Her doctorate examined women’s activism in the Black Country and she is currently researching a history of women in local government in interwar England and Wales.