Challenging domesticity in Britain, 1890-1990: special issue introduction

ABSTRACT

The idealisation of the home and its centrality to women and children’s roles was central to British culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As much historical scholarship has noted, a powerful vision of home as a place of refuge, privacy and cosy family life shaped how the British state, the press, and popular culture conceptualised domesticity, dictating the dominant representations of home life across the twentieth century. However, the introduction highlights the limitations to the existing research and, for instance, historians know relatively little about how the home functioned as a site of conflict, poverty, and fear. It explains how this Special Issue complicates concepts of domesticity in modern British historical scholarship by exploring the ways in which groups and individuals manipulated or subverted meanings of ‘home,’ using domestic space for activities that subverted the very concept of home life. Part of an AHRC funded Network, Challenging Domesticity in Britain, 1890-1990 (Ref AH/S010289/1), this collection of original research brings together new ways of thinking about domestic space historically. It shows that historians need to take the issues associated with home and domesticity more seriously, not just as a place of shelter but as a site of action and agency.

As historian Elizabeth Roberts stated in her influential oral history of women and families, 1940-1970, ‘the image of home is a powerful one, the ideal is cherished but the reality does not accord with the image; nor is the image constant … Home remained, however, the stage on which the lives of families, and more particularly that of women and children, were played out.’¹ For Roberts, the home provided a particularly emotive and influential space that shaped and facilitated women’s roles and family life as well as producing tensions, discord and problems – especially when the romanticised notion of ‘home’ was not necessarily achieved. The idealisation of the home and its centrality to women and children’s roles was certainly not new and it gained greater influence in British culture by the mid to late-twentieth century. For example, writing in 2005, Claire Langhamer argued the meaning of ‘home’ became strongly associated with a privatised family life and as ‘a place of relaxation, freedom, peace and privacy’ in mid-twentieth century Britain.² Langhamer cites one Mass Observation respondent who reported in 1942 that ‘a happy home and family life is the bulwark of a Nation.’³ This powerful vision of home shaped how the British state, the press, and popular culture conceptualised domesticity, dictating the dominant representations of home life across the twentieth century.⁴ However, we still know far less about how the home functioned as a site of conflict, poverty, and fear, despite some valuable work on domestic violence and abuse.⁵ More specifically, we know little about how these pervasive cultures of domesticity could be subverted or manipulated for a range of activities and behaviours. There has been little consideration of how women, especially, used the home in ways beyond that of homemaker and parent. Scholarship has also tended to overlook how the home could function as a site or facilitator where individuals could subvert domestic ideology for criminal and deviant behaviours, activism, and entrepreneurship. For example, how and in what ways could the home’s associations with privacy aid illegal activities? How could women’s roles in the home foster particular types of activism or protest and what the implications of this?

We address some of these questions through this Special Issue, which emerged from the Arts and Humanities Council funded network, Challenging Domesticity in Britain, 1890-1990 (Ref AH/S010289/1). It explores the important theme of domesticity and points to new ways of understanding how women in a range of contexts and through a variety of case studies shaped, rebuffed and disrupted cultures of the home in ways that challenged, exploited or disrupted their ascribed social roles. In doing so, we build on recent work that has begun to addresses individuals’ agency and engagement with their living space, such as Deborah Sugg Ryan’s account of interwar suburban modernism, which contends that ‘the meaning of objects is not just formed at the site of production but also throughout their lives by users.’⁶ This collection of articles complicates concepts of domesticity in modern British historical scholarship by exploring the ways in which groups and individuals manipulated or subverted meanings of ‘home,’ using domestic space for activities that subverted the very concept of home life.⁷ By drawing attention to the variety of ways in which women and those with whom they shared their homes utilised domestic space to challenge mainstream domestic ideology in Britain during the twentieth century, the authors in this Special Issue aim to rethink how we conceive of concepts such as private space, gender roles, and women’s abilities to navigate the inequalities they experienced. This includes: looking at the way homes were used as a cover for or facilitator of criminal activity; considering domestic space as a productive site for fostering and fuelling women’s activism; analysing the curative or rehabilitative qualities of the home; and exploring the domestic as a transient and fluid (rather than static) space. The authors in this issue therefore propose a shift away from the scholarly concentration on aspirational ideals of domesticity to explore the multiple roles and contradictory meanings of domestic space.

This Special Issue encompasses the three thematic strands that underpinned the Challenging Domesticity Network: the criminal home; the radical or activist home; and the home and wellbeing. In doing so, we asked whether it was possible to redefine the meaning of ‘home’ during the period 1890-1990. The articles presented here all share an approach that sees domesticity as less of a defined space or structure, but as a set of ideas and behaviours, some of which were deemed to be desirable, and others unwelcome or ‘deviant’. At the same time, they all conceive of domesticity as a fluid or slippery category and demonstrate that ‘home’ could be found and made, and unmade, despite the potentially debilitating presence of work or poverty or other risks. bell hooks’ landmark 1990 essay explained that the meaning of home and domesticity was different for women who had experienced white supremacism: ‘Despite the brutal reality of racial apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanisation, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts, despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.’⁸ hooks’ powerful and moving declaration of why and how we should see the home as a crucial facilitator for Black women’s resistance provides a fruitful framework for us British historians looking to domestic space to understand its importance in other historical contexts and as a method for marginalised groups to redress inequities and mobilise against oppression. As we shall see, home mattered to inhabitants in different ways, but historians of modern Britain need to take seriously its function in helping to improve inhabitants’ lives beyond that of material living standards.

Our first thematic concern centred on the criminal home and the role of domestic space in shaping, enabling and providing cover for criminal activity. Here, we build on important research using crime scene photography by Network contributors Alexia Neale and Amy Bell, as well as our own scholarship on burglary and on working-class women’s offences that highlight the ways in which crime was usually presented an deviation or abnormality in contrast to the ordinary safety of the home.⁹ For instance, Neale’s analysis of images taken during homicide investigations in twentieth-century London demonstrates how cultural expectations around homes and the idealisation of domesticity were central to the framing and narratives around the alleged offences, writing that ‘a crime scene photograph could be read for evidence of conformity with or deviation from expected social and gendered roles.’¹⁰ Building on this approach, we are interested in subjects that appear incongruous to the dominant interpretations of domesticity. Here, we are keen to understand domestic space as an agent rather than a backdrop in constructing criminal behaviours. For instance, we explore how some domestic settings enabled or facilitated certain offences and consider class and regional variations in shaping cultures of domesticity. We contend that idealised domestic culture was reinforced in the portrayal of domestic space in the criminal justice and reformatory systems, which influenced the harsher treatment of female offenders who were seen to have deviated from their ascribed social roles.

Second, our discussions focussed on the radical home as a method to analyse the relationship between domestic space and activism. We were especially interested in understanding the home as a site, a facilitator, and motivator of political and non-political activism and in considering the role of region, race, and ethnicity in shaping forms of protest. This approach reflects a wider shift amongst historians that focus on activism as emerging from everyday and locally constituted forms of protest and agitation, activities brought together a range of community groups, residents associations, and other social movements. For example, Kennetta Hammond Perry’s crucial analysis of the impact of the racist murder of Kelsy Cochrane in London 1959 in mobilising anti-racist protest demonstrates how the collective mourning around Cochrane’s death inspired condemnation of the British state’s failure to protect Black citizens. Consequently, argues Perry, ‘the visual politics surrounding Kelso Cochrane’s murder narrated a story that focused on a lived existence rooted in the mundane, and in many ways universally aspirational imagery associated with what it meant to belong as a citizen and upstanding member of society.’¹¹ This notion of citizenship has proved especially fruitful for understanding the nature of women’s activism, such as scholarship by Network contributor Caitriona Beaumont on domesticity and the interwar women’s movement, which argues for a more inclusive understanding of the ways in which conservative voluntary women’s organisations campaigned to improve women’s participation in national and local politics.¹² More recently, histories of the women’s suffrage campaign have stressed the importance of thinking about women’s activism as being a product of their personal and domestic worlds. Network contributor Lindsey Jenkins’ research on the Kenney sisters, for example, demonstrates that we need to pay greater attention to the role of family life and sibling relationships in understanding the commitment they made to campaigning for the vote.¹³ Similarly, Tania Shew’s research on sex and marriage strikes and Anna Muggeridge’s account of the link between child welfare and suffrage movements in Walsall, both demonstrate that we need to undertake a broader understanding of the meaning of women’s activism and explore a wider range of spaces and contexts through which women campaigned because the home and family life could be central to their radicalism.¹⁴ By bringing histories of the suffrage campaign into conservation with histories of later twentieth century activism by marginalised women’s groups, we suggest that there are important continuities in how women collectivised, and urge historians to take a wider conceptual approach towards the role of the domestic spaces that produced, enabled and shaped women’s activism.¹⁵

Finally, our third thematic concern addressed the influence of domestic ideology as a form of care or as providing a curative response to social and medical problems. Here, we build on a body of scholarship that explores reformatory and residential homes, asylums and settlement houses as forms of care through their physical design, material objects, decorations, and aesthetics that challenges traditional assumptions about these institutional spaces as being oppositional to domestic space.¹⁶ In our collaborative interdisciplinary research with legal scholar Ruth Lamont, we have explored the bonds of care between vulnerable children and charitable institutions engaged in emigration and rescue work, analysing their belief that training homes in Britain and the receiving homes in Canada should have a redemptive and moralising impact on their inhabitants.¹⁷ Other current work has drawn on a history of emotions methodology to explore policies of probation and the rehabilitation of offenders, as well as interrogating the deployment of nature as a therapeutic response to cultivate ‘wellbeing’ within a range of quasi-domestic settings.¹⁸ Yet this important work tends to focus on articulating middle-class visions of domesticity and care with less attention towards how working-class inhabitants responded to these curative strategies. This collection of articles draws these historiographical strands together but also considers the challenges of employing the curative home as a response to social problems. It demonstrates that ideas of what constituted a ‘healthy’ or curative home could vary in definition but that the belief in the home as a primary site of care remained constant across our case studies and time periods.

This collection of articles therefore explores the ways in which domesticity was challenged, resisted, and remade in Britain, 1890-1990. We take our conceptual approach from the work of cultural geographers Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, who draw on a range of cultural theoretical texts relating to space, gender and class (including the work of bell hooks and Doreen Massey), to highlight the fluidity of the meaning of home. They argue that ‘home is both a place/physical location and a set of feelings … home is both a material dwelling and it is also an affective space.’¹⁹ Blunt and Dowling understand ‘home’ and domestic space as potentially contradictory – in circumstances involving domestic violence, in the hostility experienced by traveller communities, or in the squatter movement – their framework helps to conceptualise the relational importance of home as a combination of setting and affect, in ways that can be fleeting, conflicting, or problematic. At the same time, our theoretical framework seeks to understand the multiple meanings of domesticity to diversify and expand our understandings of domesticity, locating its potential for challenging domestic culture. Indeed, the notion of an idealised vision of domesticity has been dominated by white, middle-class, middle England concepts of home, as our opening paragraph suggests. Massey’s own critique of dominant concepts of home highlighted the problem with its over-focus on associations with ‘belonging, identity and security’ and noted the fear that emerged ‘when the geography of social relations forces us to recognize our interconnectedness.’²⁰ This collection of essays pushes the concept of domesticity in new directions to show that it has implications for how and where marginalised groups experienced change and demonstrates how the interconnectedness of domestic space – as places where women and their families could meet, as methods of organising, and as the basis for making and unmaking homes – was crucial to the ability of individuals to exert their agency and forge new ways of being.

These articles therefore draw on some of the most cutting-edge research that explores the implications of the challenges to domesticity in Britain, 1890-1990. First, Elaine Farrell’s article develops her important research on women’s criminality and experiences of the criminal justice system, moving away from spaces such as prisons towards a consideration of how the home might be presented in court.²¹ Farrell uses police investigations into cases such as the death of David Buchanan at his Derry home in 1881 to explore how the home was treated by police and the courts when it was the scene of a crime, arguing that the ordinariness of these typical domestic homes was deliberately juxtaposed with the scandalous crimes their inhabitants were accused of.

Secondly, Lucinda Matthews-Jones provides a micro study of the philanthropist Alice Lucy Hodson and her published collection of letters from 1909 that documented life within the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in London. Matthews-Jones argues that for Hodson, home was not restricted to the limits of the Settlement building, as she moved through a variety of imagined domestic settings through her charitable work with local working-class inhabitants. Developing the concept of ‘unmaking’ the home, this analysis of Hodson’s letters demonstrates the significant ways in which home was not fixed but could be fluid, made and remade as required.

Thirdly, introducing our focus on activism, Aleena Din’s article addresses the relationship between British-Pakistani women’s homeworking and activism in late twentieth-century Britain. It challenges the entrenched image of the British-Pakistani female workforce as passive and exploited, instead demonstrating that the experience of homeworking allowed British-Pakistani women to manage their roles as mothers, members of a community and as employees in ways that led to their involvement campaigns for legislative change.

In the fourth work in this Special Edition, Kerrie McGiveron analyses the mixed sex revolutionary collective Big Flame (1970-1984), based in the Kirby area of Merseyside, to argue that the home was at the centre of their activism. Her insightful article draws attention to their ‘women-centred’ concerns, including childcare, demonstrating how domestic issues shaped their revolutionary goals. Illustrating that the home was central in developing their class-based activism, McGiveron’s article highlights the continuing importance of home in shaping working-class women’s political consciousness, even at a time when more women were taking on paid work outside of the home. Organisations like Big Flame understood that this facilitated a double burden on women that their campaigns needed to address. Intervening in recent scholarship on the Women’s Liberation Movement, this article presents a timely and valuable assessment of working-class women’s activism in a regional context that stresses how crucial their everyday spatial experience of life on a housing estate was in their politicisation.

Pushpa Kumbhat exposes the significant presence of women in the adult education movement, 1920-1945, in our fifth article. By drawing on scholarship relating to women’s domestic roles and interwar activism, Kumbhat demonstrates that women’s entry into adult education was not necessarily seen as an aberration of their home-based roles and responsibilities, but instead reflected a wider reconfiguration of their citizenship following the First World War. Together, the articles by Din, McGivero and Kumbhat pose a rethinking of the relationship between domesticity and activism, foregrounding the home and domestic roles in enabling women’s participation in a range of protests, campaigns, and other opportunities to improve their own lives.

Our final pieces reflect on the theme of the curative home. In the sixth article, Louise Settle explores the important relationship between the home and the rehabilitation of offenders through looking at emerging probation systems in early twentieth century Britain. Settle argues that the home – and its reformation – was considered increasingly central to the process of rehabilitation by officials within the criminal justice system. By looking at marriage reconciliation work, the use of probation for domestic violence, and probation officers’ attempts to improve the material living conditions of their charges, Settle argues that probation officers forged a clear vision of what they conceived of as a ‘good home environment.’ Settle shows that their vision of a curative domesticity particularly impacted women, whose roles as homemakers were strongly reasserted through their interactions with the probation system.

In the seventh article, curator Sophie Dutton reflects on the life the ‘outsider’ artist Madge Gill, whose artworks drew upon themes of loss and her search for a sense of home. Gill was emigrated to Canada as a child and returned to London aged nineteen. Renowned for her large, mediumistic paintings, Dutton demonstrates how Gill’s art offered a way of processing and rediscovering the experience of enforced emigration and the challenges of returning ‘home’. It is an illuminating example of how domesticity and its loss may be retrieved not through a spatial experience but as an emotional or artistic one – the curative home may well be a state of mind.

Finally, we offer a Viewpoint article that offers insights into how and why our thematic concerns have the potential to engage with wider public audiences and beyond that of the academy. Charlotte Wildman discusses the value of working with the Pankhurst Centre, our project partners for Challenging Domesticity Network who are based at the Pankhurst family home, situated on Nelson Street in Manchester. The article explores some of the narratives we may wish to tell through the Pankhurst house and the kinds of inclusive stories that engage current audiences with issues relating to the house as a simultaneously deviant, an activist and a curative home.

Methodologically, the articles in this Special Edition draw on diverse approaches and sources to explore the contested and contradictory cultures of domesticity and women’s ability to manipulate or subvert them. Farrell’s use of textual records, including court papers and newspaper coverage, demonstrates how we may find insights into the home via historical sources that may, at first sight, seem to counter our expectations of the meaning and experiences of domestic space. Through these sources, Farrell illuminates the importance of paying attention to the minutiae and everyday material items of domestic space. As she shows, otherwise innocuous items such as jars and foodstuffs took on a more sinister significance during police investigations and the very presence of items that were not associated with the home, such as chemicals, were incriminating. Both Dutton and Matthews-Jones make use of a microstudy approach analysis that takes one woman and her sense of home – or lack thereof – to understand the process of making or ‘unmaking’ the home as a shifting, fluid, and contradictory category. Matthews-Jones’ analysis of Hodson’s published letters describes this approach as ‘epistolary homemaking,’ uncovering the myriad ways in which individuals imagined, enacted and constructed their sense of home. Rather than focussing on the materiality of Hodson’s domestic setting, this approach helps to understand how individuals developed their sense of home through translocal spaces, ranging from rural to urban to imagined settings. Dutton and Matthews-Jones’ methodological approaches both endorse the concept of domesticity as a practice, rather than as a specific site or setting. McGiveron and Din continue the important tradition of using oral history interviews to retrieve the experiences and voices not usually recorded in ‘official’ archives. They are both especially effective in drawing out the contributions that migrant and working-class women made in shaping home-centred community-driven activism. Kumbhat’s analysis of women’s entry into the adult education movement and Settle’s account of domesticity and probation work draw on an impressive range of statistical data in combination with reports and policy work. This approach allows Kumbhat to illustrate that the number of women taking higher education classes was not only far higher than previously expected, but also that the majority of such women were involved in domestic duties. For Settle, we can appreciate the scale of probation work in its focus on the centrality of the home and family life by understanding the attempts of probation workers to rehabilitate offenders. Using data in this way is an effective method of changing how we may conceive of the relationship between active citizenship and women’s domestic and home-based roles in early to mid-twentieth century Britain.

This collection of original research brings together new ways of thinking about domestic space historically. It shows that historians need to take the issues associated with home and domesticity more seriously, not just as a place of shelter but as a site of action and agency. Looking at the deviant, the activist, and the curative homes, these articles demonstrate that these features could be central to domesticity rather than undermining or being considered incompatible with it. By shifting our analytical gaze to domesticity, we see there is much more to know about the role of the home in constructing, forging, and challenging social relations and identities. By challenging the meaning and role of domestic space, we hope this collection will lead to further research that applies our key conceptual approach to a broader range of case studies and topics.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Wildman

Charlotte Wildman is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Her expertise lies in urban history with a focus on the experiences of working-class women and children. She has collaborated with Eloise Moss and Ruth Lamont on the project Friendless or Forsaken? Child Emigration from North West England to Canada, 1860–1930 since 2015. Her first monograph, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, 1918–1939, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Her new project addresses non-violent home-based offending in Britain and Northern Ireland, 1918-1979.

Eloise Moss

Eloise Moss is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. She has collaborated with Charlotte Wildman and Ruth Lamont on the project Friendless or Forsaken? Child Emigration from North West England to Canada, 1860–1930 since 2015. Her expertise is in the history of burglary, with a wider focus on crime, gender, and urban space. Her first book, Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860-1968, was published with Oxford University Press in 2019.

Notes

1 Elizabeth Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 22.

2 Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 40, no. 2 (2005) 341–62.

3 M-O A FR 1616, 9. As cited in Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain,’ 344.

4 Peter Scott, The Making of the Modern British Home: The Suburban Semi and Family Life between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Mark Swenarton, Homes Fit For Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain (London: Routledge, 1981); James Greenhalgh, Reconstructing modernity: Space, power and governance in mid-twentieth century British cities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: the Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London: Verso, 2018); Guy Ortolano, Thatcher's progress : from social democracy to market liberalism through an English new town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Lynn Abrams, Ade Kearns, Barry Hazley, Valerie Wright, Glasgow : high-rise homes, estates and communities in the post-war period (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020),

5 Shani D’Cruze, ‘Approaching the history of rape and sexual violence: notes towards research,’ Women’s History Review, 1, no. 3 (1993), 377–397; L. Jackson, Child sexual abuse in Victorian England, (London: Routledge, 2000); Ginger Frost, ‘“He Could Not Hold His Passions”: Domestic Violence and Cohabitation in England (1850-1905)’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 12, no. 1 (2008), 45–63; Lizzie Seal and Alexa Neale, ‘In His Passionate Way’: Emotion, Race and Gender in Cases of Partner Murder in England and Wales, 1900–39,’ The British Journal of Criminology, 60, no. 4 (2020), 811–829.

6 Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918-1939: domestic design and suburban modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 8.

7 On key scholarship on domesticity across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1987); Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Lynn Abrams, Linda Fleming, Barry Hazley, Valerie Wright, Ade Kearns, ‘Isolated and dependent: women and children in high-rise social housing in post-war Glasgow,’ Women’s History Review, 28, no. 5 (2019): 794–813; Mark Clapson, ‘Working-class Women's Experiences of Moving to New Housing Estates in England since 1919,’ Twentieth Century British History, 10, no. 3 (1999): 345–365; Christine Wall, ‘Sisterhood and Squatting in the 1970s: Feminism, Housing and Urban Change in Hackney,’ History Workshop Journal, 83, no. 1 (2017): pp.79–97; Jessica White, ‘Child-centred Matriarch or Mother Among Other Things? Race and the Construction of Working-class Motherhood in Late Twentieth-century Britain,’ Twentieth Century British History, 2022.

8 bell hooks, ‘Homeplace: a site of resistance’, in Yearning (London: Routledge, 2014), 42.

9 Alexa Neale, Photographing Crime Scenes in 20th-Century London: Microhistories of Domestic Murder (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Amy Helen Bell, ‘Bodies in the Bed: English Crime Scene Photographs as Documentary Images,’ in Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850. ed. Alison Adam (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2020), 17–41; E. Moss, Night Raiders: Burglary and the Making of Modern Urban Life in London, 1860–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Charlotte Wildman, ‘Working-Class Women and the Buying and Selling of Stolen Goods in Urban Communities in the North-West of England and Belfast, 1918-1960,’ English Historical Review, forthcoming.

10 Neale, Photographing Crime Scenes, 167.

11 Kennetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 145.

12 Caitriona Beaumont, Housewives and citizens: Domesticity and the women's movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

13 Lyndsey Jenkins, Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Family, Class, and Suffrage, 1890–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

14 Tania Shew, ‘Militancy in the marital sphere: sex strikes, marriage strikes and birth strikes as militant suffrage tactics, 1911–14,’ in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins, The Politics of Women's Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London: University of London Press, Institute of Historical Research, 2021), 237–260; Anna Muggeridge, ‘Suffrage, infant welfare and women’s politics in Walsall, 1910–39,’ in Hughes-Johnson and Jenkins, The Politics of Women's Suffrage, 109–128.

15 Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in King’s Cross in the 1980s,’ Twentieth Century British History, 30, no. 2 (2019), 231–263; Jess White, ‘Black Women's Groups, Life Narratives, and the Construction of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century Britain,’ Historical Journal, 65, no. 3 (2022), 797–817.

16 Jane Hamlett, At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Palgrave, 2014); Claudia Soares, ‘A ‘permanent environment of brightness, warmth, and “homeliness”’: Domesticity and authority in a Victorian children’s institution,’ Journal of Victorian Culture, 23, no. 1 (2018), 1–24; Stephen Soanes, ‘“The Place was a Home from Home”: Identity and Belonging in the English Cottage Home for Convalescing Psychiatric Patients, 1910–1939,’ in Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725–1970: Inmates and Environments, eds. Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins, Rebecca Preston (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 109–124; Lucinda Matthews-Jones, ‘Settling at Home: Gender and Class in the Room Biographies of Toynbee Hall, 1883–1914,’ Victorian Studies, 60, no. 1 (2017), 29–52.

17 Eloise Moss, Charlotte Wildman, Ruth Lamont and Luke Kelly, ‘Rethinking Child Welfare and Emigration Institutions, 1870–1914,’ Cultural and Social History, 14, no. 5 (2017), 647–668,

18 Louise Settle, Probation and the Policing of the Private Sphere in Britain, 1907–1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Claudia Soares, ‘“The many lessons which the care of some gentle, loveable animal would give”: animals, pets, and emotions in children’s welfare institutions, 1870–1920,’ The History of the Family, 26, no. 2 (2021), 236–265; Olivia Havercroft, ‘An asylum for architects: expertise, exclusion and the construction of psychological environments in England, 1870-1930,’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2020.

19 Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (London: Routledge, 2006), 22.

20 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 170.

21 Elaine Farrell, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).