Women’s post-war political activism in Britain: priorities, campaigns, and strategies

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s activism
• historiography
• women’s organisations
• feminism

This special issue draws together ground-breaking work on women’s political activism after 1945. The articles have developed from the conference ‘Breaking the Glass Chamber’, held at the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London, in September 2022. This event brought together historians, political scientists and activists to consider why, where, when and how women were politically active between 1945 and 1997. While many contributions naturally focused on women’s activism in parliamentary politics at this time, a significant number of contributors took an expansive view of politics and recognised that, for women in particular, engagement in politics often took place outside formal institutions or parties. This special issue showcases some of this research, drawing together six contributions from scholars whose work explores these different dimensions of women’s activism in the years following 1945. These articles highlight some of the variety of causes which attracted women activists, and the concerns which drove them, as well as the methods, strategies and tactics they adopted.

These articles are wide ranging, and collectively cover the period from 1945 to the mid 1990s. Chronologically, they explore campaigns for gender equality in the post-war workplace; the lifetime feminist activism of Hazel Hunkins Hallinan; women’s role in social research and social action; grassroots petitioning; peace activism at Greenham Common; and campaigns for female ordination. Of course, these campaigns are only a snapshot of women’s campaigning in the postwar period, but they are suggestive of the diversity of activism at this time. All contributions focus on women-centred activism: the work that women undertook to improve their own lives and opportunities, and those of other women. However, they do not prioritise self-consciously ‘feminist’ activity, nor do they centre the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM).

This special issue builds on several major interventions from Caitríona Beaumont. The first is that the women’s movement and the feminist movement, while linked, are not synonymous.¹ Beaumont argues that narrowing attention to women’s groups that have ‘obvious feminist tendencies’ is too limiting. She asserts that instead of attempting to locate ‘feminism’ within a wide range of women’s associations, we need to recast the women’s movement as a social movement which encompasses a whole range of political, feminist and more conservative groups.² Furthermore, to understand the totality of women’s politics, it is necessary to look beyond even the women’s movement, broadly conceived. Many women have participated in activism, often in mixed-sex organisations, around issues that have centred class, faith, race, work or place as much as much as gender. For example, scholars of Black and ethnic minority women’s activism have recognised that their campaigns were often as integrated with anti-racist and Black liberation struggles as with women’s movements, not least because they could find groups dominated by white women difficult, even hostile, environments.³ This is a more inclusive and expansive vision of women’s activism.

Beaumont has also insisted that in order to fully understand the totality of women’s activism in twentieth century Britain, it is necessary to ‘flatten the curve’ which has dominated narratives of women’s activism.⁴ As she and others have argued, the ‘wave’ metaphor tends to diminish and obscure the breadth of the work which went on between and beyond particular moments of prominent feminist activities. For example, there is an incredibly rich literature examining the so-called ‘first wave’ of feminist activity, centred around the suffrage movement, but also connected with other demands for women’s rights to education, property, legal equality, bodily autonomy, better pay and working conditions, and access to the labour market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.⁵ This activity did not disappear with women’s partial enfranchisement in 1918. Previously understood as a period of retrenchment, even collapse, more recent scholarship has offered a far more optimistic assessment of the women’s movement after 1918.⁶ Thus one key objective of this collection is to draw together new work in this area to demonstrate the many continuities between pre- and post-war campaigns: both in terms of their objectives and their methods. Indeed, though our collection begins at the end of the Second World War, a conventional landmark in British history, in some respects the war had limited significance for women’s political practices. Further, the continuity with earlier decades is reflective of the glacial pace of progress for women. The collection also provides further impetus for historians of women’s activism to move away, not just from a focus on 'the waves' or the period 'between the waves', but to instead explore continuities in women's activism over a much longer period of time, which might even be extended into the present day. Many political campaigns were hard fought, drawn out struggles, which do not necessarily map across to conventional periods of feminist activity.

A longstanding body of work has demonstrated that non-partisan women’s organisations were integral to interwar politics. These studies trace the on-going struggles of large scale organisations such as the Women’s Institute, the Women Citizens Associations and the Townswomen’s Guilds to embed women social, economic and political rights, as well as offering forums for women political education and sociability.⁷ Campaigns for abortion rights, birth control and the rights of single mothers, if not yet mainstream and widely acceptable, did begin to gain greater purchase after the First World War.⁸ There were also a range of campaigns for the recognition of professional women’s status.⁹ Many of these groups, such as the Mothers’ Union and the Young Women’s Christian Association, were based in, or connected with, faith.¹⁰ Faith was also a spur to women’s peace activism during the interwar years, most notably the Quaker-influenced Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.¹¹ Indeed, international politics sometimes proved fruitful terrain for women, as new ideas about humanitarianism reworked older traditions of philanthropy, maternalism, and imperialism.¹² Many of these organisations and campaigns continued after the post-war period. Scholars including Pat Thane, Helen McCarthy, and Maggie Andrews, whose work stretches across the Second World War, have shown that women continuously campaigned for–and often achieved–social change for themselves and their communities, and their concerns and strategies bear remarkable similarities to the forms and methods of women’s activism in the period before 1939.

The centrality of the local to women’s activism represents another thread of continuity with earlier periods. June Hannam and Karen Hunt have argued that the totality of women’s activism will only be understood when historians build it from the grassroots up, or as they describe it, undertake an ‘archaeology’ of women’s politics.¹³ A lot of the day to day ‘doing’ of interwar politics, as they note, took place at local level or within communities. Local government remained an important site for women’s political participation. This often went beyond maternalism, although maternal and child welfare were central to many—though not all—women councillors.¹⁴ Patricia Hollis’s masterful work on women councillors in England prior to 1914 remains significant, yet there is not enough research on women’s local government activism in the years after 1918, perhaps because it has been associated with maternalism and social conservativism.¹⁵ In recent years, the hollowing out of local government in favour of national politics has made it seem less influential. But new histories reveal the vibrancy and continued importance of the local to activists generally, and to women in particular, as a space to argue for, and achieve, progressive policies.¹⁶ Such extra parliamentary activism remained important for women after 1945.

Another theme which emerges from histories of the women’s movement in the interwar years is the essential role that women played in party politics. For example, scholars have investigated the motives and meanings of political participation for women.¹⁷ Time pressures, caring responsibilities, and social expectations often inhibited women from participating in national politics, and they were frequently marginalised by the structures and cultures of mixed-sex organisations, including political parties. Only a few women were able to make an impact at national level.¹⁸ But building on their longstanding commitment to, and involvement in, organisations like the Primrose League or the Women’s Co-operative Guild, local political parties as well as local government remained an importance space for women’s political participation. Indeed, scholars like Pat Thane have shown that it was women’s activism in local communities, which was particularly attentive to questions of housing, healthcare, education and child wellbeing, that helped shift the Labour Party away from its primary focus on the male worker, developing a more expansive vision of social democracy and the welfare state.¹⁹

After 1945, a more comprehensive welfare system allowed women improved healthcare, education opportunities, and access to National Assistance benefits. This also afforded women other opportunities; as Eve Worth explores, women were increasingly engaging in careers as providers, and not only recipients, of welfare.²⁰ Economic, social and cultural change in the 1950s included full male employment, rising affluence and access to increased consumer goods, holidays and more family leisure time,all of which impacted many women’s lives.²¹ During the 1950s and 1960s more women were employed, with women increasingly returning to work, albeit part-time, after having children.²²

The significance of the politics of ‘everyday life’ should not be underestimated. Central to the WLM, the idea that ‘the personal is political’ is not just a way of understanding how personal identities and experiences shape political outlook, but also indicates that everyday life is political. For example, the failure of basic services could—and still does—serve to radicalise women. In earlier decades of the twentieth century, for example, many working-class women were politicised by their inability to access adequate housing.²³ Other campaigns linked women’s health and healthcare, particularly during pregnancy, with the health and wellbeing of their children, and thus the future of the nation.²⁴ Such campaigns also continued after 1945.²⁵ For example, Black women often spearheaded campaigns against racist schooling and banding policies that resulted in hundreds of Black children needlessly being sent to Educational Special Needs (ESN) schools.²⁶ Recent work by Caitríona Beaumont, Eve Colpus and Ruth Davidson argues that this ‘experiential expertise’ reflects the way individuals’ activism is catalysed by their personal experiences, giving them the knowledge to assert ‘expert witness status’ and seek out ways to ‘expand the scope, inclusivity and applicability’ of welfare services.²⁷ This is often community-based, and involves groups whose welfare needs are not well served by formal institutions. These groups were, of course, not limited to women. Nevertheless, it remains the case that for many women, communities were, and are, central to their impetus for activism.

These dimensions of women’s activism are also reflected in the articles in this collection. The research and social action of social researchers in Ruth Davidson’s article was specifically rooted in community-based issues. But community has a broader meaning which is also reflected in women’s common interests beyond place. This is evident in Helen Glew’s community of women workers, and Grace Heaton’s community of Christian women. These women were, at times, physically distant from each other, but were part of a community of individuals united by a common cause.

The methods of local politics also remained central to women’s lives.²⁸ For many women, both problems and solutions were local. Women drew on their networks of friends and neighbours to gain support for their concerns. Politics fitted around the spaces women inhabited—the local shop, school or council—but also around the time they had in their daily lives to engage in politics. In their investigation of women’s use of petitions, Anna Bocking-Welch, Richard Huzzey, Cristina Leston-Bandeira, and Henry Miller show that these were facilitated by activism in local shops, schools and streets, and often involved communities of women who knew each other. These forms of politics could be more effectively and practically integrated into everyday life and around other responsibilities than the ongoing demands of party activism or the artificial timetables of election campaigns. This was also reflected in the inclusiveness and non-partisan dimensions of women’s activism. Many of the petitions identified by Anna Bocking-Welch et al. saw petitioners canvassing support from women across their local communities, not just those with whom they shared a political outlook or affiliation.

The importance of welfare, broadly conceived, is also a central thread. Despite the benefits of full employment, an ‘affluent’ society and, perhaps most significantly, the welfare state, the post-war period did not result in women becoming satisfied with the services available and politically quiescent. There were periods of continued activism and challenge. Some concerns related to access and inequality. Women activists could see where the welfare state failed to deliver for groups of women: for example, in the lack of adequate pensions for older women, as Caitríona Beaumont outlines, or insufficient support for families living in poverty, as Ruth Davidson explores. Both highlight the need for improved social security benefits and housing. Women were often the primary recipients and users of welfare services and were frequently the first affected by gaps, shortcomings and failures in delivery.

Many contemporary activists were also very aware that they were working in a long tradition of women’s political activism, allowing them to add weight to their demands by situating these in a longer framework. Some women, particularly white middle-class women, felt less need to justify their political participation, in the way that prior generations had. Grace Heaton demonstrates how post-war campaigners referenced the longevity of faith-based gender activism, while Rose Debenham shows that, at Greenham Common, women consciously drew on the legacy of suffrage activism. Institutional memory and expertise was also important. Internal memories of non-party women’s organisations are noted in several contributions, such as Ruth Davidson’s, which highlights the work of the Women’s Co-operative Guild on issues of poverty, and Caitríona Beaumont’s, which explores Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan’s long life of activism within the Six Point Group. These activists embodied this sense of continuity and the importance of what had gone before.

However, this collection also reveals some changes in women’s political concerns and strategies over time. This is not surprising: women’s lives were changing, and there were also significant social and cultural shifts which impacted women’s politics. The dominant literature of women’s post-war activism has been generated by studies of the WLM reflecting the importance of this movement to a wide range of activists from the 1970s onwards.²⁹ For example, there is a growing literature on the WLM itself, which often demanded more than inclusion and equality, and sought a radical transformation in women’s opportunities, domestic responsibilities and sexual lives, reimagining the nature of work, family and politics.³⁰ Histories of sexuality, race and identity, some linked to the WLM, are developing new analyses of this important and under-researched campaigning.³¹ While the WLM has often been understood as collapsing amid the ‘sex wars’ of the late 1970s, new studies emphasise the campaigns on welfare rights, domestic violence and racial justice which persisted into the 1980s and beyond, sometimes inspired by opposition to Thatcherism and neo-liberal politics, sometimes seeking an accommodation.³²

Much more work is still needed to begin to understand the breadth and depth of the WLM. But this cannot be understood as the only possibility and form of women’s politics in the post-war period. There is a risk that, like the suffrage campaign, it could overshadow and dominate the period: reinforcing, rather than dismantling, the waves. This is, of course, not to underestimate the significance of the WLM. It enabled women to display a feminist consciousness in a very public way, which set a precedent for future women’s activism as several of our contributors—perhaps most notably Rose Debenham and Grace Heaton—demonstrate in this collection.

This collection argues that the post-war period evidenced change, but perhaps in a more subtle and evolutionary form than the wave analogy suggests. Shifts in women’s relationship to paid work, for example, meant that women’s workplace issues needed to be redefined. For instance, there is a growing literature on women and work-based protest, reflecting an upsurge in women demanding equality of treatment and supporting the wider union movement.³³ But we should not overstate the degree of this as change. As Helen Glew’s article notes, some women had had long-standing representation at work. This remained important not only to pursue legal or policy change, but also to monitor the degree to which these reforms were implemented (or not) in practice. This policing of legislation by women is also evidenced in Caitriona Beaumont’s article, which notes that national legislation was patchy in its local effect, and that women actively identified these gaps and sought to address them.

The evolution of women’s methods is also evident in this collection. As Ruth Davidson’s article reminds us, there was a long tradition of women’s involvement in social science, with Victorian and Edwardian women playing a significant role in groups involved in sociological investigation and research.³⁴ In the 1950s and 1960s, women were also at the forefront of the ‘rediscovery of poverty’.³⁵ Women poverty campaigners drew on this heritage of detailed case-study research, and also engaged with professional and academic poverty experts. Their shared expertise was effectively deployed within newly-formed pressure groups. Meanwhile, as Rose Debenham explores, direct activism at Greenham Common developed an assertive challenge to militarism, inspired by, but reworking, forms of protest pioneered by suffrage activists. Communication had always been important to women campaigners, but this evolved in response to new media opportunities, as illustrated in Grace Heaton’s article.

There are also hints of other, more subtle, changes. One is around the vernaculars of activism. In the interwar years and even beyond, housewifery had been a central framework through which women’s lives were interpreted, and women had often drawn on this status to legitimise their political demands.³⁶ However, increasingly this language fell away. More focus was placed on motherhood, and to some extent, family. Yet is often not clear in what circumstances and moments women were able to campaign for themselves rather than their children and families. Some of these tensions are is evident in these articles, which show women organising around their own faith, their own health, or their own wages. For example, Anna Bocking-Welch et al thoughtfully demonstrate the ongoing importance of the designation of ‘housewife’, ‘mother’ and ‘ordinary’, following Claire Langhamer’s identification of ‘ordinariness’ as a category of historical analysis.³⁷ But more work needs to be done to understand the languages of women’s politics, and how that reflected or related to their self-conceptions, as well as their activities.

This collection is only a starting point in developing the literature of post-war activism. One further avenue for exploration is women’s involvement in local and regional council bodies, and local political parties. These continued to be important sites for women’s activism. There were many women MPs whose careers started in local government.³⁸ Non-party women’s organisations also remain neglected in the historiography, though they remained significant as a source of expertise for government policy and of sociability for many women. Many remain influential into the present day. Current AHRC-funded research led by Beaumont is beginning a process of identifying the wide scope of the non-party women’s movement in contemporary Britain and Ireland. But there is so much more to be done.³⁹ Moreover, the activism of many women who were not white, heterosexual or able-bodied, needs far greater attention. Local grassroots campaigns to assert their rights and campaign for social justice have been important to many Black, Asian, lesbian or disabled women. These women were often not able to capitalise on the resources of some other women’s groups, and sometimes were keen to resist or reject traditions and campaigns which had marginalised their needs and experiences.⁴⁰ At the same time, while this collection centres women’s activism for women, this was by no means the only form of women’s politics. Lynn Abrams has suggested that there is an ‘absence’ of what she terms ‘para-feminist activity’, that is, the activities that went on beyond and around recognizable campaigns for women’s rights.’⁴¹ Similarly, it is important to acknowledge that women’s politics was not always progressive, as indicated by Anna Bocking-Welch et al. Understandings of these kinds of politics also needs to be expanded.

While this collection covers only the last decades of the twentieth century, many of the concerns and campaigns documented here remain astonishingly relevant today. For example, the Focus E15 campaign for social housing grew out of resistance to cuts in essential housing services and welfare provision for young mothers and remains active in East London.⁴² Ongoing work by, for example, Fivexmore highlights the inequalities and disparities faced by Black women during pregnancy and early maternity.⁴³ Nationwide, the charity Pregnant Then Screwed campaigns for mothers’ rights and working conditions.⁴⁴ Women Against State Pension Inequalities (‘WASPI women’) campaigns against the way which state pension ‘equalisation’ has unfairly impacted upon women born between 1950 and 1960.⁴⁵ These single-issue campaigns have arisen at specific moments, but are illustrative of much longer problems of gendered inequality in the labour market and the welfare state. These groups often work in conjunction with longer standing organisations such as the Fawcett Society and Maternity Action. They share an interest in the ways that cuts to the welfare state in the form of ‘austerity’ polities have fallen hardest on women, and especially already disadvantaged women.⁴⁶ As these and other campaigns illustrate, grassroots activism was, and remains, as important for women in the period after 1945, and arguably more significant to their campaigns than it has historically been for men.

These themes are reflected in the six articles which follow. Caitríona Beaumont’s account of Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan’s activism in the Six Point Group challenges understandings of women’s organisations which emphasise ‘waves’ between intense periods of women’s activism. Instead, it illustrates how older and young women worked together to sustain pressure on successive governments on key issues such as access to abortion, social welfare and equal pay. Helen Glew’s article investigates how women’s occupational organisations campaigned for gender equality in the workplace following the rescinding of marriage bars in the civil service and teaching. Ruth Davidson’s focus on the under-documented role of Harriett Wilson, Audrey Harvey and Margaret Wynn in the development and formation of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) shows how these women used their knowledge and expertise of social research and experience of voluntary organisations to poverty campaigning. Anna Bocking-Welch et al. argue that, despite women’s increased representation within formal politics, petitioning remained a popular form of political activism and collective action amongst women in the postwar period. Rose Debenham demonstrates how the women who lived and campaigned at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp evoked memories of past ‘rebellious women’ and worked to ensure that their own place in the history of women’s activism was not forgotten. Grace Heaton’s contribution focuses on the use of humour by Christian women, some of whom self-defined as feminists and some of whom did not, in their campaigns for female ordination within the Church of England between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

There has always been a women’s movement, but its contours need to be mapped more thoroughly. We hope that this collection acts as a starting point for further investigations into the many disparate forms of political activism women undertook across the twentieth century, in ways which destabilise conventional understandings of the timing, forms and demands of women’s politics.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the support of the Mile End Institute which made this conference possible. Lyndsey Jenkins also acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust (Grant ECF 2020-264). The authors are indebted to June Hannam and Jessica White for their valuable comments on this introduction.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Davidson

Ruth Davidson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Mile End Institute, School of History, Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on women’s social activism, welfare policy and politics in twentieth century Britain. She is currently a core member of the Project Steering Committee for an AHRC funded project Agency and Advocacy: Locating Women’s Grassroots Activism in England and Ireland, 1918 to the present. She is co-editor Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: experiences, expertise and activism (Palgrave Macmillan, in press, 2024).

Farah Hussain

Farah Hussain is a PhD researcher at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. Her research focus is the experience of Muslim women in the Labour Party. She explores the relationship between the Labour Party and the Muslim electorate in the UK, the societal positioning of Muslim women, and the nature of party membership.

Lyndsey Jenkins

Lyndsey Jenkins is a Departmental Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Oxford. She is a historian of women, politics, and social change. She is the author of Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Family, Class and Suffrage c.1890–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) and Lady Constance Lytton: Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr (London: Biteback, 2016); and the editor, with Alexandra Hughes-Johnson, of The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London: University of London Press, 2021). Her work has been published in Cultural and Social History, Women’s History Review, Twentieth Century British History, and the Political Quarterly.

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. She has published articles in Women’s History Review and Midland History.

The authors are collectively co-editing Women, Power and Politics in Britain: 1945–1997 for Oxford University Press.

Notes

1 Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

2 Beaumont, Housewives, 3.

3 See for example Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race And National Identity, 1945–1964, (London: Routledge, 1998); Natalie Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016); Jessica 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; Charlotte James Robertson, ‘The Women’s Refuge as “Homeplace”: Black and Asian Women’s Refuges in Britain as Spaces of Community and Resistance (1980–2000)’, Women’s History Review, (advanced access online, 2023); A.S. Francis, ‘A Luta Continua: The Political Journey of Manchester’s Black Women Activists, 1945-80’ in Hakim Adi, Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2023).

4 Beyond Women’s Liberation, Inaugural Lecture, London Southbank University, 12 October 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eB_2Jm3yqI. This intervention builds on the pathbreaking work of Karen Offen, see for example Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

5 The literature is vast, but see for example: Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, eds., The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000); June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, eds., Votes for Women (London: Routledge, 2000); June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London: Routledge, 2002); Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) 1904–18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Myriam Bousshba-Bravard, ed., Suffrage Outside Suffragism: Women’s Vote in Britain, 1880–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Routledge, 2013); Cathy Hunt, The National Federation of Women Workers, 1906–1921 (London: Palgrave, 2014); Miranda Garrett and Zoë Thomas, eds., Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Laura Schwartz, Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Zoë Thomas, Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas, eds., Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain (London: New Historical Perspectives, 2021); Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins, eds., The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London: New Historical Perspectives, 2021); Lyndsey Jenkins, Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Family, Class, and Suffrage, 1890–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

6 For more recent, optimistic assessments of the period, see for example: Pat Thane, ‘What Difference did the Vote Make? Women in Public and Private Life in Britain since 1918’, Historical Journal 76, no. 192 (2003), 268–5; Pat Thane, ‘The Impact of Mass Democracy on British Political Culture, 1918–193’, in The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918–1945, ed. Julie V. Gottleib and Richard Toye (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); Maria DiCenzo, ‘“Our Freedom and Its Results”: Measuring Progress in the Aftermath of Suffrage’, Women’s History Review 23, no. 3, (2014), 421–40.

7 Beaumont, Housewives; Caitríona Beaumont, ‘Citizens Not Feminists: The Boundary Negotiated Between Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women’s Organisations in England, 1928–39’, Women’s Historical Review 9, no. 2, (2000), 411–29; Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997 & 2015).

8 Stephen Brooke, ‘“A New World For Women”? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s’, American Historical Review 106, no. 2, (2001), 431–59; Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tanya Evans and Pat Thane, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

9 Katherine Bradley and Helen Swift, eds., Women in the Professions: Politics and Philanthropy, 1840–1940, (Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2009); Anne Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice: A Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sharon Thompson, Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women’s Association and Family Law (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).

10 Caitríona Beaumont, ‘Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: The Attitude of the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League to Divorce, Birth Control and Abortion in England, 1928–1939’, Women’s History Review 16, no. 4, (2007), 463–85; Caitríona Beaumont, ‘Fighting for the “Privileges of Citizenship”: The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), Feminism and the Women’s Movement, 1928–1945’, Women’s History Review 23, no. 3, (2014), 463–79; Carmen M. Mangion, ‘Faith, Feminism and Politics: The Inter-war Campaigning Strategies of St Joan’s Social and Political Alliance’, Modern British History (advanced access online, 2024).

11 Sue Morgan, Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Sarah Hellawell, ‘Antimilitarism, Citizenship and Motherhood: The Formation and Early Years of the Women’s International League (WIL), 1915–1919’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 4, (2017), 551–64; Sue Anderson-Faithful and Catherine Holloway, Women and the Anglican Church Congress 1861-1938: Space, Place and Agency (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

12 Eve Colpus, Female Philanthropy in the Interwar World: Between Self and Other (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Emily Baughan, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism and Empire (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

13 Karen Hunt and June Hannam, ‘Towards an Archaeology of Interwar Women’s Politics: The Local and the Everyday’, in The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918–1945, ed. Julie V. Gottleib and Richard Toye (London: Palgrave, 2013), 124–41.

14 Cathy Hunt, ‘“Success and the Ladies”: An Examination of Women’s Experiences as Labour Councillors in Interwar Coventry’, Midland History 32, no. 1 (2007): 141–59; Julia Neville, ‘Challenge, Conformity and Casework in Interwar England: The First Women Councillors in Devon’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 6 (2013): 971–94; Ruth Davidson, ‘Working-Class Women Activists: Citizenship at the Local Level’, in Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, ed. P. Ackers and A. Reid (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 93–120; Anna Muggeridge, ‘Women and Politics in Smethwick, 1918–1929’, Midland History 47, no. 2 (2022): 191–207; Anna Muggeridge ‘“That so Ancient a City should have Elected a Woman as Mayor is a Sign of the Times”: Women and Local Government in Worcester before 1939’, Midland History 48, no. 3 (2023): 352–68; Daryl Leeworthy, Causes in Common: Welsh Women and the Struggle for Social Democracy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022). Julia Bush has highlighted that some members of the anti-suffrage movement actively campaigned for women to take on a role in local government as an important sphere of influence for women. Julia Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

15 Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

16 Lynn Abrams, Ade Kearns, Barry Hazley, Valerie Wright, Glasgow: High-Rise Homes, Estates and Communities in the Post-War Period (London: Routledge, 2020); Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).

17 Much of the literature has focused on Labour women, see for example: Neil Evans and Dot Jones, ‘“To Help Forward the Great Work of Humanity”: Women in the Labour Party in Wales’, in The Labour Party in Wales, 1900–2000, ed. Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams and Deian Hopkin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 166–88; June Hannam, ‘Women as Paid Organizers and Propagandists for the British Labour Party Between the Wars’, International Labor and Working Class History 77, no. 1 (2010): 69–88; June Hannam, ‘“The Victory of Ideals Must Be Organised”: Labour Party Women Organizers in the Inter-war Years’, Management and Organizational History 5, no. 3 (2010): 331–48; Annmarie Hughes, Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Stephanie Ward, ‘Labour Activism and the Political Self in Interwar Working-Class Women’s Politics’, Twentieth Century British History 30, no. 1 (2019): 29–52; Lyndsey Jenkins and Stephanie Ward, ‘Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History’, Political Quarterly 94, no. 2 (2023): 251–7; Lyndsey Jenkins, ‘“The Voice of the True British Housewife”: The Politics of Housewifery at Labour’s Women’s Conferences, 1945–1959’, Women’s History Review, (advanced access online 2023). In recent years there has been growing recognition of the role Conservative women played in party politics at this time. See for example: David Thackeray, ‘Home and Politics: Women and Conservative Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies 49, no. 4 (2010): 826–48; N. C. Fleming, ‘Women and Lancashire Conservatism between the Wars’, Women’s History Review 26, no. 3 (2017): 329–49; Clarisse Berthezène and Julie Gottlieb, Rethinking Right-Wing Women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

18 For example, see Jacqui Turner and Daniel Grey, ‘Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain’, Open Library of Humanities 6, no. 2 (2020); Laura Beers, Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2016).

19 Pat Thane, ‘Women in the British Labour Party and the Construction of State Welfare, 1906–39’, in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (London: Routledge, 1993); Pat Thane, ‘Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906–1945’, in British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Harold L. Smith (Aldershot: Elgar Press, 1990); Pat Thane, ‘Labour and Local Politics: Radicalism, Democracy and Social Reform, 1880–1914’, in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); see also Pamela Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain 1880s–1920s (London: Routledge, 2002); Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question: 1884–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Christine Collette, The Newer Eve: Women, Feminists and the Labour Party (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

20 Eve Worth, The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945, (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

21 For women’s lives in this decade, see for example Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010 (London: John Murray, 2014); Penny Tinkler, Stephanie Spencer & Claire Langhamer, ‘Revisioning the History of Girls and Women in Britain in the Long 1950s’, Women’s History Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 1–8; Selina Todd, Snakes and Ladders: The Great British social Mobility Myth (London: Chatto & Windus, 2021).

22 Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 230–1.

23 Barbara McFarlane, ‘Homes Fit for Heroines: Housing in the Twenties’, in Making Space: Women and the Built Environment, ed. Matrix Book Group (London: Verso, 1984); Caitríona Beaumont, ‘“Where to Park the Pram”? Voluntary Women’s Organisations, Citizenship and the Campaign for Better Housing in England, 1928–1945’, Women’s History Review 22, no. 1 (2013): 75–96; Krista Cowman, ‘“From the Housewife’s Point of View”: Female Citizenship and the Gendered Domestic Interior in Post-First World War Britain, 1918–1928’, English Historical Review 130, no. 543 (2015): 352–83; Karen Hunt, ‘Gendering the Politics of the Working Woman’s Home’, Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950, ed. Elizabeth Darling and Leslie Whitworth (London: Routledge, 2007).

24 Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jane Lewis, ‘Gender, the Family and Women’s Agency in the Building of ‘Welfare States’: The British Case’, Social History 19, no. 1 (1994): 37–55; Thane, ‘The Construction of State Welfare, 1906–39’; Laura King, ‘Future Citizens: Cultural and Political Conceptions of Children in Britain, 1930s–1950s’, Twentieth Century British History 27, no. 3 (2016): 389–411.

25 See for example Krista Cowman, ‘Play streets: women, children and the problem of urban traffic, 1930–1970’, Social History 42, no. 2 (2017): 233–56; 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 33, no. 4 (2022): 498–521.

26 Black Cultural archives, Dadzie collection, DADZIE/3/2/2, ‘Editorial’, FOWAAD, 7 (November 1980), 1; Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (Stamford: University of California Press, 2019), 45; Hannah Francis, ‘The Black Parents’ Movement’ in Hakim Adi, Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2023).

27 Caitríona Beaumont, Eve Colpus and Ruth Davidson, eds., Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: Experiences, Expertise, and Activism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, forthcoming); Jennifer Crane, Child Protection in England, 1960–2000: Expertise, Experience, and Emotion, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Ville Kivimäki, Sami Suodenjoki and Tanja Vahtikari, eds. Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

28 Jenkins and Ward, ‘Women and the Labour Party’.

29 Sarah Browne, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Sue Bruley, ‘Women’s Liberation at the Grass Roots: A View from Some English Towns, c.1968–1990’, Women’s History Review 25, no. 5 (2016): 723–40; Sarah Crook, ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement, Activism and Therapy at the Grassroots, 1968–1985’, Women’s History Review 27, no. 7 (2018): 1152–68; Margaretta Jolly, Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); George Stevenson, The Women’s Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Jeska Rees, ‘“Taking Your Politics Seriously”: Lesbian History and the Women’s Liberation Movement in England’, in Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities: Volume 2, ed. Sonja Tiernan and Mary McAuliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).

30 Browne, The Women’s Liberation Movement; Jolly, Sisterhood and After.

31 Julia Sudbury, Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge,1998); Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 2000), chapter 10; Tracy Fisher, What’s Left of Blackness: Feminisms, Transracial Solidarities, and the Politics of Blackness in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: a Lesbian History of Post-war Britain 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement; Hannah J. Elizabeth, ‘“The Wild Women of the West (Midlands)’: How LesBeWell Imagined Queer Women’s Health and its Obstacles in the 1990s through the Pages of Dykenosis’, Contemporary British History 37, no. 3 (2023): 309–38.

32 Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement; Laura Beers, ‘Feminist Responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism’, in Clarisse Berthezéne and Julie V Gottleib (eds.), Rethinking Right-Wing Women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s To the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2018); Sarah Crook and Charlie Jeffries, eds., Resist, Organize, Build: Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States during the Long 1980s (New York: SUNY Press, 2022); Sarah E. Stoller, Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).

33 Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson, ‘“Side by Side with Our Men?” Women’s Activism, Community and Gender in the 1984–1985 British Miners Strike’, International Labor and Working-Class History 75, no. 1 (2009): 68–74; Cathy Hunt, The National Federation of Women Workers (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014); Sarah Boston, Women Workers and the Trade Unions, second edition (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2015); Jonathan Moss, Women, Workplace Protest and Political Identity in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019); Maroula Joannou, ‘“‘Fill a Bag and Feed a Family’ the Miners’ Strike and its Supporters’, in Labour and the Left in the 1980s, ed. Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, ‘National Women Against Pit Closures: Gender, Trade Unionism and Community Activism in the Miner’s Strike’, Contemporary British History 32, no. 1 (2018): 78–100.

34 Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); Ann Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform 1880–1920 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018).

35 Rodney Lowe ‘The Rediscovery of Poverty and the Creation of the Child Poverty Action Group, 1962–68’, Contemporary Record 9, no. 3 (1995): 612–37.

36 However, the discourse of ‘the housewife’ has been complicated by Karen Hunt, see for example: 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, ed. Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (London: Palgrave, 2014), 73–91; Karen Hunt, ‘Labour Woman and the Housewife’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918—1939, ed. Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green, Fiona Hackney (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 238–251.

37 Claire Langhamer, ‘Who the Hell are Ordinary People? Ordinariness as a Category of Historical Analysis’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (2018): 175–95.

38 This was true across the political spectrum, however at the Breaking the Glass Chamber conference held in September 2022, several sitting and former women MPs including Margaret Hodge, Estelle Morris and Dawn Primarolo reflected on the significance of local government to their political careers.

39 The AHRC funded network, ‘Agency and Advocacy: Locating Women’s Grassroots Activism in England and Ireland, 1918 to the present’, is lead by Caitriona Beaumont and Anne Logan, see: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX008606%2F1 accessed 5 June 2024.

40 See for example: Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha, and Ruth Pearson, ‘Striking Narratives: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the “Great Grunwick Strike”, London, UK, 1976–1978’, Women’s History Review 23, no. 4 (2014): 595–619; Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement; White, ‘Black Women’s Groups’; Olivia Wyatt, ‘‘The Enemy in Our Midst’: Caribbean Women and the Protection of Community in Leeds,’ in Hakim Adi, Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2023); Beckie Rutherford, ‘“I Started a New Life When I Joined Gemma”: Disability, Community, and Sexuality in Gemma Newsletters, 1978–2000’, in Gender, Subjectivity, and “Everyday Health” in the Post-1945 World, ed. Tracey Loughran, Daisy Payling and Kate Mahoney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2024).

41 Lynn Abrams, Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings, and the Self in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

42 Pablo Sendra and Daniel Fitzpatrick, Community-Led Regeneration: A Toolkit for Residents and Planners, (London: UCL Press, 2020), 41–49.

43 https://fivexmore.org/ accessed 5 June 2024.

44 https://pregnantthenscrewed.com/ accessed 5 June 2024.

45 https://www.waspi.co.uk/ accessed 5 June 2024.

46 Emma Craddock, ‘Caring About and for the Cuts: A Case Study of the Gendered Dimension of Austerity and Anti-Austerity Activism’, Gender, Work and Organization 24, no. 1 (2017): 69–82; Vicki Dabrowski, Austerity, Women and the Role of the State: Lived Experiences of the Crisis (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020).