Tastes of Honey The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution
August 2019
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Book
Real life.’ Though little known today, this is the inspiring story of how one woman shook up the establishment of the 1950s and 60s, and helped trigger a cultural revolution.
Biography & Autobiography
The myths of social mobility
December 2018
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Chapter
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Move On Up social mobility, opportunity and equality in the 21st century
SBTMR
An introduction to A Taste of Honey
September 2017
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Internet publication
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Phoenix Rising: Working-Class Life and Urban Reconstruction, c. 1945–1967
July 2015
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Journal article
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Journal of British Studies
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010
October 2014
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Book
'There was nothing extraordinary about my childhood or background. And yet I looked in vain for any aspect of my family's story when I went to university to read history, and continued to search fruitlessly for it throughout the next decade. Eventually I realised I would have to write this history myself.'
What was it really like to live through the twentieth century? In 1910 three-quarters of the population were working class, but their story has been ignored until now.
Based on the first-person accounts of servants, factory workers, miners and housewives, award-winning historian Selina Todd reveals an unexpected Britain where cinema audiences shook their fists at footage of Winston Churchill, communities supported strikers, and where pools winners (like Viv Nicholson) refused to become respectable. Charting the rise of the working class, through two world wars to their fall in Thatcher's Britain and today, Todd tells their story for the first time, in their own words.
Uncovering a huge hidden swathe of Britain's past, The People is the vivid history of a revolutionary century and the people who really made Britain great.
Class, experience and Britain's twentieth century
October 2014
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Journal article
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Social History
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology
Family Welfare and Social Work in Post-War England, c .1948– c .1970
April 2014
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Journal article
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The English Historical Review
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, Generic health relevance, 1 No Poverty
Class conflict and the myth of cultural ‘inclusion’ in modern Manchester
October 2013
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Chapter
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Culture in Manchester: Institutions and urban change since 1850
This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester's cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire's industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.
People Matter: The Making of the English Working Class
August 2013
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Journal article
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History Workshop Journal
One enduring legacy of The Making of the English Working Class is Thompson’s careful attention to the agency of ordinary people. I suggest that his methodology offers a means of identifying agency and resistance across different periods of history. His use of both class and experience, which were challenged by the cultural turn, deserve renewed attention, as they offer important analytical tools for historians. Rather than simply describing class as a social phenomenon, The Making provides us with a way to analyze class as a dynamic, historically-specific relationship. At a time when inequality is presented by politicians as normative and inevitable, we need these insights more than ever.
Thai Brides and Teacakes: working-class culture and the modern city
January 2013
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Journal article
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Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester
From Babyboomers to Beanstalkers. Making the Modern Teenager in Postwar Britain
January 2012
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Journal article
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Cultural and Social History
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the British teenager was presented as a symbol of generational rebellion in the popular press, social investigations, and much political debate. We draw on oral histories, newspapers and the archives of prominent social surveys to question this presentation. By examining how working-class teenagers and their parents experienced and remembered the post-war years, we identify a disjuncture between the literature on moral panic and the widespread evidence of intergenerational cooperation between parents and children. Many working-class parents, enjoying newfound economic security, felt able to encourage their children to enjoy more adventurous lives.
Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain, 1900-1950
May 2009
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Journal article
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Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies
Far from being symbols of a bygone era, servants remain central
to life in modern Britain. One in ten British households currently
employs domestic workers.1 The ‘disappearance’ of service —
already heralded in the 1920s, when press coverage of ‘the servant
problem’ was filled with nostalgic laments for the faithful
Victorian maid—never happened. Change, of course, did occur
—the live-in housemaid of the 1900s was replaced with the parttime
cleaner of the 1950s — and it is that transition on which I
focus here. I therefore treat the history of twentieth-century
domestic service as one of development, rather than decline.
Moreover, I argue that relations between servants and their
employers illuminate the important and dynamic role that class
has played in modern British history — though we would not
know it from the silence on service that characterizes the major
historical studies of class in twentieth-century Britain.2
This article builds on existing histories of domestic service
by moving beyond the polarization of socio-economic and cultural
history. Between the 1960s and the 1980s sociologists and
social historians were preoccupied with whether ‘deference’ or
‘defiance’ shaped servants’ behaviour and actions. While some
scholars argued that servants were socialized into unquestioning
obedience,3 others suggested that deference in fact masked covert
defiance.4 Both groups used close analysis of the interaction between servants and their employers to place them within an
existing paradigm of class relations.5 Most of these studies
agreed that domestic service had ‘disappeared’ by the 1950s,
largely because young working-class women found the occupation
oppressive and left when job opportunities increased in
factories, shops and offices.6 The recent insights of cultural
historians have challenged this older methodology and the conclusions
derived from it. Judy Giles and Lucy Delap have used
middle-class women’s writing and, in Delap’s case, servants’
memoirs, to suggest that service was a positive experience for
many working-class women.7 These different strands of scholarship
have produced immensely valuable work, but none has successfully
explained the coexistence of servants’ and former
servants’ positive testimonies with the replacement of ‘live-in’
service by part-time domestic work after the SecondWorldWar.
Affluence, Class and Crown Street: Reinvestigating the Post-War Working Class
December 2008
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Journal article
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Contemporary British History
This paper revisits sociological studies of Liverpool between 1956 and 1964 to challenge
the prevailing emphasis on affluence in histories of post-war Britain. Vulnerability to
poverty continued to shape working-class life, and the sociologists and their respondents
drew on class to account for this. However, while the researchers used class as a social
description, their respondents suggested that class was a dynamic social relationship
within which they operated a degree of agency, albeit mediated by gender and locale. Their
agency was not only facilitated by the development of a post-war welfare state, rather than by personal affluence, but also relied on older household economic strategies that highlight continuities with the pre-war period.
Juventud, género y clase en la Inglaterra de entreguerras
April 2007
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Journal article
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Hispania: revista espanola de historia
Los años de entreguerras fueron fundamentales en el desarrollo de la juventud en Inglaterra. En los inicios del periodo tratado, el derecho de voto de los jóvenes era limitado, sus oportunidades educativas y de empleo restringidas —especialmente para las mujeres— y sólo tenían un tiempo libre limitado. En 1939, la ciudadanía política se había extendido, y las oportunidades de empleo y de ocio habían aumentado. Este artículo examina estos cambios, argumentando que el predominio de un interés historiográfico por el ocio de la gente joven ha ocultado el impacto del desarrollo económico, social y político más amplio en sus estilos de vida, relaciones familiares y estatus. Los jóvenes jugaron un papel económico importante en las familias de clase obrera, lo que socava las representaciones que les muestran como incapaces e irresponsables, estereotipos que, como se demuestra, surgieron de las inquietudes políticas y sociales más amplias de la clase media. Estas preocupaciones eran, en parte, producidas por la habilidad de la gente joven para sacar ventaja del desarrollo económico, social y político y articular una identidad social, generacional —y a veces política— distintiva. Al hacer esto, los jóvenes actuaron como agentes de cambio social y económico en los lugares de trabajo, en las familias obreras y en la comunidad en general.
Breadwinners and Dependants: Working-Class Young People in England, 1918–1955
April 2007
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Journal article
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International Review of Social History
The prevailing image of twentieth-century English “youth” is as a triumphal signifier of affluent leisure consumption. By contrast, this article demonstrates the importance of young working-class people's economic role as wage-earners in the mid-twentieth century. This shaped their treatment by the family and the state and the life histories of the adults they became. Juveniles were crucial breadwinners in interwar working-class households. However, the consequences of high unemployment among adult males helped redefine youth as a period of state protection and leisure in the post-1945 decades. Nevertheless, personal affluence remained limited, and young people's economic responsibilities high, until at least the mid-1950s. The history of twentieth-century youth is best understood as one in which young working-class people's fortunes were closely linked to their family's circumstances and their importance as a supply of cheap labour. Social class thus formed, and was formed by, the experience and memory of being young.
Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918-1950
September 2005
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Book
This book gives an account of young women's lives, challenges, and existing assumptions about working class life and womanhood in England between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the 1950s. While contemporaries commonly portrayed young women as pleasure-loving leisure consumers, this book argues that the world of work was in fact central to their life experiences. Social and economic history are woven together to examine the working, family, and social lives of the maids, factory workers, shop assistants, and clerks who made up the majority of England's young women. The book traces the complex interaction between class, gender, and locale that shaped young women's roles at work and home, indicating that paid work structured people's lives more profoundly than many social histories suggest. Rich autobiographical accounts show that while poverty continued to constrain life choices, young women also made their own history. Far from being apathetic workers or pliant consumers, they forged new patterns of occupational and social mobility, and were important breadwinners in working class homes. They also developed a distinct youth culture, not only through discerning consumption of fashion, cinema, and dance halls, but also as workplace militants. In doing so, they helped to shape 20th-century society.
History
Young women, work and leisure in interwar England
September 2005
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Journal article
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Historical Journal
Interwar England witnessed the emergence of a new generation of socially and financially independent young working-class women who worked in offices, shops, and factories, ‘dressed like actresses’, and were prominent leisure consumers, indulging in cosmetics and confectionery and frequenting the cinema and dance hall. This article analyses that development. A synthesis of qualitative and quantitative material indicates that age- and gender-specific roles were shaped by material factors rather than by ‘custom’ as existing social histories imply. It is argued that individuals' financial contribution to their household shaped the allocation of leisure and spending money, and that young women's increasing earning opportunities, and rising economic importance to the household, thus enabled them to become prominent leisure consumers. However, close attention to life histories also demonstrates that mother–daughter relationships were not simply economically determined, being characterized by mutual emotional as well as financial support. Maternal aspirations for their daughters, and expanding employment opportunities, shaped the emergence of youth as a life stage marked by a degree of personal independence and commercial consumption.
Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women's Entry to Employment in Inter-war England
February 2004
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Journal article
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Twentieth Century British History
This article examines young women's entry to employment in inter-war England. In doing so, it sheds light on a neglected aspect of their lives—paid work—in a period recently identified by historians as crucial in the emergence of the modern, independent young woman. It is argued that entering employment marked the beginning of a social, cultural, and economic transition from girlhood to womanhood. The relationship between gender, life cycle, and social class in inter-war England is reassessed. The period has been identified as one when a ‘traditional’ working-class identity was breaking down, with women's relationship to social class viewed as particularly problematic by those historians who have argued domesticity defined inter-war femininity. Contemporary social surveys, the Census and government records, and life histories demonstrate that young women's entry to and choice of employment was influenced by their social background, with kinship and neighbourhood networks used to locate and obtain jobs. Employment expansion increased the state's importance in directing girls to jobs, but poverty continued to constrain employment choice. Awareness of this informed young women's own social aspirations. Interwar femininity and youthful identity formation thus did not signify the decline of social class, but were rather shaped by it.