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Women's Work: Employment Opportunities and Economic Roles, 1918–1939*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
Although there is an ever increasing amount of scholarship describing the individual and collective experiences of British women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has been, as yet, little written on the period after 1914. It is not my purpose here to fill that void. Rather it is the aim of this essay to sketch in the most striking features of British women's economic position during the inter-war years. Two interrelated aspects will be stressed: the actual employment of women during the period and the extent of changes in women's traditional economic roles. This essay proceeds on the assumption that pre-war feminism and the increased employment of women during the war heightened women's economic expectations. In post-war Britain, new vistas seemed to be opening as indicated by a flood of legal changes affecting women and as discussed in the analyses of contemporary social commentators. The reality, however, was not altogether encouraging. Employment gains made during the war by skilled and unskilled women in industry evaporated within a few years after 1918. The position of professional women showed some improvement but did not achieve the levels of their earlier hopes. The economic dislocations of the twenties and thirties were in part responsible for the slowness of change, but just as importantly, the accepted economic roles of women underwent no fundamental alterations.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1975
Footnotes
A version of this paper was read at the Pacific Northwest Conference on British Studies at Pullman, Washington, April, 1974. The financial assistance of the Research Advisory Board, University of Nevada, Reno is gratefully acknowledged.
References
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