Life stories: biography and creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Paul Thompson ◽  
Ken Plummer ◽  
Neli Demireva
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
World War ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
And Gender ◽  
University Expansion ◽  
Second World

This chapter traces the engine of the pioneers' success and discusses their earlier lives, hinting or reflecting on how these experiences may have shaped their research. It begins by analyzing how the pioneers' were influenced by the communities where they grew up. Looking at the pioneers' families as a whole, even though this generation for which unprecedented university expansion brought rare opportunities for upward mobility, the chapter examines the pioneers' working-class families and old Oxbridge intellectual aristocracy. It notes that some of the key factors which brought them opportunities were due to national social changes and international events. The chapter also looks at how the older generation generally benefitted from Second World War experiences that took them out of their social-class cocoon. The chapter then discusses the pioneers who chose to explore other cultures rather than to research their own communities. It emphasizes social class injustice, racism, and gender injustice.

Revisiting Southam Street: Class, Generation, Gender, and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Line Of Sight ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World ◽  
Urban Working

AbstractThis article examines pictures taken by the British photographer Roger Mayne of Southam Street, London, in the 1950s and 1960s. It explores these photographs as a way of thinking about the representation of urban, working-class life in Britain after the Second World War. The article uses this focused perspective as a line of sight on a broader landscape: the relationship among class, identity, and social change in the English city after the Second World War. Mayne's photographs of Southam Street afford an examination of the representation of economic and social change in the postwar city and, not least, the intersections among class, race, generation, and gender that reshaped that city.

The Second World War: Remaking the British Working Class?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
Richard Croucher
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
British Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

In the post-war years, to the 1970s, most historians’ verdict on the Second World War was abundantly clear: it represented a watershed in social and political relations, shifting Britain in a social-democratic and more egalitarian direction. In more recent years, this verdict has increasingly been called into question. Some historians began to judge the war’s results, especially in terms of the flattening of social and gender hierarchies, to have been considerably exaggerated. Geoffrey G. Field has produced a sizeable, detailed and well-produced work which reaffirms the judgements of the ‘war as dramatic watershed’ school. He synthesizes much of the work on British society and the working class in the Second World War, interspersed with analysis of the vast holdings of The National Archives, the Mass Observation Archive, as well as film and literary sources. This review focuses on industrial relations, particularly the arms industries: where unionization, collective bargaining and workplace union organization were transformed. Joint production committees, however, proved ephemeral.

Boys Will Be Boys: Working-Class Masculinities in the Age of Mass Production

2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Heron
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Second World ◽  
Over Time

This article investigates the changing construction of masculine identities among working-class males in a large Canadian factory city, Hamilton, Ontario, in the half century before the Second World War. It argues that, long before individual working men embraced the patriarchal identity of breadwinner and head of family, they had learned and practiced how to be “masculine” in family homes, schools, city streets, workplaces, and pleasure sites. The result was a complex bundle of contradictory attitudes and practices in which the processes of class, ethnic/racial, and gender formation were closely interwoven and in which the male body became a crucial vehicle for expressing gender. The article stresses that working-class masculinities were not fixed, static, or universal, but shaped in specific ways in different contexts and subject to challenges and re-negotiation over time. In the period under study here, working-class males faced new forms of institutional regulation in schools, workplaces, streets, and military trenches, the commercialization of many of their pleasures, and new independence and assertiveness in the pubic sphere among the women of their communities. Negotiating these challenges brought both continuities and significant changes in masculine identities.

Reconstructing Europe’s Economy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Shadle
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Government Planning ◽  
Social Market ◽  
Second World

After the Second World War, Western Europeans had to rebuild their nations’ economies. This chapter describes the varieties of capitalism they adopted: social democratic, organicist, and social market. The chapter looks at how these economies differed in terms of property rights, government planning, labor relations, and social welfare. It illustrates a key insight of institutional economics: that there are a variety of capitalisms dependent on different institutional arrangements. The chapter also looks at important social changes, such as the increasing affluence of European society and the early stages of European integration. All these developments set the stage for postwar Catholic thinking about the economy.

scholarly journals Taming the Expellee Threat in Post–1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
PERTTI AHONEN
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
World War ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those concerning the level of autonomous organisational activity and the degree and type of political and administrative inclusion allowed for the refugees, affected the integration process in significant ways and helped to produce divergent national outcomes.

Islamic Law and Human Rights

2015 ◽  
pp. 818-842
Author(s):  
Shannon Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Second World

This article explores the question of whether Islamic law and universal human rights are compatible. It begins with an overview of human rights discourse after the Second World War before discussing Islamic human rights declarations and the claims of Muslim apologists regarding human rights, along with challenges to Muslim apologetics in human rights discourse. It then considers the issues of gender and gender equality, feminism, and freedom of religion in relation to human rights. It also examines four basic scholarly orientations to the topic of Islam and human rights since the end of the Second World War: a model that privileges a secular (non-religious) paradigm for rights; a Muslim apologist model, which privileges a purely “Islamic” conception of rights over secular models; a Marxist/postcolonial critique of rights as a western imposition of power; and a Muslim reformist paradigm of rights that highlights points of continuity between western legal and Muslim legal traditions.

scholarly journals Punkty, czyli złuda modernizacji

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Marcin Kula
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Origin ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World

The author’s remarks on Agata Zysiak’s book Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście [Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a Working-Class City] (2016) primarily concern the question of social advance through education and Zysiak’s outline of this process in Poland after the Second World War. As a participant of that process — first as a student, and later as a teacher — the author suggests that it should be viewed from the perspective of historical sociology.

Living Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-254
Author(s):  
Martin Conway
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Second World

This chapter focuses on the consumption of democracy. What happened in the roughly twenty-five-year period from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s is perhaps best regarded as a process of gradual acculturation. At different speeds and by different paths, a large majority of Western Europeans came to feel at home in democracy, and began to practise democracy for themselves. However, the new democracies were more equal in their formal structures than in their social reality. The reassertion of boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and age, after the more fluid and often chaotic experiences of the war years, was reinforced by the evolving but persistent inequalities of social class. Western Europe emphatically remained a class society after 1945. The rapid economic growth that occurred during the post-war years generated new forms of affluence, but these were distributed in ways that reinforced pre-existing class divisions. In particular, the post-war years witnessed a resurgence in the fortunes of the middle class. Whether assessed in terms of its material prosperity, its influence within and over government, or its wider social and cultural ascendancy, the middle class was the dominant social class of the post-war era.

War and Gender

2020 ◽  
pp. 633-676
Author(s):  
Karen Hagemann ◽  
Sonya O. Rose
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Complex Features ◽  
Global Cold War ◽  
Second World

The chapter focuses on the development from the Global Cold War and anticolonial struggle to the global conflicts of the post–Cold War period. It first provides an overview of the complex features of a period that starts in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with the challenges of the aftermath of the conflict and a post war reordering of economies, societies and national and international politics, and continues with the rise of the Global Cold War and the spread of the Wars of Decolonization in Asia and Africa that led to the decline of European empires. Then it explores the consequences of the collapse of communism, the end of the Global Cold War, and the proliferation of Wars of Globalization along with new forms of humanitarianism and peacekeeping. In the last section, it discusses the research by gender scholars from different disciplines on the Global Cold War and the Wars of Globalization and their attempts to rewrite mainstream narratives.

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