Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 196885

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Moss
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Industrial Disputes ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This book draws upon original research into women’s workplace protest to deliver a new account of working-class women’s political identity and participation in post-war England. In doing so, the book contributes a fresh understanding of the relationship between feminism, workplace activism and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985. The study covers a period that has been identified with the ‘zenith’ of trade union militancy. The women’s liberation movement also emerged in this period, which produced a shift in public debates about gender roles and relations in the home and the workplace. Industrial disputes involving working-class women have been commonly understood as evidence of women’s growing participation in the labour movement, and as evidence of the influence of second-wave feminism upon working-class women’s political consciousness. However, the voices and experiences of female workers who engaged in workplace protest remain largely unexplored. The book addresses this space through detailed analysis of four industrial disputes that were instigated by working-class women. It shows that labour force participation was often experienced or viewed as claim to political citizenship in late modern England. A combination of oral history and written sources are used to illuminate how everyday experiences of gender and class antagonism shaped working-class women’s political identity and participation.

Household Production and Economic Efficiency: Arguments for and against Domestic Specialization

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan J. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Economic Efficiency ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Home Economics ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Household Tasks ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Household Members ◽  
Post War

Increasing labour force participation by successive cohorts of mothers in post-war Britain has brought about a change in women's economic role, because they no longer specialize completely in domestic activities, except for a relatively short period associated with childrearing. By contrast, men continue to specialize in paid work, taking little responsibility for household tasks. Economic argument and sociological evidence are brought together in this paper to suggest that the demands of economic efficiency no longer require household members to specialize between domestic and market tasks. This idea runs counter to the major recent theory of economic demography, the socalled `new home economics', in which specialization (within marriage, though not necessarily by sex) is of crucial importance because of the particular way in which productivity is assumed to improve as more time is devoted to an activity. The nature of the returns to time spent at domestic and market activities is examined here in some detail — for example it is suggested that experience accrues more to participation in an activity than from the scale of that activity, and empirical evidence from various sources would appear to support this. The implication is that resources may not currently be allocated efficiently, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the factors which may hinder the achievement of efficiency, and how these might be overcome.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 164-174
Author(s):  
Jonathan Moss
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Subjective Value ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Late Modern

The conclusion summarises the book’s main findings, arguing that labour force participation was often experienced or viewed as claim to political citizenship in late modern England. Women’s workplace protest was not simply a direct response to women’s heightened presence in trade unions and ‘second-wave’ feminism. The women involved in these disputes were more likely to understand their experiences of workplace activism as an expression of the economic, social and subjective value of their work and an assertion of their personal autonomy. They possessed specific skills and ability, which were closely tied to their sense of self. Revisiting women’s workplace protest from an historical perspective enables one to see how these women were both indirectly influenced by and contributed towards the development of British feminism. Women’s attempts to redefine how their work was valued and to speak with their own voice within the labour movement challenged gender norms and can be described as feminist. However, it is crucial to recognise that the majority of women interviewed did not view themselves or their behaviour as either feminist or political, and stressed their ‘ordinariness’ or individuality instead. The conclusion explains this tension and suggests the women believed they were practicing ethics rather than politics.

White Slavery and Social Purists’ Authority

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-124
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Forced Prostitution ◽  
Case Work ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This chapter unpacks social purists’ commitment to the notion of ‘white slavery’ during the inter- and post-war years. Focusing on the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA), the chapter argues that this organisation used white slavery to construct their patrolling and moral surveillance of women as necessary to the maintenance of urban social order. By working with only a vague notion of white slavery, the LVA were able to imprecisely apply this term to their case work. Young women from marginalised communities, particularly Irish and working-class women, were presented by the organisation as being vulnerable to white slavery. Despite their records showing little engagement with women involved in forced prostitution, the LVA’s continual allusions to white slavery enabled their patrollers to further their image as experts in the moral protection of women and the organisation’s references to white slavery were used to try to generate donations from LVA supporters.

scholarly journals First Generation Feminist? Auto-Ethnographic Reflections on Politicisation and Finding a Home within Feminism

Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Turbine
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Intergenerational Learning ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The Uk

In spite of the apparent rise in feminism, who gets to know about feminism is still fraughtand impartial. How then, do we come to find ‘a home’ in and for feminism when it has been absentfrom our formative politicisation? How comfortable is that home for working-class academics? Inthis paper, I reflect on my feminist genealogy—from growing up as a working-class girl in a smallScottish town in an area of deprivation to becoming a first generation feminist academic in a RussellGroup University in the UK. This paper builds on the wealth of research exploring the trajectoriesof working-class women within academia by engaging genealogy research to explore how onedevelops as a feminist within academia—which can also be a strange place for first generationacademics. As an undergraduate coming of age in the ‘post-feminist’ 1990s, access to the languageand politics of feminism was beyond my grasp. I came to feminism relatively late in my life andacademic career—it was in my doctoral research that I really became engaged academically and asa named political identity. I employ auto-ethnography in this paper and reflect on how our intimateothers are always implicated in our own stories. This allows me to highlight how inheritedexperiences, memories, and embodiments are key. Intergenerational learning can make us implicitlyfeminist before we learn the formal language of feminism. The stories I choose to tell and ‘memories’I invoke here are re-crafted and recalled in response to what frustrates me now. That young womenare still telling the same stories that I tell here.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
The Law ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Safe Working

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

Employment Pattern and Extent of Under-utilisation of Manpower in Rural Baran; Areas of Pakistan

1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (4II) ◽  
pp. 1225-1233
Author(s):  
Sabur Ghayur
Keyword(s):  
Crop Production ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Hydroelectric Power ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
North West ◽  
North West Frontier Province ◽  
Physical Infrastructure ◽  
Employment Pattern

The barani (rain-fed) region accounts for about a fifth of the cultivated area in Pakistan. It has the potential to significantly increase crop production levels. Similarly, considerable scope exists in this area for the development of forests, fruit and vegetable gardening, pasture and stock rearing. Most of the natural resources are also found in this tract. Its hilly areas possess a vast potential for tourism. Besides, significant opportunities exist for irrigation and hydroelectric power generation. An optimum utilisation of all this potential, obviously, is employmentgenerating and income-augmenting. Despite all such realisations this region as a whole, unfortunately, is identified as the least attended to area in terms of provision of socio-physical infrastructure, other development programmes and, even, research work. This led to a deterioration of the employment situation in the barani region as a whole. A poor information base and analysis thereof on employment and manpower related variables is also the consequence of such a treatment to this area. I This paper, using the data of a field survey, tries to fill, though partly, the vacuum on employment and related variables in the rural barani region. An attempt is made here to record and analyse the labour force participation rates, employment pattern (main economic activities) and unemployment/underemployment levels prevailing in the rural baran; areas of the provinces of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

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