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Service labour on ships was feminised, but it was monopolised by men. Besides the limited role of the stewardess, women were not employed in general service positions until the 1930s when they began to be hired as waitresses in place of male dining-room stewards. This article considers the conditions of possibility for American and British lines recruiting white women in preference to men. This occurred at two significant junctures. Firstly, during the 1930s as race became more crucial to employment on American ships in transoceanic trades, and subsequently from the late 1950s as shipping companies responded to the rise of commercial aviation. By examining the changing face of service employment at sea and the labels used to designate male and female service labour as both parallel and foil to practices on land and in flight, this article casts new interpretive light on the relationship between gender, identity, work and status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pearl Jephcott (1900–1980) between 1922 and 1946 was by turns a volunteer girls' club worker, Organising Secretary for the Birmingham Union of Girls' Clubs, the occupant of a similar post in County Durham and finally the Publications Officer for the National Association of Girls' Clubs. During most of that period she combined girls' club work with helping to pioneer new forms of practitioner research. The article examines her contribution to both these fields during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of social science research methods by women reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a largely buried history. This article examines the work of Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness, two British reformers who conducted many social investigations using a wide range of research methods. They also crossed genres in writing fiction, which was an accepted method at the time for putting forward new ideas about social conditions. Black and Harness were part of a vibrant network of women activists, thinkers and writers in late nineteenth century London, who together contributed much to the growing discipline of social science and to imaginative forms of writing about social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography of women who experienced homelessness is spare but a small, important body of research addresses their long-standing problems with visibility. However, this writing mostly focuses on either ‘vagrant’ women who were subjects of the law, or ‘respectable’ women who were subjects of philanthropy. This article draws these groups into the same frame. It shows how the assumed dichotomy between them worked in mutually constitutive ways to sustain their lack of visibility. The ‘homeless woman’ was defined through her desire to remain hidden, while the ‘woman vagrant’ was defined by her public performance of transgression. In a context where ‘homeless’ was challenging ‘vagrant’ as a sociological descriptor, the woman vagrant was not seen as homeless and the homeless woman was effaced by her own respectability. Despite the divide evoked by the labels, the lived experience of women without homes was connected by a range of economic and affective pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the inclusion of religion within the West Central Jewish Working Girls' Club in London through newspapers, club histories and oral testimonies. Previous scholarship has downplayed the religious element in Jewish youth clubs; however, this article will demonstrate that religion was a factor within the activities of the West Central Club. Drawing on reports from the club leaders, this article will show that religion was present through prayers and services held on the Sabbath, and, where possible, this religion promoted domesticity for young women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article lists major accessions made in 2012 to repositories of the British National Archives relating to women's history.

This article adopts a biographical approach to examine the politicization of a woman activist, Gertrude Tuckwell (1861–1951), in the British labour movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the influence of Tuckwell's radical background and argues that her loyalty and sense of duty towards her family shaped and directed the nature of her social and political work. With emphasis on the years between 1891, when she began to work for the Women's Trade Union League, and 1921, when this organization was transferred to the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, it is argued that these characteristics have contributed to her neglect within British labour history, which has tended to foreground those women whose leadership roles have been easier to define. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the numbers of 'other women' and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses 'irregular and illicit unions' in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalence of illicit unions throughout the twentieth century and before allows us to question contemporary concerns about our supposed 'divorcing society' and the decline of family life in modern Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experiences of unmarried mothers who kept and tried to raise their children between World War One and the end of the twentieth century. It argues that there has not been a simple progression from their experiencing social stigma and ostracism to more enlightened attitudes since the 1970s. Rather there is a great deal that has hitherto been unknown about what the evidence suggests were very diverse experiences and attitudes throughout the period. A major change since the 1970s has been from pervasive secrecy about unmarried motherhood, cohabitation, adultery and similar 'irregular' practices, especially among the middle classes, to greater openness. The article uses a variety of sources, including the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (founded in 1918, now One Parent Families), oral histories, contemporary interviews and official and unofficial investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nurses were one of the fastest growing female workforces in Victorian England, one of only a handful of occupations dominated by women; but little is known about them. Most historical work on nursing has been based on the writings of nurse leaders and as a result the experiences of ordinary nurses have been all but ignored. This article challenges the reliance on such sources, and questions the extent to which the writings of these prominent and privileged commentators represent the triumph of rhetoric over reality. By searching for new material within institutional archives and by using a range of other sources, such as census returns, it is possible to uncover the lives of ordinary nurses who worked in the hospital wards. This article uses such techniques, and through the study of a group of nurses at one hospital, produces evidence to challenge some previously held assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the material culture of British working-class homes in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, paying particular attention to the issue of cleanliness. Using evidence from social investigations and autobiographies, it asks how cleanliness, both as a material practice and as an idea, was deployed within the working-class home and its spatial arrangements. The relationship of working-class and middle-class ideas of domesticity is examined, with different chronologies of change for subjects of different class backgrounds highlighted. It is proposed that to a certain extent working-class women found their 'widening sphere' within, rather than beyond, domestic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a broad overview of the gendered regimes which shaped the development of social scientific knowledge in Australia, and the position of women within the field, from 1890 to 1945. It particularly explores the local desire to emulate developments in Europe and the United States. Australian women were prominent in early 'amateur' social science, which was strongly linked to social reforming activities. However, the social sciences developed exceedingly slowly within the Australian academy and rather continued to be sustained largely by the social reform movement. The continuing lack of formal institutionalisation, well into the twentieth century, provided considerable scope for some (privileged) women to create themselves as social scientific experts. Indeed, it was largely the interests of women social reformers who eventually drove professionalisation of the social sciences from the 1930s. Nevertheless, when professionalisation and institutionalisation did finally come in the 1940s, Australia followed remarkably similar patterns to those seen in the United States and United Kingdom nearly 50 years earlier. Women were largely regulated to the lower-status, applied, feminine field of social work while men took over the new and more prestigious academic arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this article is a neglected period in the life of the prominent feminist social investigator, Clara Collet (1860–1948). The article establishes a narrative account of Collet’s life in retirement from primary and secondary sources, which then provides a context for an evaluation of the most notable political ideas found in her later texts. Some Colletian writings from before 1920 are also discussed, partly because previous Collet scholarship has neglected her connections with the Women’s Freedom League and the feminist wing of the Labour movement during her middle-age years. Like many progressives of her vintage, Collet’s political opinions were an amalgam of liberal and socialist ideas, and the article also makes connections between her views and wider debates within intellectual history, for example, the ‘New Liberalism’ and ‘new feminism’ debates. The article concludes that Collet’s political opinions during her old age were in many ways more radical than those she had expressed during the earlier stages of her lengthy career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the establishment of women factory inspectors in the wake of a common sweating furore in Britain and New Zealand. Sweating reformism was not simply transplanted in New Zealand from the motherland. It is argued that Britons and New Zealanders developed related illusions about anti-sweating which had important implications for the confinement of women's work. In New Zealand female factory inspectors were held to be symbols of successful anti-sweating reform, while in Britain they were celebrated for their investigation and exposure of industrial conditions since here reform was limited. The women themselves knew the limits of their success. And they embodied a contradiction. The rationale for their employment was that women's work was different from men's and female employment needed to be regulated. Female factory inspectors accepted this formula for factory workers but were averse to it being applied to their own employment. In this regard, the female factory inspectors' experience as workers themselves is as revealing as their occupational duties to reform sweating and other industrial conditions for women. Despite many social differences, the way in which female factory inspectors in colony and 'mother country' dealt with the contradiction between regulating blue and white collar employment was remarkably similar. The article presents this contradiction in the context of the relation of women factory inspectors to the wider feminist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study of the first women appointed as official government factory inspectors in Britain. It uses the diaries, memoirs and official documentation left by these women - most notably, Lucy Deane - to explore the tensions surrounding the meaning of 'work' and the shifting alignments within the women's movement in 1890s Britain. The article questions existing feminist interpretations of both the work of the women inspectors and the way in which it affected the intellectual concerns of the turn of the century women's movement. Rather than bringing about an increased cross-class identification between upper-middle and working-class women, this study argues that the women factory inspectors relied upon aristocratic patronage and an increasing sense of class distinction between themselves and working-class women to reinforce their professional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the gendered dimensions of relationships in the conduct of a major academic Australian social survey in Melbourne in the early years of the Second World War. Despite its grounding in methodology current in Britain at the time, its execution and outcomes mirrored the gendered and classed nature of the survey, with its male direction, middle-class female interviewers, and largely working-class respondents. The value of 'women's conversations' was reflected in the fullness of the findings that were made publicly available in subsequent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the role of the suffrage news-seller in light of the important role official organs came to play for organizations within the movement and the competing claims the act of selling placed on women unaccustomed to venturing into the streets and facing public hostility. Connection between unconventional behavior and militancy; Importance of self-promotion to the public profile movement; Implication of street activists as targets for misogynist hostility.