Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women's work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-55
ISBN: 9781526104458
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Manchester University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Social and Cultural History;

The Civil Service and the London County Council employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers these institutions influenced both each other and private organisations, thereby serving as a barometer or benchmark for the conditions of women's white-collar employment. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources - including policy documents, trade union records, women's movement campaign literature and employees' personal testimony - this is the first book-length study of women's public service employment in this period. It examines three aspects of their working lives - inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality of opportunity - and demonstrates how far wider cultural assumptions about womanhood shaped policies towards women's employment and experiences. Scholars and students with interests in gender, British social and cultural history and labour history will find this an invaluable text.