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History

K.L.Parker: ‘Women MPs, Feminism and Domestic Policy in the Second World War’

Parker, K.L. ‘Women MPs, Feminism and Domestic Policy in the Second World War’
D.Phil completed, 1994. Oxford University

Abstract: This thesis examines the role of women MPs in framing domestic policy, perceptions of gender roles, and feminism during the Second World War. Revising questions posed by previous studies, it explores how the women MPs defined ’emancipation’ for women, the terms under which they were willing to advance gender-based claims, and the forces which affected their efforts. It aims to demonstrate that the women MPs helped to shape a feminist political programme which moved beyond a simple claim for equal legal rights. ‘Total war’ provided them with an opportunity to put aside political differences to unite in demanding both that women be included fully in the war effort and that women’s traditional roles be recognised as socially and economically valuable. After an introduction which elaborates these points, Chapter 2 introduces the fourteen women MPs. Chapter 3 traces the formation of the Woman Power Committee and its arguments for women’s full participation in the war effort and for recognition of the rights of mothers and housewives. Chapter 4 investigates the women MP’s role in framing the British welfare state, including their support for family allowances and Beveridge’s ‘housewives’ charter’. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the position of women MPs and gender-based political claims within the context of the Labour and Conservative parties. Drawing upon parliamentary speeches, government records, party archives and private papers, this study supports the claim advanced by several recent historians that the Second World War did not initiate widespread changes in the status of women.

Categories
History

E.A. McCarty: ‘Attitudes to Women and Domesticity in England, c.1939-1955’

McCarty, E.A. ‘Attitudes to women and domesticity in England, c.1939-1955’
D.Phil completed, 1994. Oxford University

Abstract: This thesis is a study of attitudes to women and domesticity in England, c. 1939-55. It focuses on attitudes to women and domesticity as they were expressed in a representative range of contemporary discourses, and the ways in which these attitudes were shaped by social, political and economic concerns. In particular, it looks at representations of women as housewives, an image which predominated during the 1940s and 1950s, and which signified women’s relationship not only to the home, but also to the ‘public’ sphere of paid work, politics and the state. The thesis argues that attitudes to women and domesticity were both more complex and more diverse than has often been allowed; and that the period saw the evolution of new and distinctive understandings of the housewife in response to the particular circumstances of the war and post-war years. Moreover, one such understanding, shared by a number of individuals and women’s groups, of the emancipatory potential of the home and the housewife’s role, has been insufficiently acknowledged by a later generation of historians, to whom the figure of the housewife has come to present women’s entrapment, not their emancipation. Chapter one discusses the historiographical issues involved in a study of domesticity. Chapter two outlines the key changes taking place in the material conditions of domestic life in the period after the First World War through to the mid-1950s. Chapter three and four examine attitudes to women, marriage and family in contemporary sociological literature and in popular women’s magazines.