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Women's Experience in Britain: Race, Class and Gender since 1945 (Context)

Module description

The period since 1945 has been one of unprecedented flux in the lives of women in Britain. Women’s relationship to education and employment, the state, and marriage and motherhood have dramatically shifted. On this module you will analyse why there has been such a rapid pace of change and what its implications are for the wider history of Britain in this period. You will also examine what the interrelationship is between these changes in women’s lives and feminist activism. Does feminism cause or reflect shifts in women’s lives? And why, even during this period of dynamic change, have so many aspects of gendered experience and expectation remained so sticky? The module will take an intersectional approach to the category of ‘woman’, analysing it through the lens of key axes such as race, class, sexuality, and generation.

Module aims - intentions of the module

Together with its co-requisite module, the aims of this module are for you:

• To understand the dynamic changes in women’s lives in this period and to interrogate the relationship between women’s experiences and feminist movements.
• To introduce you to intersectional theory and how we apply it to historical understandings of women’s lives.
• To encourage you to think about the ways in which centring women’s experience shifts our perspective on key themes in recent British history.
• To develop the skill of historicising contemporary events and how to bring together historiographical research with the research of other disciplines such as sociology and cultural studies.
• To engage in-depth with the vast array of source material that is available on this topic: ranging from oral history collections; to policy reports; to social media. The module also offers the possibility of creating your own primary source material on this topic due to its contemporary nature.
• To build research, analytical, interpretative and communication skills that can be applied in further academic studies or in graduate careers, in particular in policy and the civil service, through engaging with the complexities of women’s lives.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Ability to evaluate the different complex themes in, and disciplinary approaches to, the recent history of women’s lives and understand why there has been so much flux (but also continuity) in their experience since 1945.
• 2. Ability to make close specialist evaluation of the key developments in women’s lives within this period and how this relates to wider historical trends.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Ability to analyse the key developments within women’s lives and theories of their experience in this period.
• 4. Ability to focus on and comprehend complex issues.
• 5. Ability to understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible manner.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Independent and autonomous study and group work, including presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning.
• 7. Ability to digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument.
• 8. Ability to present complex arguments orally.

Syllabus plan

While the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Domesticity and its discontents in the 1950s
• Women and models of social class and mobility
• Second Wave Feminism
• The welfare state
• Having it all? Women in the 1990s
• Motherhood and Fatherhood
• LGBT+ Activism
• Gendering the economy
• Post-feminism and the media in the 2000s
• Gen Z women and social media
• Women’s relationship to education and employment
• Intersectionality
• Women in the post-imperial context 

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood in Britain (Bloomsbury, 2020)
• Natalie Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)
• Lynn Abrams, ‘Liberating the Female Self: Epiphanies, Conflict and Coherence in the Life Stories of Post-War British Women’, Social History, 39/1 (2014)
• Claire Langhamer, ‘Feelings, Women and Work in the Long 1950s’, Women’s History Review, 26/1 (2017)
• Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour’, Stanford Law Review, 43/6 (1991)
• Judith Walkowitz, ‘Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in King’s Cross in the 1980s’, TCBH, 30/2 (2019)
• Jonathan Moss, Women, Workplace Protest and Political Identity in England, 1968-85 (MUP, 2019)
• J. Dean, ‘Who’s Afraid of Third-Wave Feminism? On the Uses of the “third wave” in British Feminist Politics’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11/3 (2009)
• Heidi Safia Mirza, Black British Feminism: A Reader (Routledge, 1997)
• Pamela Abbott and Geoff Payne (eds), The Social Mobility of Women: Beyond Male Mobility Models (Falmer, 1990)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – Faculty to provide hyperlink to appropriate pages

Key words search

Women, Britain, Class, Race, Gender, Intersectionality, Contemporary