What did contemporary social scientists who investigated matters relating to gender (and, often, women’s lives) hope to achieve by doing so? What parts of these women’s (and occasionally men’s) lives interested them? Was this always emancipatory for women?

Sample reading

Lynn Abrams, 'Heroes of their own life stories: narrating the female self in the feminist age', Cultural and Social History, 16:2 (2019), pp. 205-224

Lynn Abrams, 'Liberating the female self: epiphanies, conflict and coherence in the life stories of post-war British women', Social History, 39 (2014), pp.14–35

Lise Butler, 'Michael Young, the Institute of Community Studies, and the politics of kinship', Twentieth Century British History, 26:2 (2015), pp. 203-224

Tanya Evans and Pat Thane, 'Secondary analysis of Dennis Marsden's Mothers Alone', Methodological Innovations, 1:2 (2006), pp. 78-82 [link]

Helen McCarthy, ‘Social science and married women’s employment in post-war Britain’, Past and Present, 223 (2016), pp. 269-305

Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: masculinities and social space in late twentieth-century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996)

Liz Stanley, Sex Surveyed, 1949-1994: from Mass-Observation's 'Little Kinsey' to the National Survey and Hite Reports (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995) [not available as an e-book, but there is a physical copy in the Library collections: HQ21.S6249] 

Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried motherhood in twentieth-century England (Oxford: OUP, 2012)

Eve Worth, The Welfare State Generation: women, agency and class in Britain since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

Research studies/primary sources

Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)

Dennis Marsden, Mothers Alone: poverty and the fatherless family (London: Allen Lane, 1969)

Young men and women socialise in a coffee bar. From Abrams, The Teenage Consumer , unpaginated frontispiece