Lynn Abrams – författare

Could women be feminist without feminism? Could they foster feminist activism without a movement or an ideology? Could they recraft ways of being female without a plan? Feminist Lives adopts a woman-centred approach to explore these questions and to understand how British women charted a new way of being female in the three decades before the Women's Liberation Movement. By focusing on the 'transition' generation of women who were born in the long 1940s and who grew to maturity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the book demonstrates that it was they who developed the aspirational model of womanhood that then emerged after 1970 as the norm amongst women in the global north.In doing so, Feminist Lives seeks to fill 'the feminist history gap', countering a narrative that has for too long neglected this generation of women as fusty and failing, and as just not feminist enough. Using women's voices as the book's evidential and emotional core as they describe themselves, their relationships, their feelings and actions, this volume analyses the modes by which women constructed a modern self, built upon new ways of living, feeling, and being.

In the wake of an unparalleled housing crisis at the end of the Second World War, Glasgow Corporation rehoused the tens of thousands of private tenants who were living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in unimproved Victorian slums. Adopting the designs, the materials and the technologies of modernity they built into the sky, developing high-rise estates on vacant sites within the city and on its periphery. This book uniquely focuses on the people's experience of this modern approach to housing, drawing on oral histories and archival materials to reflect on the long-term narrative and significance of high-rise homes in the cityscape. It positions them as places of identity formation, intimacy and well-being. With discussions on interior design and consumption, gender roles, children, the elderly, privacy, isolation, social networks and nuisance, Glasgow examines the connections between architectural design, planning decisions and housing experience to offer some timely and prescient observations on the success and failure of this very modern housing solution at a moment when high flats are simultaneously denigrated in the social housing sector while being built afresh in the private sector.Glasgow is aimed at an academic readership, including postgraduate students, scholars and researchers. It will be of interest to social, cultural and urban historians particularly interested in the United Kingdom.

Workers Culture in Imperial Germany represents the first alternative approach to the study of workers' culture in Imperial Germany. It is also the first comprehensive historical analysis of the emergence of Germany's modern leisure industry. The central concern of the book is the emergence of a distinct workers' culture which provided a disparate and heterogeneous working class with a focus of identity in an alien and hostile society. Lynn Abrams focuses on the leisure activities enjoyed by workers in the major cities of Bochum and Dusseldorf. She provides a comprehensive coverage of a whole range of popular amusements and recreations on offer including festivals, pubs, Tingel-Tangels, dance halls, clubs and cinema. The book is also a major contribution to the social history of working-class life in the nineteenth century, contributing to the debate over the role of a working class culture in Imperial Germany.

Updated and expanded, this second edition of Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871–1918 is an accessible introduction to this important period in German history. Providing both a narrative of events at the time and an analysis of social and cultural developments across the period, Lynn Abrams examines the political, economic and social structures of the Empire. Including the latest research, the book also covers:how Bismarck consolidated his regimethe Wilhelmian periodthe factors that led to the outbreak of World War One.With a new introduction and updated further reading section – including a guide to useful websites – this book gives students the ideal introduction to this key period of German history.

Updated and expanded, this second edition of Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871–1918 is an accessible introduction to this important period in German history. Providing both a narrative of events at the time and an analysis of social and cultural developments across the period, Lynn Abrams examines the political, economic and social structures of the Empire. Including the latest research, the book also covers:how Bismarck consolidated his regimethe Wilhelmian periodthe factors that led to the outbreak of World War One.With a new introduction and updated further reading section – including a guide to useful websites – this book gives students the ideal introduction to this key period of German history.

Modern woman was made between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War. In this time, the women of Europe crafted new ideas about their sexuaity, motherhood, the home, the politics of femininity, and their working roles. They faced challenges about what a woman should be and how she should act.  From domestic ideology to women's suffrage, this book charts the contests for woman's identity in the epoch-shaping nineteenth century.

Shetland has a history unique in Europe, for over the past two centuries it was a place where women dominated the family, economy, and the cultural imagination. Women ran households and crofts without men. They maintained families and communities because men were absent. And they constructed in their minds an identity of themselves as 'liberated' long before organised feminism was invented. And yet, Shetland is a place which was made by the most masculine of societies - those of the Picts, Scots and above all the Vikings - and its contemporary identity still draws on the heroic exploits and sagas of medieval Norsemen. This book examines how against this tradition Shetland became a female place, and offers answers as to how, in this most isolated island community, the inhabitants transgressed and reversed their traditional gender roles. Reconstructing this 'woman's world' from fragments of cultural experience captured in written and oral sources, this book will appeal to scholars in the fields of social and cultural history, social anthropology, gender and women's studies.

The place of women in Shetland society is unique. In this isolated island group off the north of Scotland, women dominated the family, economy and the cultural imagination for 200 years. Here, women were numerically preponderant and economically vital. They maintained families and communities because men were absent. In their minds they constructed an identity of themselves as ‘liberated’ long before organised feminism was invented. It examines the opportunities and life experiences of women in a place where more of them worked and fewer got married than anywhere else in the British Isles. And it is about the relationship between myth-making and historical materiality and the ways in which the people of this northern archipelago have imagined their past. Reconstructing this ‘woman’s world’ from fragments of cultural experience captured in written and oral sources, the author recreates and explores Shetland using its inhabitants’ material experience and personal testimony.

Scottish history is undergoing a renaissance. Everyone agrees that an understanding of our nation’s history is integral to our experience of its present and the shaping of the future. But the story of Scotland’s past is being told with little reference to gendered identities. Not only are women largely missing from these grand narratives, but men’s experience has tended to be sublimated in intellectual, political and economic agendas. Neither femininities nor masculinities have been given much of a place in Scotland’s past or in the process of nation-making. Gender in Scottish History offers a new perspective on Scotland’s past since around 1700, viewing some of the main themes with a gendered perspective. It starts from the assumption that gender is integral to our understanding of the ways in which societies in the past were organised and that national histories have a tendency to be gender blind.Each chapter engages with one key theme from Scottish historiography, asking what happens when women are added to the story and how the story changes when the meanings of gendered understandings and assumptions are probed. Addressing politics, culture, religion, science, education, work, the family and identity, Gender in Scottish History proposes an alternative reading of the Scottish past which is both inclusive and recognisable.

Scottish history is undergoing a renaissance. Everyone agrees that an understanding of our nation’s history is integral to our experience of its present and the shaping of the future. But the story of Scotland’s past is being told with little reference to gendered identities. Not only are women largely missing from these grand narratives, but men’s experience has tended to be sublimated in intellectual, political and economic agendas. Neither femininities nor masculinities have been given much of a place in Scotland’s past or in the process of nation-making. Gender in Scottish History offers a new perspective on Scotland’s past since around 1700, viewing some of the main themes with a gendered perspective. It starts from the assumption that gender is integral to our understanding of the ways in which societies in the past were organised and that national histories have a tendency to be gender blind.Each chapter engages with one key theme from Scottish historiography, asking what happens when women are added to the story and how the story changes when the meanings of gendered understandings and assumptions are probed. Addressing politics, culture, religion, science, education, work, the family and identity, Gender in Scottish History proposes an alternative reading of the Scottish past which is both inclusive and recognisable.

Over the twentieth century Scots' lives changed in fast, dramatic and culturally significant ways. By examining their bodies, homes, working lives, rituals, beliefs and consumption, this volume exposes how the very substance of everyday life was composed, tracing both the intimate and the mass changes that the people endured. Using novel perspectives and methods, chapters range across the experiences of work, art and death, the way Scots conceived of themselves and their homes, and the way the 'old Scotland' of oppressive community rules broke down from mid-century as the country reinvented its everyday life and culture. This volume brings together leading cultural historians of twentieth-century Scotland to study the apparently mundane activities of people's lives, traversing the key spaces where daily experience is composed to expose the controversial personal and national politics that ritual and practice can generate. Key features: *Contains an overview of the material changes experienced by Scots in their everyday lives during the course of the century*Focuses on some of the key areas of change in everyday experience, from the way Scots spent their Sundays to the homes in which they lived, from the work they undertook to the culture they consumed and eventually the way they died. *Pays particular attention to identity as well as experience

Workers Culture in Imperial Germany represents the first alternative approach to the study of workers' culture in Imperial Germany. It is also the first comprehensive historical analysis of the emergence of Germany's modern leisure industry. The central concern of the book is the emergence of a distinct workers' culture which provided a disparate and heterogeneous working class with a focus of identity in an alien and hostile society. Lynn Abrams focuses on the leisure activities enjoyed by workers in the major cities of Bochum and Dusseldorf. She provides a comprehensive coverage of a whole range of popular amusements and recreations on offer including festivals, pubs, Tingel-Tangels, dance halls, clubs and cinema. The book is also a major contribution to the social history of working-class life in the nineteenth century, contributing to the debate over the role of a working class culture in Imperial Germany.

Modern woman was made between the French Revolution and the end of the First World War. In this time, the women of Europe crafted new ideas about their sexuaity, motherhood, the home, the politics of femininity, and their working roles. They faced challenges about what a woman should be and how she should act.  From domestic ideology to women's suffrage, this book charts the contests for woman's identity in the epoch-shaping nineteenth century.

This collection of essays examines the construction of gender norms in early modern and modern Germany.; The modes of reinforcement by the state, the church, the law and marriage, and the resistance to these norms by individuals, are central to each of the contributions.; It examines discourses of the body and sexuality and the relations between gender and power. Similarly, the usefulness of the "public/private paradigm" familiar to gender historians is further challenged.

In the wake of an unparalleled housing crisis at the end of the Second World War, Glasgow Corporation rehoused the tens of thousands of private tenants who were living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in unimproved Victorian slums. Adopting the designs, the materials and the technologies of modernity they built into the sky, developing high-rise estates on vacant sites within the city and on its periphery. This book uniquely focuses on the people's experience of this modern approach to housing, drawing on oral histories and archival materials to reflect on the long-term narrative and significance of high-rise homes in the cityscape. It positions them as places of identity formation, intimacy and well-being. With discussions on interior design and consumption, gender roles, children, the elderly, privacy, isolation, social networks and nuisance, Glasgow examines the connections between architectural design, planning decisions and housing experience to offer some timely and prescient observations on the success and failure of this very modern housing solution at a moment when high flats are simultaneously denigrated in the social housing sector while being built afresh in the private sector.Glasgow is aimed at an academic readership, including postgraduate students, scholars and researchers. It will be of interest to social, cultural and urban historians particularly interested in the United Kingdom.

Oral history is increasingly acknowledged as a key tool for anyone studying the history of the recent past, and Oral History Theory provides a comprehensive, systematic and accessible overview of this important field. Combining the study of theories drawn from disciplines ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis with the observations of practitioners and including extensive examples of oral history practice from around the world, this book constitutes the first integrated discussion of oral history theory.Structured around key themes such as the peculiarities of oral history, the study of the self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, memory, narrative, performance, power and trauma, each chapter provides a clear and user-friendly explanation of the various theoretical approaches, illustrating these with examples from the rich field of published oral history and making suggestions for the practicing oral historian. This second edition includes a new chapter on trauma and ethics, a preface discussing new developments in the field and updated glossary and further reading sections. Supplemented by a new companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/abrams) containing a comprehensive range of case studies, audio material and further resources, this book will be invaluable to experienced and novice oral historians, professionals, and students who are new to the discipline.

Oral history is increasingly acknowledged as a key tool for anyone studying the history of the recent past, and Oral History Theory provides a comprehensive, systematic and accessible overview of this important field. Combining the study of theories drawn from disciplines ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis with the observations of practitioners and including extensive examples of oral history practice from around the world, this book constitutes the first integrated discussion of oral history theory.Structured around key themes such as the peculiarities of oral history, the study of the self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, memory, narrative, performance, power and trauma, each chapter provides a clear and user-friendly explanation of the various theoretical approaches, illustrating these with examples from the rich field of published oral history and making suggestions for the practicing oral historian. This second edition includes a new chapter on trauma and ethics, a preface discussing new developments in the field and updated glossary and further reading sections. Supplemented by a new companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/abrams) containing a comprehensive range of case studies, audio material and further resources, this book will be invaluable to experienced and novice oral historians, professionals, and students who are new to the discipline.

The story of Scottish knitting: the first critical history and analysis of a local craft turned international icon.From Fair Isle patterning to Pringle jumpers, Scottish knitwear is internationally renowned and instantly recognizable. This open access study unpicks the distinctive place of knitting in the Scottish landscape, economy, and culture from the 19th century to today.Recent reappraisals of the industrial revolution and traditional craft economies, and the recent revival of hobby knitting during the Covid-19 pandemic, have raised new questions about the roles of social communities, sustainability and women’s domestic work in the textile industries. Tracing its story from raw material to final product, from home-spun clothes and crafts to luxury markets and industrial-scale production, Knitting in Scotland investigates the Scottish knitting trade’s remarkable survival across two centuries of economic and cultural modernization.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

Combining architectural and social history, this open access book tells for the first time the in-depth story of Scotland’s new towns.One of the most significant episodes in modern architectural, urban and social history, Scotland’s postwar new towns offered new housing, new ways of life and new jobs. Begun between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, the new towns – East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston and Irvine – were a key element of the planned Welfare State, attracting international attention and widespread publicity. These were places of architectural innovation, and economic and social change.Building Modern Scotland tells a new history of the new towns, combining architectural and social history to illustrate what was planned, what was built, and how these places were experienced by the communities who lived and worked in them. It positions the new towns at the heart of modern Scottish history, showing how they represented an ambition to make a modern, transformed nation. The book surveys each new town’s planning and design before turning to key topics such as housing, family life, work and opportunity, and community. Drawing on archives and oral history, the book will appeal to historians of modern architecture and design as well as readers interested in modern social history. It provides a new account of modern Scotland, its buildings, places and people, and argues that a better understanding of the new towns’ history and value should inform present-day decision-making.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Combining architectural and social history, this open access book tells for the first time the in-depth story of Scotland’s new towns.One of the most significant episodes in modern architectural, urban and social history, Scotland’s postwar new towns offered new housing, new ways of life and new jobs. Begun between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, the new towns – East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston and Irvine – were a key element of the planned Welfare State, attracting international attention and widespread publicity. These were places of architectural innovation, and economic and social change.Building Modern Scotland tells a new history of the new towns, combining architectural and social history to illustrate what was planned, what was built, and how these places were experienced by the communities who lived and worked in them. It positions the new towns at the heart of modern Scottish history, showing how they represented an ambition to make a modern, transformed nation. The book surveys each new town’s planning and design before turning to key topics such as housing, family life, work and opportunity, and community. Drawing on archives and oral history, the book will appeal to historians of modern architecture and design as well as readers interested in modern social history. It provides a new account of modern Scotland, its buildings, places and people, and argues that a better understanding of the new towns’ history and value should inform present-day decision-making.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’ has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of what masculinity actually means for men (and women) in a Scottish context. This interdisciplinary collection explores a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, examining the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour.How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romance, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men ‒ work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce ‒ the book also illustrates the range of masculinities which affected or were internalised by men. Together, they illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how more generally masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history.

Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’ has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of what masculinity actually means for men (and women) in a Scottish context. This interdisciplinary collection explores a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, examining the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour.How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romance, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men ‒ work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce ‒ the book also illustrates the range of masculinities which affected or were internalised by men. Together, they illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how more generally masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history.