Penny Summerfield – författare

Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past.

Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice.

Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.

Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It introduces students and researchers to scholarly approaches to diaries, letters, oral history and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past.

Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of subjective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world within which narrators lived. However, sources such as letters, diaries, memoirs and oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, concerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability, and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their transformation of historical practice.

Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by historians.

Featuring essays by leading feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, this key text explores the latest developments in autobiographical studies.

The collection is structured around the inter-linked concepts of genre, inter-subjectivity and memory. Whilst exemplifying the very different levels of autobiographical activity going on in feminist studies, the contributions chart a movement from autobiography as genre to autobiography as cultural practice, and from the analysis of autobiographical texts to a preoccupation with autobiography as method.

Featuring essays by leading feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, this key text explores the latest developments in autobiographical studies.

The collection is structured around the inter-linked concepts of genre, inter-subjectivity and memory. Whilst exemplifying the very different levels of autobiographical activity going on in feminist studies, the contributions chart a movement from autobiography as genre to autobiography as cultural practice, and from the analysis of autobiographical texts to a preoccupation with autobiography as method.

The Second World War is often seen as a period of emancipation, because of the influx of women into paid work, and because the state took steps to relieve women of domestic work.

This study challenges such a picture. The state approached the removal of women from the domestic sphere with extreme caution, in spite of the desperate need for women’s labour in war work. Women’s own preferences were frequently neglected or distorted in the search for a compromise between production and patriarchy. However, the enduring practices of paying women less and treating them as an inferior category of workers led to growth in the numbers and proportions of women employed after the war in many areas of work.

Penny Summerfield concludes that the war accelerated the segregation of women in ''inferior'' sectors of work, and inflated the expectation that working women would bear the double burden without a redistribution of responsibility for the domestic sphere between men, women and the state.

First published in 1984, this is an important book for students of history, sociology and women’s studies at all levels.

The Second World War is often seen as a period of emancipation, because of the influx of women into paid work, and because the state took steps to relieve women of domestic work.

This study challenges such a picture. The state approached the removal of women from the domestic sphere with extreme caution, in spite of the desperate need for women’s labour in war work. Women’s own preferences were frequently neglected or distorted in the search for a compromise between production and patriarchy. However, the enduring practices of paying women less and treating them as an inferior category of workers led to growth in the numbers and proportions of women employed after the war in many areas of work.

Penny Summerfield concludes that the war accelerated the segregation of women in ''inferior'' sectors of work, and inflated the expectation that working women would bear the double burden without a redistribution of responsibility for the domestic sphere between men, women and the state.

First published in 1984, this is an important book for students of history, sociology and women’s studies at all levels.

Originally published in 1987, Out of the Cage brings vividly to life the experiences of working women from all social groups in the two World Wars.

Telling a fascinating story, the authors emphasise what the women themselves have had to say, in diaries, memoirs, letters and recorded interviews about the call up, their personal reactions to war, their feelings about pay and the company at work, the effects of war on their health, their relations with men and their home lives; they speak too about how demobilisation affected them, and how they spent the years between two World Wars.