Family, Sexuality and Social Relations in Past Times – serie

A Woman's Place is based upon Elizabeth Roberts's interviews with 160 elderly people from the towns of Barrow, Lancaster and Preston. They recall their memories of family life as children, youths and adults in the period between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War. A Woman's Place shows working-class women to be conscious of, and secure in, the separate, private sphere of home and family, with little feeling of male oppression, but more of class oppression and economic injustice to man and woman alike. A woman's key place within the family as budget manager and domestic decision taker was widely recognized. It was, however, a position won at great cost. The hazards of childbirth, the grueling physical routines of washing, cleaning and cooking, the necessity of undertaking part-time, or (in Preston especially) full-time paid employment to boost the family's meager income, were the coin with which that role was bought. This hard female experience from childhood to motherhood is carefully and sensitively recorded, and the oral evidence supported and elucidated by documentary material from a wide range of local and national sources.Elizabeth Roberts's classic work in the oral history of the family is now reissued to coincide with the publication of Women and Families to which it is a direct prequel. Taken together the two books provide an unrivaled picture of almost a century of social change.

This is an account of the lives of the families and the servants of the British country house from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the onset of the Great War. It is a pioneering history based on contemporary records, diaries, private and public autobiographies, and on the childhood recollections of living descendants. Never before have the intimacies of life above and below stairs been depicted with such clarity and vividness. Country house family and servants were the two elites of British society and this was the period of their greatest prosperity. They were closely reliant on each other. 'Our servants and we are all members of a large family, who cannot get on independently of each other,' Lady Jenne wrote in 1892. The omnipresence of the servants affected every aspect of the family's behavior and the family shared the lives of the servants: the country house was a community. The power base of the nation's political establishment, it was also home - a tangible symbol of lineage, permanence and stability, embodying in its fabric, decoration and ritual the accumulations and memories of successive generations.The book is illustrated with rare contemporary photographs, is fully referenced, has a wide ranging bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and is comprehensively indexed. Its evocation of a style of life and ways of living that have now largely vanished will be of equal interest to scholar, student and general reader.

This is an account of three English working-class communities in England from 1940 to 1970. The story is told through the words and memories of those who lived through it. The book is at once vivid, moving and eye-opening.