You can manage bookmarks using lists, please log in to your user account for this.
Media type:
E-Article
Title:
THE SELF AND SELF-HELP: WOMEN PURSUING AUTONOMY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN
Contributor:
Abrams, Lynn
Published:
Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019
Published in:
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (2019), Seite 201-221
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1017/s0080440119000094
ISSN:
0080-4401;
1474-0648
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
ABSTRACTIn the history of post-war womanhood in Britain, women's self-help organisations are credited with little significance save for ‘helping mothers to dotheirwork more happily’. This paper suggests that the do-it-yourself impetus of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded as integral to understanding how millions of women negotiated a route towards personal growth and autonomy. Organisations like the National Housewives’ Register, the National Childbirth Trust and the Pre-School Playgroups Association emerged from the grass roots in response to the conundrum faced by women who experienced dissatisfaction and frustration in their domestic role. I argue that these organisations offered thousands of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence and that far from being insufficiently critical of dominant models of care, women's self-help operating at the level of the everyday was to be one of the foundations of what would become, by the 1970s, the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives.