E1 Rags to Riches? Social Mobility and a History of Women’s Working Lives

From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives,
featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians.

The first episode of this series will offer a brief history of women’s working lives from the early modern industrious household, through the industrial revolution, to the ‘return to work’ during WW2, and the push for gender equality. We’ll be joined by Dr. Eve Worth who will also talk to us about social mobility, adult education, and the occupational trajectories of women in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

Amy Edwards
Amy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s.

  / somsproject  
  / somsdramyedwards  
@somsproject.bsky.social
Book: Amy Edwards, Are We Rich Yet: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (University California Press, 2022)
For more about the project: 'The Secret of My Success': Women and Self-employment in Britain, 1970-2000

Dr Eve Worth
Eve is a social and women’s historian of contemporary Britain based at the University of Exeter. She is particularly interested in women’s experience of social mobility and class, ranging from working class to the increasing public role of elite women in Britain since 1945. Through her research she also explores women’s changing relationship to employment and education. Her first book The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. She is also a member of the Department of Work and Pensions’ Methods Advisory Group. And today we are lucky to have her joining us to discuss her research on social mobility, and the importance of women’s work for helping us to understand the major social and economic changes that Britain has gone through in the past 100 years or so.

See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice
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