Angela Davis

Modern motherhood : women and family in England, c. 1945-2000

This book examines women’s experiences of motherhood in England in the years between 1945 and 2000. Based on a new body of 160 oral history interviews, the book offers the first comprehensive historical study of the experience of motherhood in the second half of the twentieth century. Motherhood is an area where a number of discourses and practices meet. The book therefore forms a thematic study looking at aspects of mothers’ lives such as education, health care, psychology, labour market trends and state intervention. Looking through the prism of motherhood provides a way of understanding the complex social changes that have taken place in the post-war world. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the field of twentieth-century British social history. However it will also be of interest to scholars in related fields and a general readership with an interest in British social history, and the history of family and community in modern Britain.

Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting

(1978). Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting. The Black Scholar: Vol. 9, Blacks & The Sexual Revolution, pp. 24-30.

Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: feminist history and the spatial turn

In the last two decades, historians have increasingly sought to understand how environments, ‘built’ and otherwise, architectural surroundings, landscapes, and conceptual ‘places’ and ‘spaces’ (the terms are not synonymous) have affected the nature and scope of political power, cultural production and social experience. The impact of Jürgen Habermas (whose hugely influential work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, was translated into English in 1989) is readily apparent in historians’ responses to these themes. Habermas’s attention to the ways in which the new urban spaces of eighteenth-century Britain created an oppositional counter-public was a defining text in encouraging historians to consider the precise significance of sites of cultural and political

‘Oh no, nothing, we didn’t learn anything’: sex education and the preparation of girls for motherhood, c.1930–1970

This article investigates how girls were educated about sex, pregnancy and childbirth during the years 1930 to 1970. Based on the results of 92 oral‐history interviews with Oxfordshire women, it explores how national debates surrounding sex education influenced what girls in Oxfordshire were taught. In addition, it examines how successful the women themselves thought this education had been in equipping them for maternity and whether they believed women could indeed be educated for motherhood.

Fighting for her Future: Reflections on Human Rights 1 and Women's Prisons in the Netherlands

Part of a larger study of race and gender politics in womens prisons within a transnational, comparative context, this paper is based on a series of interviews conducted with imprisoned women in the Netherlands. We argue that in relation to the US system, the relatively progressive character of the Dutch prison system emanates from its consistent deployment of human rights principles in structuring conditions of custody. We further suggest that such a human rights perspective, combined with strategies of prison reduction and eventual abolition can help to radicalise prison activism in the US.

Belonging and ‘Unbelonging’: Jewish refugee and survivor women in 1950s Britain

ABSTRACT This article analyses the life stories of female Jewish refugees and survivors in 1950s Britain in order to explore their relationship with the existing Jewish community and wider society. The paper is based on an analysis of twenty-one oral history testimonies from the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust collection held at the British library. Around 50,000 Jewish refugees from Central Europe came to Britain in the 1930s after fleeing from Hitler. In addition, a relatively small number of camp survivors and former hidden children settled in the country after the war; the Board of Deputies of British Jews Demographic Unit estimates the figure at 2000. This article considers how these refugee and survivor women tried to find a place for themselves within 1950s Britain. Looking at their experiences of arrival, work and home, it reflects upon the discrimination and hostility they faced, and they ways they tried to deal with this. Finally it discusses what this meant for their sense of belonging or ‘unbelonging’.

Gendered perspectives on men’s changing familial roles in postwar England, c. 1950-1990

This article examines the ways in which men and women remember men’s place in, and experiences of, family life in postwar England during a period when a new ideal of fatherhood arguably emerged. Based on forty-four oral history testimonies with men and women, this article adds a new dimension to existing literature in gender history by closely examining men and women’s perspectives on the same issues. Focusing on decisions around family planning, experiences of pregnancy and birth, and the division of labour in the home, the article analyses how men and women understood their respective roles as parents-to-be and as new parents; how they negotiated the expectations of those around them; and the extent to which the gendering of childcare responsibilities persisted in the decades between 1950 and 1990

Oral History and Women’s Accounts of Infertility in Postwar England

This chapter considers women’s accounts of infertility told during oral history interviews about their lives as mothers in postwar England. In telling their stories of how they became mothers, many women also spoke of the fertility problems they encountered in achieving their desired family size, or their inability to do so. However, the theme of infertility was often ‘hidden’ within women’s narratives. As these women were the biological mothers to at least one child they rarely presented themselves as experiencing infertility and downplayed the difficulties they had in conceiving their children, whether their first child or subsequent children. The chapter also reveals the fatalistic approach that women took to fertility problems and their ambivalence about seeking medical help. Powerlessness and helplessness characterized the narratives of both women who could be said to have achieved their desired family size and those who did not.

Wartime women giving birth: Narratives of pregnancy and childbirth, Britain c. 1939–1960

Highlights • Women’s maternity narratives are complex and multilayered.• Wartime tropes were central to their birth stories.• Their accounts reflect the association between maternity and military service.

Introduction to “Transforming pregnancy since 1900” ☆

Around 1900, few pregnant women in Western Europe or North America had any contact with a medical practitioner before going into labour. By the end the twentieth century, the hospitalisation of childbirth, the legalisation of abortion and a host of biomedical technologies from the Pill and IVF to obstetric ultrasound and prenatal diagnosis had dramatically extended the reach of science and medicine into human reproduction. This shift has a long and complex history which of course predates the introduction of twentieth-century innovations. Nevertheless, novel medical interventions such as ultrasound, many commentators assert, have transformed ‘the very experience of pregnancy’ (Petchesky, 1987). This special section originated in a workshop held in Cambridge in 2012. It stemmed from the observation that, despite a wealth of historical, sociological and anthropological writing on reproductive health and healthcare, we have a relatively insecure grasp of profound transformations in the science and management of pregnancy since the turn of the twentieth century. Existing historical research has been concerned primarily with the politics of childbirth and fertility control or framed within studies of the emergence of social policies focused on maternal and child welfare. By explicitly thematising continuity and change, the workshop aimed both to look beyond the most intensively studied topics and to contribute to ongoing reassessments of the ‘medicalisation’ of pregnancy as a historical process.