Annmarie Hughes

Introduction: Gender and Generations: women and life cycles

Taylor and Francis RWHR_A_556317.sgm 10.1080/09612025.2011.556317 Women’s History Review 0961-2 25 (pri t)/1747-583X (online) Original rt cle 2 1 & Francis 0000Ap il 201 D KatieBa cl y k.barcl y@qub.ac.uk The 17th Annual Conference of the Women’s History Network (UK) was hosted by the Centre for Gender History, University of Glasgow on 5–7 September 2008. The Centre for Gender History was formed in 2008 and developed from the recognition that the School of History at Glasgow University has the largest concentration

Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919-1939

This work offers a unique contribution to gender and Scottish history breaking new ground on several fronts: there is no history of inter-war women in Scotland, very little labour or popular political history and virtually nothing published on women, the home and family. This book is a history of women in the period which integrates class and gender history as well as linking the public and private spheres. Using a gendered approach to history it transforms and shifts our knowledge of the Scottish past, unearthing the previously unexplored role which women played in inter-war socialist politics, the General Strike and popular political protest. It re-evaluates these areas and demonstrates the ways in which gender shaped the experience of class and class struggle. Importantly, the book also explores the links between the public and private spheres and addresses the concept of masculinity as well as femininity and pays particular reference to domestic violence. The strength of the book is the ways in which it illuminates the complex interconnections of culture and economic and social structure. Although the research is based on Scottish evidence, it also uses material to address key debates in gender history and labour history which have wider relevance and will appeal to gender historians, labour historians and social and cultural historians as well as social scientists.

State Regulation, Family Breakdown, and Lone Motherhood: The Hidden Costs of World War I in Scotland.

Using a range of parish records, records from the Registrar General of Scotland, charity organizations, and media reports, this article contributes to the historiography which evaluates the effects of World War I in Britain as well as the history of lone mothers and their children. It highlights how during the war, women, especially lone mothers, made significant gains through the welfare system, changing approaches to illegitimacy and the plentiful nature of women’s work but also how in doing so this brought them under greater surveillance by the state, local parishes, and charity organizations. Moreover, as this article will demonstrate, many of the gains made by women were short-lived and in fact the war contributed to high levels of family breakdown and gendered and intergenerational poverty endured by lone mothers and their children.

Fragmented feminists? the influence of class and political identity in relations between the Glasgow and West of Scotland suffrage society and the independent labour party in the West of Scotland, c. 1919-1932

Abstract The strained relations between feminist organisations and the labour movement have often been attributed to the male dominance of the labour movement rather than the influence of class and political loyalties. This article questions that approach. Using the minutes of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society, labour movement organisations, and Glasgow City Council and newspaper accounts, it examines relations between the Independent Labour Party in the west of Scotland and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society. These highlight how the class and political loyalties of feminists from this organisation were as destructive to any potential feminist and non-feminist alliances which would improve the lives of working-class women as the ‘male dominance’ of the Independent Labour Party.