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Review: Black Market Britain, 1939–1955. By Mark Roodhouse. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-958845-9, £55 (hardback)
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Female philanthropy in the interwar world: between self and other
No full textFemale philanthropy was at the heart of transformative thinking about society and the role of individuals in the interwar period. In Britain, in the aftermath of the First World War, professionalization; the authority of the social sciences; mass democracy; internationalism; and new media sounded the future and, for many, the death knell of elite practices of benevolence. Eve Colpus tells a new story about a world in which female philanthropists reshaped personal models of charity for modern projects of social connectedness, and new forms of cultural and political encounter.Centering the stories of four remarkable British-born women - Evangeline Booth; Lettice Fisher; Emily Kinnaird; and Muriel Paget - Colpus recaptures the breadth of the social, cultural and political influence of women's philanthropy upon practices of social activism. Female Philanthropy in the Interwar World is not only a new history of women's civic agency in the interwar period, but also a study of how female philanthropists explored approaches to identification and cultural difference that emphasized friendship in relation to interwar modernity. Richly detailed, the book's perspective on women's social interventionism offers a new reading of the centrality of personal relationships to philanthropy that can inform alternative models of giving today
Women, service and self-actualization in inter-war Britain
No full textThis article challenges historians’ concentration on the self in the interwar years with relation to elite women’s lives. It argues that the focus on the interior self has both diminished the importance of service in constructions of women’s identities between the wars, and overlooked how ideas of service were changing in this period to accommodate new thinking about women’s personal psychological development. The argument is developed in the context of four broader contemporary debates: the redrawing of late-Victorian ideas of goodness, social purpose and happiness by university-educated women in response to women’s professionalization; second-generation suffragists’ critiques of women’s family roles and sex; interwar debates about mass democracy and the ‘voluntary citizen’; and the purpose of women’s voluntary organizations. Readdressing writings by celebrated figures Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Macadam and Maude Royden alongside women who have received less attention — Violet Butler, Lettice Fisher, Grace Hadow, Emily Kinnaird and Christine Jope-Slade — the article examines how educated and elite women recalibrated service in the years after the First World War to emphasize the mutuality of self-fulfilment and community development, not self-sacrifice or the neglect of the self. My focus is on the intellectual, moral and psychological tensions women confronted in this process. The article’s contribution is in its retrieval of service as a vehicle for negotiating competing ideas of the interwar feminine self, in which feminist perspectives on self-reliance and personal initiative were tested by forms of women’s self-expression in conformity with social and spiritual models of companionship and inter-personal encounter
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