Women and Work Culture by Louise A. Jackson Krista Cowman

Author:Louise A. Jackson, Krista Cowman [Louise A. Jackson, Krista Cowman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780754650508
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2005-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

YOUTH

Chapter 6

‘You’d the Feeling You Wanted to Help’: Young Women, Employment and the Family in Inter-war England

Selina Todd

Entering paid employment was a fact of life for most young women reaching the end of their compulsory schooling in inter-war England, with approximately 85 per cent of those who left elementary school going straight into paid work.1 Over 60 per cent of young women between the school leaving age- 12 prior to 1921 and 14 thereafter-and 25, the average age of first marriage for women, were in full-time employment. Despite this, few studies of young women’s work in inter-war England have been undertaken.2 This is largely explained by women’s short working lives. Their entry to employment was frequently attributed by contemporaries to their own lack of discernment and desire for spending money; young women allegedly treated their employment as, in the words of J.B. Priestley, ‘a dreamy interlude between childhood and marriage’.3 That young women’s employment patterns were shaped primarily by personal consumption patterns has not been questioned by the limited historiography on youth, which has concentrated on the emergence of the youthful consumer, preceding the development of mass youth culture in the 1950s.4

This chapter questions that representation, suggesting that employment profoundly shaped social, economic and cultural aspects of young women’s lives. It focuses particularly on the importance of familial need in shaping young women’s entry to the labour force and employment choices, the impact of their employment upon their family relations and household role, and on the importance of wage-earning in the construction of youthful culture and identity. It suggests that young women’s labour force participation and employment patterns were primarily shaped by household need; it argues that the transition from school to work did not mark a simple shift from dependency to independence; and it builds on local case studies undertaken by Alexander, Roberts and Sarsby in arguing that the demands of the labour market on the working-class household shaped a distinctive, working-class, youthful, feminine identity.5

In illuminating the links between economic conditions and the creation of cultural and social identity, this chapter draws on employment and earnings data provided by the Census and government records, on contemporary social surveys, and on 59 testimonies of women who were themselves young workers in inter-war England. Distinctions are drawn between juvenile girls and boys (those aged above the school leaving age but below 18) and young adult women and men (aged between 18 and 24) where necessary, although the majority of the study is concerned with young women across this age range. Personal testimonies have been selected from published autobiographies and archival life history collections, in order to construct a national sample. While the historian must engage as critically with life history as with other source material – and conclusions presented here are never exclusively based upon these testimonies – they are nevertheless valuable, both for the vivid recollections of youthful experience that they offer, and because they demonstrate that to many women, paid work retrospectively appeared central to their life experience.

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