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example, the critic and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster considered that suburban semi-detached houses ‘will inevitability become the slums of the future’.6 He was, of course, wrong. By paying too much attention to the musings of these well-educated and privileged commentators, we miss the reality of interwar suburban life. This newly formed lower middle class did not have a powerful voice, so we were left for much of the twentieth century with the results of intellectual prejudice, a negative view of suburbia that was very evident in literature, popular music, radio and
domestic relatives of working men. Such were the majority of Victorian women employees (Verdon 2002 ; Clarke 1997 ; Roberts 1995 ; Lown 1990 ). However, analysis of the contingencies of middle-class women employees (those whose employment required the purchase of education or training, as well as contradicting the other definitive circumstances of woman manual workers), establishes that the key distinction between the exigencies of male and female employment lay in the impact of women's domestic lives and the lives of children upon their
which Carnival was again allowed after a four-year wartime ban. From the outset the competition played host to the battle for culture between white-creole elites and middle-class nationalists that steered Trinidad’s passage through the ‘crisis of decolonisation’. As in Jamaica before the war, the beauty competition began in Trinidad in 1946 as a projection of the primacy of white-creole identity, intended to show the mastery of the creole elite, rather than the British, over leadership and power in the emergent Trinidadian nation. However, middle-class nationalists of
-Man’, and ‘The “Blue Jacket’s” Sampler’.2 These employments were no doubt intended to represent the magazine’s readership, but they also offer valuable insights into the ways in which working men were imagined, consumed, and deployed in constructions of manliness. Middle-class men wrote and illustrated the British Workman, so this chapter explores the role of such representations for their own social group. As such, it returns to where this book began, with desire for the male emotionalised body and the gender it embodied. Working men’s erotic power lay in their
Introduction This chapter contextualises the work-based identity insecurity experienced by middle-class professionals in the public sector among the general identity-making problems of postmodernity and other cultural determinants of the group. The aim is to illuminate how the call to adapt quickly and constantly to the changing demands of the profit-hungry and cost
16 Marco Oberti and Edmond Préteceille Urban segregation, inequalities and local welfare: the challenges of neoliberalisation The central argument of this chapter is twofold: the transformation of social structures and that of welfare-state regimes have to be considered together; urban inequalities and segregation are crucial in relating these two processes. The first part discusses the relevance of social class analysis in the face of the fragmentation produced by changing work relations, the growth of the service sector, the expansion of the middle classes
the lead. It was of little surprise that the instigators of the pan-village activism described in the story happened to be a middle-class vicar’s daughter and her governess. Peggy, almost instantaneously, becomes an articulate and impassioned League advocate, using her domestic authority to win over the housemaid before calling on Mrs Tom Smith (the bedridden aunt) at home in her cottage, and explaining the League by drawing a careful analogy with the Co-operative Movement: ‘You know what co-operation is, don’t you?’ ‘Why, yes, miss, I knows what the Co-op store is
weaker as the unions were forced into retreat. The divisive politics of the 1980s fuelled hatred on both sides. At a time when class language and analysis were being suppressed in public discourse, Thatcherism was wielding a class politics from above. Just at the moment when turbulent change was radically transforming the working class, it was being silenced. Indeed, many class analyses subsequently concentrated upon middle-class individuality within the marketplace. It became less tenable to unite a diversity of groups under a class banner as gay, black and women
pubs’, she wrote in a collection of essays, aptly named Pub: A Celebration. Southern suburban pubs became especially popular with middle-class housewives out on shopping journeys, with a Bloody Mary ordered as a reviver. Sherry and gossip at a pub, so her friends said, became a welcome substitute for coffee and biscuits at a café. The old regime persisted strongest the further London receded from view. Special ladies’ lounges – restricted to women only – still flourished in the North, where she detected ‘a certain smug satisfaction that … women know their place and
As scholars such as Rohan Maitzen and Alison Booth have argued, historical women were habitually used as gender role models for Victorian and Edwardian girls and young women, frequently in the attempt to promote domestic ideology and ‘traditional’ gender roles to middle-class audiences. 1 To date, scholarship has tended to focus most emphatically on the representation of Tudor women such as Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. 2