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Along with the suffrage campaign, women's liberation activism is one of the most renowned aspects of women's political history. The women's liberation movement (WLM) has often been linked with the 'big city'. This is the first book-length account of the women's liberation movement in Scotland, which charts the origins and development of this important social movement of the post-1945 period. In doing so, it reveals the inventiveness and fearlessness of feminist activism, while also pointing towards the importance of considering the movement from the local and grassroots perspectives. This book has two central arguments. First, it presses for a more representative historiography in which material from other places outside of the large women's liberation centres are included. Second, it highlights that case studies not only enrich our knowledge about women's liberation but they also challenge the way the British movement has been portrayed by both participants and historians. The book commences with contextualising the subject and summarising recent research into the movement in the United Kingdom. It looks at the roots of the movement by offering portrayals of the women who went on to form women's liberation groups in Scotland. The book then analyses the phenomenon of 'consciousness-raising' (CR) and the part it had to play in the WLM's development. The focus then moves to exploring where, when and why women's liberation groups emerged. The campaigns taken up by the WLM were to defend abortion rights and campaign against violence against women.
Loyalists and cut short by the chairman of the meeting.10 The absence of effective unity propelled Leo Russell’s attempt to establish an extra-parliamentary, non-partisan challenge to pro-entry organisations. The resulting AntiCommon Market Council, founded in late 1962, conceded that opposition efforts had been ‘too amateur – to counter and counter-attack’ with factual arguments or thoughtful This often led to unlikely combinations. To cite but one example, a meeting at Caxton Hall in London on 28 September 1961 was planned to include the Forward Britain Movement, League
conducted on the streets rather than in parliaments. The parliamentary nature of the devolution campaign, therefore, would not have interested many active feminists, although smaller women’s liberation groups, like the Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence, did discuss it. However, the two issues should not be confused. Women’s liberation activists in Scotland could feel that the British movement was dominated by those in the South of England and that they had different issues to face and campaign on, while still displaying ambivalence about the devolution issue
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the opponents of Britain's first attempt to join the European Economic Community (EEC) between the announcement of Harold Macmillan's new policy initiative in July 1961 and General de Gaulle's veto of Britain's application for membership in January 1963. In particular, it examines the role of national identity in shaping both the formulation and articulation of arguments put forward by these opponents of Britain's policy. To date, studies of Britain's unsuccessful bid for entry have focused on high political analysis of diplomacy and policy formulation. In most accounts, only passing reference is made to domestic opposition. This book redresses the balance, providing a complete depiction of the opposition movement and a distinctive approach that proceeds from a ‘low-political’ viewpoint. As such, it emphasizes protest and populism of the kind exercised by, among others, Fleet Street crusaders at the Daily Express, pressure groups such as the Anti-Common Market League and Forward Britain Movement, expert pundits like A.J.P. Taylor, Sir Arthur Bryant and William Pickles, as well as constituency activists, independent parliamentary candidates, pamphleteers, letter writers and maverick MPs. In its consideration of a group largely overlooked in previous accounts, the book provides essential insights into the intellectual, structural, populist and nationalist dimensions of early Euroscepticism.
Madchester may have been born at the Haçienda in the summer of 1988, but the city had been in creative ferment for almost a decade prior to the rise of Acid House. The End-of-the-Century Party is the definitive account of a generational shift in popular music and youth culture, what it meant and what it led to. First published right after the Second Summer of Love, it tells the story of the transition from New Pop to the Political Pop of the mid-1980s and its deviant offspring, Post-Political Pop. Resisting contemporary proclamations about the end of youth culture and the rise of a new, right-leaning conformism, the book draws on interviews with DJs, record company bosses, musicians, producers and fans to outline a clear transition in pop thinking, a move from an obsession with style, packaging and synthetic sounds to content, socially conscious lyrics and a new authenticity.
This edition is framed by a prologue by Tara Brabazon, which asks how we can reclaim the spirit, energy and authenticity of Madchester for a post-youth, post-pop generation. It is illustrated with iconic photographs by Kevin Cummins.
Women Art Workers constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, this book instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women – working in fields such as woodwork, textiles, sculpture, painting, and metalwork – navigated new authoritative roles as ‘art workers’ by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures so often considered in isolation: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial, and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, and a wide range of unstudied advertisements, letters, manuals, photographs, and calling cards, Women Art Workers elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles: guild halls, exhibitions, homes, studios, workshops, and the cityscape. Shattering the traditional periodisation of the movement as ‘Victorian’, this research reveals that the early twentieth century was a critical juncture at which women art workers became ever more confident in promoting their own vision of the Arts and Crafts. Shaped by their precarious gendered positions, they opened up the movement to a wider range of social backgrounds and interests, and redirected the movement’s radical potential into contemporary women-centred causes.
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
the North Atlantic); overtly neo-Nazi groups such as the National Action Party and the British Movement ; and even shops linked to this broad movement in the 1980s, such as Rucksack ‘n’ Rifle, an outfit based in Wrexham that was set up by former British Movement leader Michael McLaughlin to target the survivalist movement. Several splinter groups from the National Front had emerged by this time
movement combined personal issues with political discussions and helped to raise awareness about domestic violence, rape and abortion, amongst many other issues. Indeed the WLM was important in shaping and contributing to public discussions about women’s role which led to the implementation of a raft of ‘progressive’ legislation throughout the 1970s, including in Britain the Equal Pay Act (1970), the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) and the Domestic Violence Act (1976).5 Beyond this basic narrative there is little detail about the British movement. In contrast to the
building new and larger stores in locations which reflected changing population patterns and transport technologies. Although the co-operative movement represented Britain’s largest retailer in the 1950s, it faced two significant challenges in responding to this shifting commercial environment. The first of these was Crises and co-operative credibility 287 structural. In the 1950s, the British movement was made up of 1,000 or so independent co-operative societies, loosely tied together through federal arrangements. Central organisations like the Co-operative Union had