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ABSTRACT
This paper makes a major intervention in the historiography of elites through analysis of the experience of women occupational elites born in post-war Britain. The paper draws on a new set of oral history interviews recently conducted with women born in the post-war decades with an entry in Who’s Who which is the leading biographical dictionary of ‘noteworthy and influential’ people in the UK. The women we interviewed were all highly occupationally successful and those analysed here also attended one of twelve elite girls’ schools. This article argues that our interviewees can be separated into two distinct post-war cohorts: one born between early 1940s and mid-1950s and the other born late 1950s to late 1960s. The shape and structure of the cohort’s trajectories were different, their relationship to their careers were different, and, even though both groups faced sexual discrimination and unequal divisions of labour, the nature of these gendered inequalities changed too. By foregrounding elite women within this shifting historical context, this article illuminates broader trends in both classed and gendered experience and how this related to the changing nature of the economy in recent history.
Acknowledgments
Firstly, we would like to thank our interviewees for their time and giving us an insight into their fascinating life histories. Thank you also to Janet Howarth for the invaluable discussions about women’s elite education. We appreciated Helen McCarthy reading a draft, and the article is much better for her comments. Maddie Sheldon provided excellent research assistant support on this article. The wider research project ‘Changing Elites’ was funded by the European Research Council Horizon 2020.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. See for example W.D Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London, 1981); David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London, 1990).
2. Mike Savage. “Introduction to elites: From the ‘problematic of the proletariat’ to class analysis of wealth elites.” The Sociological Review 63, (2015): 233–234.
3. Bruno Cousin, Shamus Khan and Ashley Mears. “Theoretical and Methodological Pathways for Research on Elites.” Socio-Economic Review 16, no. 2 (2018): 225–249.
4. Luna Glucksberg, “A Gendered Ethnography of Elites.” Focaal 81, (2018): 16–28.
5. This focus on elite women who are not employed is also analysed in Laura Clancy and Hannah Yelin. “Introduction to Special Issue: Race, Royalty and Meghan Markle: Elites, Inequalities and A Woman in the Public Eye.” Women’s Studies International Forum 84, (2021).
6. Helen McCarthy. “Women, Marriage and Work in the British Diplomatic Service.” Women’s History Review 23, no. 6 (2014): 853–873.
7. Figures calculated by the ‘Changing Elites’ project, University of Oxford.
8. Ibid.
9. See for example Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood (London, 2020); Eve Worth and Laura Paterson, “’How is she going to manage with the children?’ Organizational Labour, Working and Mothering in Britain, c.1960–90.” Past and Present, Supplement 15, (2020): 318–343; Dolly Smith Wilson. “A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain.” Twentieth Century British History 17, no. 2 (2006): 206–229.
10. This is a method that has been discussed in detail by the interviewer before, see Eve Worth, The Welfare State Generation: Women, Class and Agency in Britain since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2022).
11. Emily Peirson-Webber, “Mining Men: Reflections on Masculinity and Oral History during the Coronavirus Pandemic.” History Workshop Journal 92, (2021): 242–250.
12. Eve Worth, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, “Is there an Old Girls’ Network? Girls’ Schools and Recruitment to the British Elite.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 44, no. 1 (2023): 1–25.
13. Worth et al. “Is there an Old Girls’ Network?”.
14. Lynn Abrams. “Liberating the Female Self: Epiphanies, Conflict and Coherence in the Life Stories of Postwar British Women.” Social History 39, no. 1 (2014): 14–35; Worth, The Welfare State Generation.
15. Mike Savage and Magne Flemmen. “Life Narratives and Personal Identity: The End of Linear Mobility?.” 16, no. 1 (2019): 98; see also Jane Elliott, ‘Talkin bout my generation: Perceptions of Generational Belonging Amongst the 1958 Cohort.” Sociological Research Online 18, no. 4 (2013).
16. Interview with Elise.
17. Interview with Alexandra.
18. Interview with Rebecca.
19. Interview with Karen.
20. Interview with Sarah.
21. Interview with Janet.
22. Interview with Elise.
23. Interview with Fiona.
24. There was a strong flow of migration of white British subjects to colonial territories in this period, Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Cornell, 1997), 25; Interview with Mieke.
25. Interview with Judith.
26. Interview with Caroline.
27. Interview with Andrea.
28. Ysenda Maxstone Graham, Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools c.1939–79 (London, 2017), 266.
29. Interview with Sally.
30. Interview with Patricia.
31. Interview with Victoria.
32. Ibid.
33. Interview with Alison.
34. Interview with Sarah.
35. Ibid.
36. Interview with Alison.
37. Interview with Fiona.
38. Int Interview with Alison.
39. Janet Howarth, ‘Women’ in Brian Harrison, The History of the University of Oxford: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1994), 345.
40. Carol Dyhouse, “Troubled Identities: Gender and Status in the History of the Mixed College in English Universities since 1945.” Women’s History Review 12, no. 2 (2003): 174.
41. We are indebted to conversations with Janet Howarth for this insight.
42. Interview with Melanie.
43. Interview with Fiona.
44. Interview with Abigail.
45. Howarth, ‘Women’, 353.
46. Interview with Janet.
47. Interview with Alexandra.
48. Interview with Melanie.
49. Ibid.
50. Interview with Patricia.
51. Interview with Laura.
52. Helen Glew, Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council (Manchester, 2016).
53. Worth et al, ‘Is there an Old Girls’ Network?’, 11.
54. See for example Interview with Caroline.
55. Rhona Rappoport and Robert Rappoport. “The Dual Career Family: A Variant Pattern and Social Change.” Human Relations, 22, no. 1 (1969): 3–30.
56. See Worth, The Welfare State Generation; Abrams ‘Liberating the Female Self’.
57. Interview with Celia.
58. Ibid.
59. Interview with Alexandra.
60. Interview with Victoria.
61. Ibid.
62. Interview with Elise.
63. He does not have an entry in Who’s Who.
64. These figures are calculated by the 'Changing Elites project', University of Oxford.
65. Worth, The Welfare State Generation.
66. Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800–1867 (Oxford, 2007).
67. Interviews with Janet and Celia.
68. Interview with Sally.
69. Interview with Georgina.
70. Ibid.
71. Interviews with Alexandra and Penelope.
72. Hansard Society Commission, Report on Women at the Top (London, 1990).
73. Linda McDowell, Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford, 1997), 128.
74. Emma Barrett. “King Kaz: Cazenove, Thatcherism, and the 1980s Financial Revolution.” Twentieth Century British History 30, no. 1 (2019): 108–131.
75. Interview with Laura.
76. Hansard Society Commission, Women at the Top, 47 (notable that 33% of people qualifying as barristers were women); Frances Burton, ‘Foundation of the Association of Women’s Barristers, 1991’, in Erika Rackley and Rosemary Auchmuty (eds), Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women in Law in the UK and Ireland (Oxford, 2019), 435–40.
77. Conversation with Ex-Principal, Oct 2021.
78. Erzsebet Bukodi, Education, First Occupation and Later Occupational Attainment: Cross-cohort Changes among Men and Women in Britain (London, 2009).
79. Office of Public Service and Science, Equal Opportunities for Women in the Civil Service: Progress Report 1992–93 (HMSO, 1993), 4.
80. Interview with Sarah.
81. Interview with Laura.
82. See Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2006).
83. Interview with Celia.
84. Interview with Janet.
85. Interview with Elise.
86. Interview with Sarah.
87. Ibid.
88. Interview with Mieke.
89. Alexandra Allan and Claire Charles. “Cosmo Girls: Configurations of Class and Gender in Elite Educational Settings.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 35, no. 3 (2014): 339.
90. Allan and Charles, “Cosmo Girls,” 339.
91. Interview with Mieke.
92. Ibid.
93. Interview with Abigail.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. See for example Jessi Streib, Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall in All Places (Oxford, 2020).
97. Interview with Victoria.
98. Interview with Sally.
99. Interview with Patricia.
100. Worth, The Welfare State Generation.
101. Interview with Karen.
102. Interview with Judith.
103. Interview with Karen.
104. For recent research about the desire to ‘deflect privilege’ even for those with less ‘elite’ experiences see Sam Friedman, Dave O’Brien and Ian McDonald. “Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self.” Sociology (2021): 1–18.
105. Interview with Celia.
106. Interview with Sarah.
107. Interview with Alison.
108. Interview with Fiona.
109. Ibid. Please note that 'crippled' as a concept has been reclaimed and used as an analytical tool in the development of 'crip theory'. See Dan Goodley, ”Dis/entangling Critical Disability Studies.” Disability and Society 28, no. 5 (2013): 631–644.
110. See for example Interviews with Caroline and Laura.
111. Rima Saini. “The Racialised ‘Second Existence’ of Class: Class Identification and (De/Re-) construction across the British South Asian Middle Classes.” Cultural Sociology 52, no. 4 (2023): 671–687.
112. Interview with Andrea.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid.
115. For discussion of the significance of the Old Boys’ Network see Aaron Reeves, Sam Friedman, Charles Rahal and Magne Flemmen. “The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment 1897–2016,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 6 (2017): 1139–1166.
116. Howarth, ‘Women’.
117. Interview with Sally.
118. Ibid.
119. Interview with Janet.
120. Interview with Sally.
121. Helen McCarthy, Girlfriends in High Places: How Women's Networks are Changing the Workplace (Demos, 2004).
122. Interview with Karen.
123. See for example Interview with Judith.
124. Interview with Celia.
125. We are not going to identify the interviewee.
126. Interview with Caroline.
127. Ibid.
128. Interview with Karen.
129. Ibid.
130. Sara Connolly and Mary Gregory, ‘Women and Work since 1970’, in Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Newell (eds.), Work and Pay in 20th Century Britain (Oxford, 2007), 151.
131. Interview with Andrea.
132. Valerie Grove, The Compleat Woman: Marriage, Motherhood, Career—Can She Have It All? (London, 1988), 132.
133. Grove, Compleat Woman, 133.
134. Nicola Horlick, Can You Have It All? How to Succeed in a Man’s World (Macmillan, 1997).
135. Horlick, Can You Have it All?, 116.
136. Horlick, Can You Have it All?, 129
137. Interview with Laura.
138. Ibid.
139. Interview with Melanie.
140. Interview with Andrea.
141. Maria Adamson and Marjana Johanasson, ”Writing Class In and Out: Constructions of Class in Elite Businesswomen’s Autobiographies.” Sociology 55, no, 3 (2020): 496.
142. Interview with Alexandra.
143. Ibid.
144. Interview with Fiona.
145. Interview with Caroline.
146. Ibid.
147. Worth and Paterson. “Organisational Labour”; see also Angela Davis and Laura King. “Gendered Perspectives on Men’s Changing Familial Roles in Postwar England, c.1950–1990.” Gender and History 30, no. 1 (2018): 87.
148. Interview with Andrea.