ABSTRACT
Victoria's death in 1901. Britain broke away from the firm class and gender divisions of the late nineteenth century, although women gained the vote only in 1918 and it was not until after the Second World War that working-class children received an education beyond the age of fourteen. Politically the period saw the rise of the Labour Party, although it also witnessed the interwar growth of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and declining trade union power. Culturally, the strains of the First World War relaxed rigid social protocols, and a more 'ebullient night-life' emerged in London.5 Nightclubs developed and sexual inhibitions relaxed. The unifying effect of the Second World War, although often exaggerated, engendered further social transformation, loosening hierarchies and snobberies. Economically, the average Briton had a real income 3.3 times higher in 1989 than in 1913, and life expectancy rose so that more people were living past 65. The expansion of the welfare system, at least until the 1980s, provided a growing safety net where access to pensions, unemployment benefit, housing and health was extended into the post1945 welfare state, increasing the role of the state.6 This must be set against growing unemployment and economic insecurity, the return of severe cyclical slumps, and stark inequalities of wealth facing society in the 1990s.
