ABSTRACT
As a postgraduate student looking at women’s writing in the 1950s, I was not surprised to discover that both women and their writing are conspicious by their glaring absence from most social historical and literary critical accounts of the era. This is the starting point for much feminist research, though it is none the less crippling and appalling in its effects. But perhaps I found this absence all the more shocking given the comparative recentness of the period - after all we know that women were there because some of us were! Probably many readers of this chapter have some kind of memory or image of the 1950s based on their own experience, so that these new accounts of a time one has actually lived through dramatically illustrate how quickly women are written out of history. And they remind us too that one of the most, if not the most powerful construction of history, the making of a past, is in the activity of writing. Working on the material of recent periods, particularly those within living memory, throws the problems and delights of being a ‘historian’ into fascinating relief. The 1950s offer an enormous range of accessible sources so where does the process of selection start? Perhaps if we can think about those processes of history-in-the-making it can help us push further at the question of its political effects. In other words, looking at the 1950s brought me up
against history as text, or textuality, as something which is endlessly written and re-written with all the concomitant questions of authorship and audience - who writes it and for whom? And then follows the even bigger question, how far is this ‘history’ only ever ‘ideology’, an imaginary representation of people’s lives, and what relation does it bear to those lives as they are lived?
