ABSTRACT
This book can be read in a number of ways which relate to its various aims. At the most straightforward level, of content and narrative, it is ‘about’ women, gender and work, and the connections, for different groupings of women, between the gendered divisions of different spheres of their lives. Its central subject matter and its central questions, and answers, therefore, are substantive ones, and historically specific. It develops an analysis on the basis of oral history research conducted in the 1990s with retired women who began work in Lancashire during the inter-war years and whose experience broadly laps over the second third of the twentieth century.
