- All our books
- Categories:
- Abroad
- Adultery
- America
- Architecture
- Biography
- Bloomsbury
- Childhood
- Cookery Books
- Country Life
- Diaries
- Education
- Family
- Fathers
- Gender and Race
- Grandmothers
- History
- House and Garden
- Humour
- Ireland
- London
- Love Story
- Men (books about)
- Men (books by)
- Mothers
- Poetry
- Politics
- Science Fiction
- Scotland
- Sex
- Shopping
- Short Stories
- Single Women
- Social Comedy
- Suffragettes
- Teenagers (books for)
- Thrillers
- Translations
- Victoriana
- Widows
- Woman and Home
- Women’s Place
- Working Women
- WWI
- WWII
- Young Love
- Audiobooks
- Book Tokens
- eBooks
- Notebook
- Persephone Classics
- The Persephone Bag
- Catalogue
Find a book

A Book a Month
We can send a book a month for six or twelve months - the perfect gift. More »
Order This Book

'Women of Britain, Come into the Factories', Donald Zec 1941
AFTERWORD BY YVONNE ROBERTS
352pp
ISBN 9781903155097
This is, we believe, the most readable overview of twentieth century women’s lives yet written, covering everything Persephone readers might want to know about the suffragettes, early ‘type-writers’, contraception or work in wartime; and it complements our other books by exploring factually what they, indirectly, explore in fiction.
A Woman’s Place 1910–75 was written twenty-five years ago by a novelist historian and is both human and humane, wise and cynical, polemical and witty. It concludes, wearily: ‘A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively "feminine”; and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse.’
Endpaper
Lucienne Day has combined a successful professional life with a domestic one and her ‘Palisade’ (1952) hints at encirclement and fencing-in, while the abstract shapes evoke the domestic. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London/ Design © Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation
Read reviews about all Persephone books
Read blogs about all Persephone books
Categories: Gender and Race History Politics Teenagers (books for) Women’s Place Working Women