A Woman’s Place: 1910–75

'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