Helen Glew, “Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-1955” (Manchester UP, 2016)

What role has gender played in government institutions? In Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-1955, Helen Glew, a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster uses detailed case studies of the Post Office, London County Council, and the British Civil Service to explain this crucial question. The book explores the social, economic and cultural setting for the idea of ‘women’s work’ in British state bureaucracy, looking at the barriers confronting women and their resistance to these constraints. The book uses rich historical evidence to analyse campaigns for equal pay, along with the eventual end of the bar to married women in the Civil Service. The book offers a new gendered perspective on organisations that are crucial to understanding British society at the start of the twentieth century. Clear, engaging and well written, the book will be of interest to a general audience, as well as to academics and historians.

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