Feminist Lives

The story of women growing up in post-war Britain, rejecting the self-sacrifice of their mothers' generation and embracing new ways of living, feeling, and being in the decades before Women's Liberation. They were feminists before feminism, which we see through their descriptions of themselves, their relationships, their feelings, and actions.

---

Could women be feminist without feminism? Could they foster feminist activism without a movement or an ideology? Could they recraft ways of being female without a plan? Feminist Lives adopts a woman-centred approach to explore these questions and to understand how British women charted a new way of being female in the three decades before the Women's Liberation Movement. By focusing on the 'transition' generation of women who were born in the long 1940s and who grew to maturity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the book demonstrates that it was they who developed the aspirational model of womanhood that then emerged after 1970 as the norm amongst women in the global north.

In doing so, Feminist Lives seeks to fill 'the feminist history gap', countering a narrative that has for too long neglected this generation of women as fusty and failing, and as just not feminist enough. Using women's voices as the book's evidential and emotional core as they describe themselves, their relationships, their feelings and actions, this volume analyses the modes by which women constructed a modern self, built upon new ways of living, feeling, and being.