Women's writing networks in Spanish magazines around 1900

As an output of the HERA Travelling Texts project, created with the aim of uncovering the realities of women’s literary culture on the fringes of Europe during the long nineteenth century, this study was conceptualised to find out more about the networks of women writers in Spain around 1900, using the digitised corpuses of contemporaneous periodicals as the primary source material. Each chapter of the study centres on a particular periodical, which is used as the starting point for the community of writers and readers, both real and imagined. This thesis looks at the realities of the literary culture for creative women in the late nineteenth century-early twentieth century, exploring the strategies used by women (and men) to support each other in their literary endeavours, how they took inspiration and courage from each other, how they promoted their own names, and how they were received by wider society. The study will also focus on the transnational nature of this literary culture, looking at how women of different nations influenced each other’s work, with a view to understanding more about how cultural change takes place. Finally, this thesis hopes to persuade the reader that the periodical is a rich and under-utilised resource for discovering more about the lives of women writers and their network of relationships.

Gender, class and the household economy in Scotland in the ‘Age of affluence’

From early 1950s to the early 1970s Britain is said to have experienced an ‘age of affluence’. Whilst material conditions for many households improved in these decades, this detailed examination of budget management processes shows that for many working-class households, these gains were the product of hard work and careful money management. Using oral history methodology, this thesis explores lived experiences of the household economy to illuminate these qualifications to ‘affluence’. In so doing, this thesis advances analysis which considers the relationship between the macro-level economic conditions of affluence and the everyday economic realities of households in the post-war period. The thesis examines the operation of the household economy and shows how working-class households utilised domestic labour, budgeting, paid work, credit and thrift to make ends meet, as well as to achieve ‘affluence’. Further, by exploring these areas of the household economy, this thesis shows that gendered ideology continued to preserve power and material inequalities between men and women. Although considerable change did occur, particularly involvement in the paid labour market, domestic responsibilities continued to be an important focus of women’s identities and the effective performance of these duties by women remained central to the success of the household. This thesis represents a fresh focus on how the exploration of everyday life, including the salience of ideological continuities in shaping experience, can qualify and refine our understanding of twentieth century economic and social change, and contributes to socio-historical understandings of ‘affluence’ and its intersections with the household, gender, and class.