Feminist Lives

Abstract

Abstract Feminist Lives adopts a woman-centred approach to understand how British women charted a new way of being female in the three decades before the Women’s Liberation Movement. Focusing on the so-called ‘transition’ generation of women who were born in the long 1940s and who grew to maturity in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, this book shows how this generation of women developed the aspirational model of womanhood that then emerged after 1970 as the norm amongst women in the Global North. 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 lives, relationships, feelings, and actions, this study analyses the modes by which women constructed a modern self, built upon new ways of living, feeling, and being.