Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994)

Poor woman with babyIntegrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, Joanna Bourke looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality, and the nation to assess how the subjective identity of the “working class” in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural, and economic change. She argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural rather than an institutional or political phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity.

Table of contents

  1. Introduction: class and poverty
  2. Body: making love not war
  3. Home: domestic spaces
  4. Marketplace: public spheres
  5. Locality: retrospective communities
  6. Nation: Britishness: illusions and disillusions