Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 19001950

Votes, Voices and Vocations

By (author) Julia Neville, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Paul Auchterlonie, Ann Roberts, Helen Turnbull

Publication date:

14 September 2021

Publisher

University of Exeter Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781905816767

Highly Commended for the W.G. Hoskins Prize in the Devon History Society Book of the Year awards.

This book is one of the first to study the regional role of women in public and professional life, breaking new ground in early twentieth-century local and gender history.

Covering politics (Eleanor Acland and Clara Daymond), medicine and education (Dr Mabel Ramsay and Jessie Headridge), and a variety of voluntary organizations (Florence Cecil, Georgiana Buller, Jane Clinton and Sylvia Calmady-Hamlyn), it shows how women worked individually and in collaboration to create new opportunities for women and girls in a large, mainly rural, county far from London and the industrial heartlands of England. These biographical studies are based on original research and reveal the huge public contribution made by these eight women, who up to now have been largely hidden from history.

Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950 is a contribution to the history of women in Britain between the wars, a period that has received less attention than the Edwardian era and the two World Wars. It also fills a major gap in the history of Devon women, on which almost nothing has been published, and on Devon in the inter-war period, similarly neglected by historians. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of gender history and the history of modern Britain, as well as everyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Devon.

 

This is a worthy testimony to be welcomed by readers in the present, as much as an excellent historical exploration. The biographical studies are thorough, sensitive, and inspirational. Together, they form a compelling appreciation of the local and regional, and, more specifically, the Devon context.