A Woman’s Place, 1910-1975

This is, perhaps, the most readable overview of twentieth century women’s lives yet written, covering everything the reader might want to know about the suffragettes, early ‘type-writers’, contraception, work in wartime etc; and it complements Persephone’s other books by exploring factually what they, indirectly, explore in fiction. A Woman’s Place 1910-75 was written twenty-five years ago by a novelist historian and is both human and humane, wise and cynical, polemical and witty. It concludes, wearily: ‘A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively feminine ; and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse.