Based on extensive research, this text provides a critical investigation of the development of the Women's Co-operative Guild from the 1880s to World War II. Charting the rise and fall of an exceptional feminist political organization, the author assesses the political significance of the movement during the decades of its greatest influence and examines the causes and circumstances of its demise. Advancing a fresh perspective on working-class women's organizations, this book combines historical narrative, biography and political analysis.

The law governing family relationships has changed dramatically in the course of the 20th century and this book - drawing extensively on both published and archival material and on legal as well as other sources - gives an account of the processes and problems of reform.

This book examines how, from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, British policymakers, welfare providers, and working-class men struggled to accommodate men's dependence on the state within understandings of masculine citizenship.

A fascinating, revealing examination of divorce in Victorian Britain - and what it meant for society as a whole. It is a story of high drama, humour, pathos and tragedy, brimming with moral comment that throws a light on the preoccupations of the age.

Starting after the Great War, this book charts the rise of the ritualistic engagement, the modern white wedding and the more widely available honeymoon holiday, to show changes and continuities in English masculinity by considering power relations between men and women. Through a close reading of a range of sources (including first-person testimonies, newspapers and etiquette manuals), power relations between bride and groom, and between different generations, are revealed in the context of social class and the rise of consumerism.