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This study presents a social and political history of the Social Democratic Federation from the early 1880s to the end of the Edwardian era with a focus on the London area. The SDF has often been portrayed as an intransigent and alien organisation by the existing historiography but this study outlines the relationship between the political journey of individual members, the constraints and potential of the local area and the resultant politics of the SDF as an organisation. With the aid of under-utilised sources such as branch minutes and publications this thesis builds a profile of SDF membership in London and the factors affecting membership in the metropolis. There then follows sections on branch culture and propaganda followed by chapters on the cultural/political questions of gender, religion and education. The second half of the thesis deals with the more political questions of strategy, ideology, internationalism (and racism), trade unionism and relations with the Labour Party. The title 'People, Place and Party' is meant to indicate the tension between those elements that affect the development of an organisation. With an awareness of these elements and by using a breadth of source material it is possible to overcome the obstacle of the 'dogmatic' stereotype of the SDF.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in feminist media studies, yet the vast majority of communication, media, and design historical studies seem to focus on the canon of media ecology, following a heroic approach analysis, whilst appearing disjointed, and departmentalized. This thesis argues ‘against the personality cult, pointing to the collective and cumulative dimension present in most, if not all, design’, and by adopting an inclusive approach to the study of the periodical demonstrates that a transdisciplinary holistic approach is plausible, though certainly more challenging.1 This thesis applies an original modified version of Gérard Genette’s theory of the paratext, and offers an interdisciplinary discussion of gender representation by interpreting late nineteenth century periodical paratexts. More specifically, it examines: to what extent the gendered conventions of late nineteenth century Britain influenced the editorial design identity of the general feminist weekly periodical; and whether emerging hybrid paradigms of late nineteenth century New Womanhood in any way challenged the established patriarchal ideals, through the editorial design identity of the general feminist weekly periodical. Herein lies a set of carefully considered and thoroughly detailed case studies that follow a newly modified Genettean model of analysis that: a. considers the designed as well as the visual and textual elements of the periodical; b. respects all the specificities of the periodicals under investigation; c. acknowledges the different people taking part in the design production and consumption of the late nineteenth century feminist periodical, as well as the role and input of the men and especially women involved. In general, the thesis demonstrates that general feminist periodicals projected a voice that was critical of any established gendered norms, which manifested not only through the textual, and visual content, but also the design identity of these periodicals. In particular, the findings reveal that the Women’s Penny Paper, Woman’s Herald, and Woman’s Signal centered their editorial design identity on specific hybrid paradigms of New Womanhood, such as: the non-partisan New Woman with a universal outlook; the Liberal New Woman; the New Woman Gospel temperance supporter; and the New Woman that espoused bourgeois propriety, whilst supporting women’s suffrage. This thesis positions the periodical, its designed, visual and textual features, its producers and consumers, and its conditions of production and consumption at the very centre of the investigation, hoping to encourage the conception of further new (trans)methodological models for use in periodical studies, or other areas of research enquiry.

This thesis focuses on the voices, activism and experiences of working-class women engaged with the Women’s Movement between 1968 and 1979. It explores their interactions with feminism and class politics and places particular emphasis on their role in the Women’s Liberation Movement and the productive and reproductive class struggles in the period. This approach defines the WLM as a part of the wider Women’s Movement, alongside women’s industrial and community conflicts. It argues that contemporary accounts seeking to recover the significance of ‘sisterhood’ or prioritise alternative identities in the movement often do so at the expense of its working-class participants and underplay the significance of ‘class’ in the political identities of middle-class liberationists. It asserts therefore that that the integration of working-class women and class politics into the story of the 1970s Women’s Movement requires a reconsideration of the existing narratives of the WLM. In developing this perspective, it extricates the tension between the foundational and ideological importance of class and class politics at individual, regional and national levels of the WLM in Britain on the one hand and the intractable problems that class posed within and around the movement on the other. In so doing, it illustrates how both structural and cultural forms of class analysis can offer complementary insights into women’s identity construction and political consciousness, with particular validity not only for social and political movements but also for the post-war period more widely.

This thesis explores how young women negotiate the meanings and dilemmas of young womanhood in Britain today. Gender, womanhood and young adulthood have been variably defined and understood. This thesis will investigate how young women negotiate contemporary discursive constructions of femininity, taking a broadly social constructionist and discursive psychological perspective which conceptualises identities as constructed and continually negotiated in talk and interactions. The thesis analyses data from 13 semi-structured interviews with 8 female university students between the ages of 18 and 23. In addition, it analyses a data set of vlogs uploaded by 11 female vloggers in the same age group. In this thesis ‘discourse’ is used in the wider sense of denoting meaning-making practices such as visual images and appearance as well as spoken language. An innovative methodological framework for analysing video material is proposed. The thesis considers what kind of young woman is brought into being through the talk, appearances and other discursive practices of the participants. It shows how the participants negotiate complicated discursive contexts in which positioning oneself as empowered is desirable, and positioning oneself as a victim is undesirable. The thesis also shows how the participants position themselves as responsible in their talk about their futures. The analysis shows the ambiguities in young women’s orientations to their bodies, and the ways that young women position themselves as intelligent and mature by distancing themselves from vulnerability to beauty related pressures. The analysis also shows how young women continually work on improving themselves, reflecting not only on their self-improvements, but also on their ongoing reflexivity. Yet overdoing their careful controlling of themselves is constructed as unhealthy. The implications of these findings and the methods used are discussed.

The 1970s are widely thought to have marked a watershed for women. Women’s lives underwent considerable transformations, even as the limits of those changes were bound by continued assumptions about gender roles. The British women’s movement enjoyed its most vibrant upsurge in half a century and a raft of legislation marked the most significant advance in women’s rights since the 1920s. The landmark equality legislation is well known: the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. The 1970-74 Conservative Government passed a series of laws strengthening the rights of married women. The 1974-9 Labour Governments introduced statutory maternity leave, child benefit, and addressed some gender inequalities in pension provision. They also passed the 1976 Domestic Violence Act, and the 1977 Sexual Offences Act, which offered women some new protections. This thesis concentrates on those measures which most directly affected women’s economic status and their treatment as workers, in the home and in formal paid employment. It shows how feminists, women rights activists, and other interested parties advanced the cause of reform, and how party and government politicians perceived and responded to these challenges within the context of their broader concerns. The exploration of this particular set of policies shows how governments began to move away from the Beveridge assumptions, whereby women were viewed as dependents, towards a view which saw all women as economically independent workers. This work also shows how these policies, and the ideas about gender equality which they embodied, evolved within a broader political context, which saw the end of the postwar consensus and its replacement with a different set of ideals and assumptions. By adopting a broadly chronological approach, this work shows how the notion and practice of equality for women developed throughout the period which we so closely associate with women’s liberation.

This thesis offers new insights and understandings of the complexity and development of the operational and organisational forms of the Women’s Liberation Movement over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Through focusing on the local groups of Aberdeen, Brighton and Hove, Edinburgh and Bolton as case studies of the broader movement, this research argues that there were complex processes of development at the grassroots in which women conceived of, implemented and continued to develop new feminist methods of political organisation and structure, and continued to debate issues of organisation, structure and political practice throughout the period. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates that the development of new, alternative feminist organisational and political practices were central to the ways in which the WLM attempted to represent and manage the diverse opinions, positions, interests and socio-economic divisions within its membership from the very beginnings of the WLM. This study also explores the impact of local factors on each group and the extent to which these shaped and developed the organisation, structure and practices of local groups over the course of the 1970s and into the 1980s. In doing so, this thesis challenges a historiography that depicts the WLM as a ‘structureless’ movement and therefore as disorganised, and which outlines a simplistic ‘rise and fall’ chronology of the movement, from unity in the early 1970s to crippling division at the end of the decade. Rather, through the use of documentary evidence and oral history interviews with feminist activists, this thesis argues that attempts to solve and mange debate and disagreements between women were a significant part and purpose of feminist organisation and its subsequent development well beyond the supposed ‘end’ of the WLM in 1978.

This thesis analyses the construction and negotiation of ‘the tween’ and tween cultural spaces online, forming part of an emerging field of digital girlhood studies. The research is situated in two online ‘tween’ spaces: Stardoll, a commercial website, and The Ugly Side of Stardoll, a blog run by members of Stardoll. Combining a ‘cultural analysis’ approach with ethnographic traditions such as ‘immersion’ and ‘mapping’, this thesis interrogates articulations of tween culture through interlinking online case studies. The key findings of this thesis are centred on three themes. First, the construction of an explicitly tween culture on Stardoll that situates the site within a commodified pinkification of girl culture. Second, the governance of boundaries of tween girlhood, examined through two features of the site. (1) I argue that the production of Cyrus as a tween celebrity, by Stardoll and the girls’ who consume her, are moderated within a 'tween speech’ genre; and (2) interrogating discourses of risk I argue that the boundaries of Stardoll’s tween culture are governed by understandings of risk within the site and from the girls’ blog The Ugly Side of Stardoll. The third theme is the articulation of tween femininity; I argue that Stardoll produces a neoliberal, postfeminist tween identity on the site. Interestingly, the girls who use Stardoll (re)position other, younger girls within Romantic discourses of childhood in their governance of tween girlhood. However both Stardoll and the girls are invested in similar constructions of tween girlhood based on ‘wholesomeness’ and framed by understandings of age, through complex discourses of postfeminism and Romantic childhood.

The dissertation rests firstly on the author's previously published work (German, 1989; German, 2007; German, 2013) which attempted to analyse the position of women in British society in terms of their relationship to class, work and oppression; and secondly on original research in the form of interviews with a number of Second Wave and Third Wave feminists, which aimed to elicit their responses to a variety of questions in relation to class, women's role at work, and feminist activism. The aim is to contrast the expectations and influences of the different generations of feminists in order to understand what has motivated them and what issues continued to be important for them. The research investigates differences between the two groups of women, considering the extent to which this reflects the different economic and social circumstances in which they were shaped politically. It argues that there is a strong ideological commitment to women's equality across the different age groups, itself based on the inability of successive generations to achieve full equality, but that there are considerable differences of approach to activism and campaigning priorities, as well as to some theoretical questions. It considers the extent to which the Third Wave reflects a fragmentation from Second Wave approaches. It argues that the continued centrality of class in understanding women's oppression and other forms of oppression is related to the discrepancy between the expectations of oppressed groups for equality and capitalism's structural inability to deliver such equality.