This thesis offers a new conceptual framework for the study of women’s philanthropy between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War. Contesting the dominant historiographical narrative which essentialises the association of women with philanthropy, it argues that interwar female philanthropy operated through an inherently creative and flexible methodology. By interrogating gender as a category of analysis alongside other definitional variables of generation, religion, informal and formal modes of influence, and professionalisation, it reveals female philanthropy as an intellectual, as much as a practical endeavour, through which women philanthropists sought to achieve and encourage self-development and societal improvement. Moving beyond a social history framework that concentrates on philanthropic activity in terms of its relationship to social policy, six thematic chapters argue for the critical significance of concepts of language, performance and space in the meanings and presentations of interwar female philanthropy. A central remit of the thesis is to relate the social and cultural processes that underpinned women’s philanthropy between the wars to the subjective experiences of the individual women who engaged them. The thesis examines the personal archives, published oeuvres and publicity materials (alongside presentations of philanthropy in public discourse) of four philanthropic women who achieved celebrity in the interwar period: Evangeline Booth, Lettice Fisher, Emily Kinnaird and Muriel Paget. It interrogates the contemporary meanings attached to female philanthropy in a period of transformations in mass transport, mass communication and mass democracy, and in women’s position within society. An analysis of this process sheds new light on the historiography of work, civil society and citizenship. Problematising the centrality placed on the national as a sphere of citizenship (embodied in the state), the thesis reveals the critical interconnections between the local and global domains in female philanthropists’ visions. It also illuminates the hitherto underexplored connections between philanthropy, celebrity, the mass media and mass culture. Far from outmoded, female philanthropy lay at the heart of interwar cultural transformations. Female philanthropists contributed dynamically to debates about civil agency and sought to remap the contours of a good society.

A number of academic studies assert that ex-servicemen were subject to intimidation, some killed as a punishment for war service, and that they formed a marginalised group in Irish society. Evidence based on records of the victims and perpetrators demonstrates otherwise; intimidation was mostly for reasons other than war service, for instance, membership of a particular class such as landowners or the judiciary, or for specific actions, including informing, supplying to or joining the Crown Forces. The violence towards ex-servicemen was geographically focussed, varying in intensity in correlation to the level of violence experienced by other sectors of the population; support for republicanism varied significantly by location. The great majority of ex-servicemen were not intimidated; many served in the IRA. With the formation of the Free State there is little evidence that either the State or community marginalised ex-servicemen. They were treated equally before the legislature and the courts. Some half of the Free State army, formed to defeat extreme republicans, were ex-servicemen. Remembrance took place with considerable community support and acceptance from the State. According to credible contemporary reports they were not discriminated against and held high positions in the civil service, army and police. They were not a homogeneous group. Neither war service nor loyalism defined them; many were supporters of Fianna Fáil. Britain fulfilled its imperial obligation to the ex-servicemen with housing and pension benefits considerably more favourable than those for their counterparts in Britain. The view that ex-servicemen were persecuted became persuasive. They became perceived through the prism of commemoration, and with the establishment of a republican historiography assigned to a national amnesia. Loyalist lobbying groups highlighted perceived discrimination to a willing press. It was a convenient collusion but at odds with the evidence. In reality the group truly marginalised after the Civil War was the anti-Treaty republicans.

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The rise of a mass investment culture has been recognised by academics and contemporaries alike. Generally understood in the British context as ‘popular capitalism’, the growing numbers of individuals with a stake in stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic has been an integral part of the advent of what is loosely termed neoliberalism in contemporary societies. However, we know very little about how this mass investment culture developed and evolved in the late-twentieth century, and the relationship it fostered between the individual and the financial services industry. This thesis seeks to explore this phenomenon as it emerged in Britain, in order to highlight the limitations of popular capitalism, both as a political project and as a framework of analysis for understanding the 1980s. Instead a concept of financial consumerism is offered as a more useful lens through which to understand the changes associated with Thatcherism and neoliberal reform in Britain. In doing so, this research moves our site of analysis away from the national and Thatcher-centred bounds of the Conservative Party’s political project, and the economic ideologies of New Right think tanks and economists in Chicago, Germany and Austria. Instead, analysis centres on the actions of agents external to the Conservative Party. They transformed an ideological project designed to create self-governing citizens into a form of consumption which favoured large financial institutions at the expense of the individual consumer.

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