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.

Historians writing on the subject of race have largely focused on the period after the Second World War: the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 has become a defining symbol of Britain’s immigration history. Studies that examine the earlier decades of the twentieth century privilege either imperial or scientific discourses on race. This focus neglects the variety of social and cultural discourses through which the idea of racial difference was disseminated to the British public. This thesis focuses on the idea of race in the 1920s and 1930s and explores how other peoples and places were constructed in the British imagination through three separate but interconnected themes: religion, entertainment and childhood experiences. The thesis has three central arguments: firstly it argues that racial discourses were varied; secondly, that while Britain’s cities offered opportunities for interracial contact, most British people’s experiences of the racial other were limited to the realm of the imagination, nourished by a variety of constructions emanating from churches, schools, entertainment venues and the home; thirdly, that the racial other was constructed in the British imagination as a source of both fear and desire. Religion was one of the dominant forces disseminating ideas about racial difference to the British public in the interwar years. Religious leaders were able to construct an image of other peoples and places through their connection to important annual events such as Empire Day and in their commentaries on current events; their response to the 1919 race riots illustrates how religion, empire and politics intersected on matters of race and national identity. Missionary groups also played an important role in constructing ideas about race, especially to children, through missionary exhibitions. The role of religion in society in the interwar years has been underplayed and yet religious discourses on race that were familiar in the nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth. In the realm of popular entertainment, both blackface and orientalist productions excelled in the art of racial disguise. These productions underline the contradiction at the heart of race discourse between fear and desire; fear of a difference that undermined the notion of white supremacy and thus the strength of Britain’s Empire, and a simultaneous desire to ‘know’ the ‘other’, be that through cultural interactions or physical intimacy. The act of dressing-up as the racial ‘other’ was a crucial means of exploring fantasies of the ‘other’ without transgressing contemporary racial boundaries. Newspaper reviews of popular entertainments constructed a narrative on race that used both positive and negative stereotypes. The history of licensing and censorship in the files of the Lord Chamberlain’s Archive reveals contemporary anxieties about race focusing particularly on miscegenation. People were encouraged to imagine racial difference in a variety of ways and from a young age. The stereotyped images presented to children are open to less nuanced interpretation than those aimed at adults and more than any other were composed of binary oppositions between black and white, civilised and savage, ancient and modern. Evidence from newspapers and the Mass-Observation Archive highlights how children were encouraged to imagine racial difference and the variety and complexity of childhood experiences that defined people’s ideas about race. This thesis builds on an established body of work on the subject of race and uses a variety of sources in order to advance the discussion beyond a narrow focus on empire or scientific debates towards a more comprehensive analysis of the circulation of the idea of race in interwar Britain. It focuses on an era that has received less scholarly attention than the years after 1945 and highlights the variety of discourses on race that permeated the social and cultural life of interwar Britain.

This thesis is an examination of the role of reason in the thought of the left-leaning writer, publisher, editor and journalist Leonard Woolf. Examining Woolf’s response to political radicalization and impending international conflict between 1930 and 1940, this discussion contends that Woolf sought to emphasise human thought, reason and individual psychology as a response to interwar anxieties about cultural crisis. / Thesis (Master, History) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-09 13:03:11.911

This thesis analyses the content, tone, form and authorship of the national newspaper gossip column 1918-1939, as a new means through which the qualities of the popular press in this period can be more closely defined. Often dismissed as an example of the sensational, Americanization of early twentieth-century popular culture, the celebrity gossip column has been loosely grouped with the friendly, informal language and bolder formatting of the ‘New Journalism’ of the late nineteenth century and the development of the dramatic ‘human-interest’ stories of ‘everyday life’ in the interwar period (LeMahieu, 1988; Wiener, 1988). Through a comparative study of six newspapers including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and News of the World, I analyse the changing representation of the celebrity subject, and, originally, the shifting character and persona of the gossip columnist. Whereas some historians have analysed the content of newspapers without considering the questions of the newspaper’s production, I analyse newspaper employment records, gossip columnists’ memoirs and their unpublished letters and diaries to define the specific economic, social and cultural circumstances which, I argue, influenced their public portrayal. Also, in examining the unpublished correspondence between editors, proprietors and columnists and the burgeoning print culture of journalistic training manuals and professional memoirs, I provide a history of the press’s professionalization in this period. The national popular press has often been used as a historical source to define national character and national identity in the interwar period (Bland, 2008; Kohn, 1992). By scrutinizing the content and production of the gossip column and particularly the class, behaviour, interactions and subject matter of the columnist, I argue that the gossip column presented a version of ‘Britishness’ that was not so inward-looking and domesticated as so many accounts of interwar Britain suggest.