This book examines how adolescence, menstruation and pregnancy were experienced or ‘managed’ by active women in Britain between 1930 and 1970, and how their athletic life-styles interacted with their working lives, marriage and motherhood. It explores the gendered barriers which have influenced women’s sporting experiences. Women’s lives have always been shaped by the socially and physically constructed life-cycle, and this is all the more apparent when we look at female exercise. Even self-proclaimed ‘sporty’ women have had to negotiate obstacles at various stages of their lives to try and maintain their athletic identity. So how did women overcome these obstacles to gain access to exercise in a time when the sportswoman was not an image society was wholly comfortable with? Oral history testimony and extensive archival research show how the physically and socially constructed female life-cycle shaped women’s experiences of exercise and sport throughout these decades.

This book examines the developments in women’s sports history in Britain in the last 10 years, following on from its successful predecessor Women and Sport History (2010). It considers what has changed and what continuities persist drawing on a series of contributions from authors who are active in the field. The chapters included in this book cover a broad time frame and range of topics such as the history of women’s football in Scotland and England; women’s role in rugby leagues; women’s sport during World War II; and female participation in American football, cricket and cycling. Written and edited during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book also reflects on the possible implications of the pandemic on women’s sport. In doing so, it highlights the diversity of research currently being undertaken in the field and touches on areas which remain overlooked or underdeveloped. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Sport in History.

Could women be feminist without feminism? Could they foster feminist activism without a movement or an ideology? Could they recraft ways of being female without a plan? Feminist Lives adopts a woman-centred approach to explore these questions and to understand how British women charted a new way of being female in the three decades before the Women's Liberation Movement. By focusing on the 'transition' generation of women who were born in the long 1940s and who grew to maturity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the book demonstrates that it was they who developed the aspirational model of womanhood that then emerged after 1970 as the norm amongst women in the global north. In doing so, Feminist Lives seeks to fill 'the feminist history gap', countering a narrative that has for too long neglected this generation of women as fusty and failing, and as just not feminist enough. Using women's voices as the book's evidential and emotional core as they describe themselves, their relationships, their feelings and actions, this volume analyses the modes by which women constructed a modern self, built upon new ways of living, feeling, and being.

The midlife crisis has become a cliché in modern society. Since the mid-twentieth century, the term has been used to explain infidelity in middle-aged men, disillusionment with personal achievements, the pain and sadness associated with separation and divorce, and the fear of approaching death. This book provides a meticulously researched account of the social and cultural conditions in which middle-aged men and women began to reevaluate their hopes and dreams, reassess their relationships, and seek new forms of identity and fresh pathways to self-satisfaction. Drawing on a rich seam of literary, medical, media, and cinematic sources, as well as personal accounts, Broken Dreams explores how the crises of middle-aged men and women were shaped by increased life expectancy, changing family structures, shifting patterns of work, and the rise of individualism.

Winner of the 2022 Open Publication Prize by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-ANZ) A Women's History of the Beatles is the first book to offer a detailed presentation of the band's social and cultural impact as understood through the experiences and lives of women. Drawing on a mix of interviews, archival research, textual analysis, and autoethnography, this scholarly work depicts how the Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, while also reexamining key, influential female figures within the group's history. Organized topically based on key themes important to the Beatles story, each chapter uncovers the varied and multifaceted relationships women have had with the band, whether face-to-face and intimately or parasocially through mediated, popular culture. Set within a socio-historical context that charts changing gender norms since the early 1960s, these narratives consider how the Beatles have affected women's lives across three generations. Providing a fresh perspective of a well-known tale, this is a cultural history that moves far beyond the screams of Beatlemania to offer a more comprehensive understanding of what the now iconic band has meant to women over the course of six decades.

This book explores medical and health periodicals of the nineteenth century: their contemporary significance, their readership, and how historians have approached them as objects of study. From debates about women doctors in lesser-known titles such as the Medical Mirror, to the formation of professional medical communities within French and Portuguese periodicals, the contributors to this volume highlight the multi-faceted nature of these publications as well as their uses to the historian. Medical periodicals – far from being the preserve of doctors and nurses – were also read by the general public. Thus, the contributions collected here will be of interest not only to the historian of medicine, but also to those interested in nineteenth-century periodical culture more broadly. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Media History.