The People: The Working Class in 20th and Early 21st Century Britain

Selina Todd (The University of Oxford)

The People: The Working Class in 20th and Early 21st Century Britain

Abstract:

This presentation is based on my forthcoming book, The People: the rise and fall of the working class, 1910-2010. In this paper, I draw on social surveys and personal testimonies to explore how working-class life changed over the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. I explore how class identity has changed, arguing that working-class self-identification has not disappeared. I demonstrate that people draw on history and memory to challenge the 'commonsense' of neoliberalism and to suggest alternatives.

Speaker:

Selina Todd is Lecturer in British History at Oxford University and Fellow and Vice Principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford. Her first book, Young women, work, and family in England, 1918-1950 (Oxford, 2005) won the women's history network annual book prize. She is also a past winner of the Twentieth Century British History/OUP essay prize. She is currently working on a collaborative study of social mobility in the 19th and 20th centuries.