Essex is a maligned county, present in popular mythology as a home for troublesome women – from Matthew Hopkins’ 17th century witches, to the sexually provocative but apparently stupid 1980s Essex Girls, and today’s primped women of The Only Way is Essex. When J. B. Priestley wrote English Journey he was exercised by some troublesome…
Tags 1930s, destruction, economic geography, Fordism, industrial society, manual labour, manufacturing, occupational community, production, robot, spaces of work, tradition, ways to make a living
Categories: Reviews, Thoughts
These are difficult times, and perhaps you’re holding tight to your contracted hours and hoping that the downsizing finger doesn’t point your way. You are not considering approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise. And so you would not look at the shelf and think: oh, that’s the self-help book…
I had my eyebrows threaded at the Beauty Plus concession in my local department store. Threading, very common in Asia, uses twisted lines of cotton thread to remove hair. It’s low-tech, and demands crafty fingers. Ten minutes of relative pain, some rosewater and an hour of redness and then ready-made arched eyebrows. The last time…
There are a lot of possible situations when a sales representative might greet a customer. It could be in a store, at the street or in their offices. And it is in the latter situation when a simple “Hi, good afternoon” could become complex, as this is right when your body starts to speak before…
I was sat in the taxi office, nosing around as I waited. The waiting area was as much backstage as frontstage; the place where the drivers came for their breaks. There’s a towel sqaushed over a rail, just outside the toilet door, and a reminder to keep on top on the domestic work. At a…
In 1945, Gertrude Williams published Women and Work (part of the New Democracy Series, Nicholson and Watson, London), questioning ‘women’s place’ in the post-war industrial world in which many ‘cherished prejudices have been turned topsy-turvy’ (1945: 9). I came across a copy of this book for the first time just a few weeks ago, and…
At 11am this morning, the phone rings. Someone has tried to buy nearly three hundred pounds worth of ‘women’s country clothing’ online in my name (not a very likely scenario). A salesperson was alerted by something about the difference and distance between the alleged buyer (me) and the delivery address (in Glasgow). It’s part of…
When making counts and comparisons of those in employment, the canny statistician knows to take account of seasonal work. Labourers are taken on to harvest crops in late summer, even in this age of mechanised agriculture, and temporary Christmas workers boost December’s employment figures. Late October is not a common time for seasonal work, but…
Last night, I caught a minute or two of a tv programme about driving. An elderly Scottish actor drove an elderly English car along “one of Britain’s best drives” (defined according to an algorithm based on nostalgia for a time where driving was a select pleasure not a universal pain). This episode showed a road…