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352p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 1903155096
AFTERWORD BY YVONNE ROBERTS
This is, we believe, the most readable overview of twentieth
century women's lives yet written, covering everything
Persephone readers might want to know about the suffragettes,
early 'type-writers', contraception or work in wartime;
and it complements our other books by exploring factually
what they, indirectly, explore in fiction.
A Woman's Place 1910-75 was written twenty-five
years ago by a novelist historian and is both human and
humane, wise and cynical, polemical and witty. It concludes,
wearily: 'A woman born at the turn of the century could
have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty
to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three
when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when
it was right to be seductively ''feminine''; and three
when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse.'
Lucienne Day has combined a successful
professional life with a domestic one and her 'Palisade'
(1952) hints at encirclement and fencing-in, while the
abstract shapes evoke the domestic. |
