Helen McCarthy

A richly textured portrait of the living standards of women and children in Victorian Britain.

Though remembered as the era of the housewife, momentous change in the status of British women began in the 1950s.

In 1915 the Women’s Congress demonstrated that cooperation endured in a political landscape ravaged by the First World War.

The Foreign Office was long a bastion of male chauvinism. Only during the Second World War did women diplomats begin to make their mark.