‘It was a hothouse’: Women, elite schooling, and life trajectories in post-war Britain

The paper draws on a set of oral history interviews recently conducted with women born in the post-war decades with an entry in Who’s Who which is the leading biographical dictionary of ‘noteworthy and influential’ people in the UK. The women we interviewed were all highly occupationally successful and those analysed here also attended one of twelve elite girls’ schools. This paper argues that our interviewees can be separated into two distinct post-war cohorts: those born from early 1940s to mid-1950s, and those born from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. The shape and structure of the cohort’s trajectories were different, their relationship to their careers were different, and even though both groups faced sexual discrimination and unequal divisions of labour, the nature of these gendered inequalities changed too. The paper also argues that the roots of these differences can be seen in the messages they received at their elite girls’ schools. These messages shifted across the period from a sense that there were only a handful of girls who should try for top universities (and then possibly a career) to a rhetoric that all the students should have high-flying educational and occupational trajectories but that the onus was on them to balance this with marriage and motherhood.  

Dr Eve Worth is a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Exeter. Her first book The Welfare State Generation: Women Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. She has published extensively on gender and elite education, including a prize-winning article for the British Journal of Sociology of Education.