The essay traces patterns of poor women's employment in late-nineteenth-century London. It shows that employment was common among single, married and widowed women, except among mothers of young children. Unpaid domestic work and paid employment dovetailed into a constant burden of work facing poor women. This challenges the prevalent argument that married women earned wages only at moments of severe crisis in the household economy. It reveals a culture of women's work among the poor that contrasts sharply with the ideology of separate spheres that excluded middle-class women from employment.

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In the 1960s some young British women challenged established gender roles, pursuing education, careers and personal freedom. Many of them grew frustrated with the limitations of 1960s youth culture, and particularly of new permissive sexual norms. The Rolling Stones, as a significant cultural force and symbol of London youth culture and sexual 'freedom', became a focus for criticism of this culture growing out of the women's liberation movement at the end of the decade and developing in the years since then. However, the Rolling Stones' response to changing gender roles in this period was complex and contradictory. At times, their songs endorsed women's subordination, rejecting their claims to independence. On the other hand, a number of the songs celebrated independent women and mutual relationships. The Rolling Stones, central figures in the youth culture of the 1960s and a symbol of that culture's commitment to subordinating women, were conflicted and ambivalent, rather than uniformly hostile, to changing gender roles.

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Beginning in the mid‐1980s, social historians found their approach and assumptions under attack from scholars interested in cultural theory. Those taking the ‘linguistic turn’ rejected social history’s materialist paradigm, arguing for the primacy of language in the generation of identity and consciousness. By the mid‐1990s, this challenge spawned fierce polemics among scholars debating the validity of concepts such as experience and class. In the intervening decade and a half, though, the heat has dissipated and scholars can calmly assess the impact of the critique. Though they disagreed fiercely at the time, many participants in these debates operated along a continuum that allows for the continued relevance of social history and the implementation of the lessons of the linguistic turn. By integrating social history’s concerns and insights drawn from the application of cultural theory, promising new approaches transcend the divisions of the 1990s.