Young Women on the MoveBritain circa 1880–1950

Abstract

Travel is an essential part of everyday life for most people, and it inevitably brings inconvenience at times, but women have often experienced particular and distinctive constraints and harassments while traveling that may inhibit or reduce their mobility. However, we know relatively little in detail about how, why, and how much women traveled in the past. This article provides new evidence about female mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain by analyzing the daily movements that were recorded in the personal diaries of nine young women. The diary entries show that all the women traveled frequently both alone and with others, used a variety of transport technologies that were available at the time, and rarely recorded incidents that caused them concern or alarm. Mobility was not only essential for carrying out everyday activities but it was also central to the development of friendships and, especially, courting. Both social class and location did have some influence on the ways in which the young women traveled, on their freedom to travel alone, and on the inconveniences they faced. However, overall, the similarities between the experiences of the nine diarists were much greater than the differences. Although it is not possible to generalize widely from just nine accounts, these diaries do provide new insights into female mobility in the past.

Review of periodical literature for 2021

“…With regard to the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain, Miller claims that the longstanding practice of petitioning came to be reinvented as ‘a flexible, mutable tool that was used by all shades of the suffrage movement because it underpinned a broader repertoire of activism and fostered political cultures’ (p. 355). From their reading of nine diaries, Pooley and Pooley conclude that young British women were highly mobile within society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Wildman discusses how the increased geographic mobility of working‐class women coincided with social anxiety over shoplifting in interwar Manchester. Bradley and Rowland find that, before (and even after) women were admitted to the legal profession in 1919, female factory inspectors and social workers functioned as makeshift legal agents, dispensing advice to women who would otherwise not receive it.…”