Lynn Abrams is a giant of gender history and the analysis of personal testimony material. Her approach to women’s testimonies as cultural texts is always innovative and nuanced and her new book is no exception. In Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings and the Self in Post-War Britain, Abrams centers women’s subjectivity to argue that women born in the Long 1940s “pursu[ed] self-fulfilment rather than self-sacrifice” and in doing so “effected a rupture in conceptions of womanhood” (33). She positions her work as “countering a narrative that has for too long neglected and sometimes falsely lampooned this generation as fusty and failing, and just not feminist enough” (1). This sits in tension, however, with the ways in which this book contributes to the growing and vibrant historiography of this cohort of women who grew up in the wake of the Second World War. They are considered by women’s historians to be pivotal to understanding the rise of second-wave feminism and the shape of the post-war decades more broadly in Britain.

Feminist Lives is richly researched and draws on an impressive array of primary sources. The core source material is a set of 25 oral history interviews that Abrams conducted with white, predominantly middle-class women, that she recruited initially through her village book club (13). She complements these interviews with qualitative data collected primarily by social scientists between the 1960s and 2000s from a range of projects. Abrams brings a novel approach to the recent debates amongst historians about re-analysis of social science material; choosing to apply the techniques developed by “oral historians and feminist scholars” to this type of material and leaning into its “literary or poetic nature” (16). Abrams deftly moves between the different source types and examines the significance of a woman’s experience being recounted contemporaneously or retrospectively for the historian. We can be different selves across the life course, but none of these selves are necessarily any truer or more real than any other. The book also aims to be a bridge between the “two versions of post-war Britain, the material and psychological” (7). Abrams argues that despite upheaval to both these aspects of life, they have not been analyzed by historians together in a sustained way. Whilst the book does begin the work of bringing these two histories together, it is in the theories of emotion and role of feelings as a driver of historical change where this book really sings. For example, the chapter on the “expressive self” which argues that “in a wide sense, the 1960s liberated women’s feelings” (185) has added a layer of complexity to the way that I think about women’s lives in this decade.

Abrams structures the book around conceptions of the “self” and new ways of being in the lives of these women from childhood through to their early adulthood at the turn of the 1970s. Aspects of the life course such as education, employment and marital relationships are analyzed through the lens of the changing nature of the self. Abrams does not flatten out women’s experiences and carefully draws out the different ways in which change manifested. She argues, for example, that there were many of ways of “doing” marriage amongst this generation, but that it was primarily women themselves who had to bring about shifts that would mean the relationship “met their needs for self-fulfilment and development” (127). It is in this discussion of marriage that we hear in depth about Eileen, a working-class woman who endured a difficult marriage for more than 30 years before she made the decision to leave her husband in the early 2000s (147). There was an accumulation of things that happened later in life, such as taking a gender studies course as a mature student and attending a course on domestic violence as part of her job, which led to an “epiphanic moment” (232) of realization and reclamation of her autonomy. It would have been fascinating to have even more examples from the sources of how the themes that Abrams identified played out later in life for this generation of women.

A core argument of the book is that these women lived “feminist lives.” Abrams explains this framing in the introductory and concluding chapters; arguing that whilst most women were not directly part of the Women’s Liberation Movement, they “absorbed the underlying tenets of feminism, evident in their personal testimony” (228). She notes many women, in fact, perceived feminism as “doctrinal and intellectual” (228). Although, we do not get a detailed sense in the main body of the book what these women may have said or felt about feminism as a movement in their testimonies. Abrams’ argument is a powerful intervention in the history of women in the post-war period and broadens our understanding of the mechanisms and influence of second wave feminism. I think it also raises interesting questions for women’s historians. For example, if women do not claim the label of feminist, can we apply this to their experiences? Or, more importantly, what does the idea of “feminist lives” do to feminism as an analytical concept for historians when it defines such a wide range of actions and choices as feminist?