Times of their lives: a century of working class women

Abstract

This thesis looks at social change among working-class women in Scotland, over the last hundred years, by using oral history evidence from four generations. Six multi-generational families form part of this generational structure.

I wanted to move away from commonly used perspectives on working-class culture and as a consequence decided to discuss my material by using a socio-temporal framework.

The first part of the thesis aims to present a theoretical discussion about 'social time'. The second part consists of the ethnographic component, women's life stories. And the final part analyses this oral history in terms of the initial general statements to produce salient conclusions about the nature of working-class culture as it appeared among certain families in Falkirk at the beginning of the 1980s.