Dr Helen Glew
I am a historian of women's employment and the women's movement in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain.
I graduated with a BA Honours in English Literature & History from the University of Lancaster, from where I also gained a Masters in Historical Research, specialising in social and cultural history. In 2010 I earned a PhD from the University of London (Institute of Historical Research), having completed a thesis funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Scheme, which allowed me to work with the British Postal Museum & Archive (now The Postal Museum). I have worked at the University of Westminster since 2007.
My work centres on questions around women's employment, feminism, and women in public life in the late 19th and 20th centuries. I am also interested in representations of women in popular culture and in museums.
In 2016 my monograph Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: women's work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-55 was published by Manchester University Press. I am now working on a book project on the marriage bar and social and cultural debates about married women's paid work, c.1870-1960. I have also published a number of journal articles and book chapters on topics related to these two projects, as well as on women in magazines, cultural representations of women telephonists, and women's occupational associations.
I am developing a new project on the rise and fall of the typing pool as a phenomenon in office cultures.