To mark the start of Women's History Month 2022, the MEI's Deputy Director, Dr Lyndsey Jenkins, sat down with Dr Eve Worth (Oxford) and Dr Ruth Davidson (Visiting Research Fellow, MEI) to discuss Dr Worth's new book, The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945.

They discuss how the growth of the welfare state after 1945 and its contraction in the 1980s was central to the lives of women born in Britain between the late 1930s and early 1950s and conclude that historians should move beyond the focus on women's emotions and personal identity to consider their relationship with the state as employer, educator and provider.