From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives, featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians. The series as a whole will explore the relationship between gender, work, and career in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, asking what’s new (and what isn’t) about the nature of women’s working lives in Britain? Episodes will focus on different industries – from politics and science, to entertainment, sex advice, sales and beyond – through the lives of some of the women who worked in them. The series will explore not only the success stories of famous entrepreneurs and business leaders, but also ‘hidden’ histories of women who made a living in systems and structures not often designed with them in mind. Amy EdwardsAmy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s. Helen McCarthyHelen is a professor at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches on different aspects of modern and contemporary British history. This includes a course on Women, Gender and Paid Work in Britain since the 1950s. In 2014 she published a book called Women of the World which was a pioneering study of women’s role in British diplomacy. And more recently, in 2020, she also published a book called Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood. So this is all to say that she is a foremost expert when it comes to the relationship between gender and work, and we’re very lucky to have her join us to talk to us on the topic of working motherhood. We’ll also hopefully get to hear about what she is currently working on, which is the history of retirement since 1945: so a fun episode ahead!See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice