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. For many women, working for themselves has been a strategy for making money at times when they had few other options. Dr Aleena Din takes a look at post-war migration, discrimination in the labour market, and the ingenuity and entrepreneurialism of British South Asian women

Amy Edwards

Amy 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.

Dr Aleena Din

Dr Aleena Din is a historian who works on the relationship between gender, race, and class in modern Britain. Her PhD focused on the migration, settlement and work experiences of British-Pakistani women who settled in Middlesbrough and Oldham between the 1960s and early 2000s. She has been involved in a number of amazing research projects, including one on the Muslim history of Oxford, and a project that she worked on at the University of Bristol called ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830 to the Present’. She is now just about to start a new job at the University of Manchester, which is very exciting. But before she does, she’s kindly agreed to join us today to talk to us about what work looked like for women migrating to Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Find out more at https://southasianbritain.orgSee this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice