While the advent of the home computer in 1990s Britain has been well documented by historians of computing and technology, there remains little research on the everyday experience of this phenomenon. In this article, we use material held in The Mass Observation Project (MOP) archive to explore the way men and women in late-modern Britain experienced and understood the changes brought about by home computing. The reflexive and yet private nature of responses held in the MOP archive make it an important window into the cultural and social contexts in which personal computers were encountered. Our research indicates that the advent of the home computer brought about a number of historically-specific changes in the way Mass Observers scribed and composed their written communications. The processes through which people turned ideas into text were irreversibly recalibrated by the possibilities of saving, editing, copy and pasting on screen. As personal computer resources moved from being predominantly accessible at work to being a staple part of the home, the lines between labour and leisure, business and pleasure and the personal and the professional were blurred. Ultimately, evidence from the Mass Observation Archive indicates that the advent of the home computer had a significant effect on the processes through which individuals composed a sense of self on a day-to-day basis. It introduced new tensions, possibilities and anxieties to the act of negotiating a ‘modern’ identity. Building on this insight, our paper makes interventions in two areas: the history of writing and the history of the home. Placed alongside one another, these findings open up suggestive new questions for the heavily contested historiographical trope of the late-modern ‘self’.

This thesis explores the sexual experiences of Catholic women in post-war England. It uses original oral testimony from Catholic laypeople, alongside the internal documents and public pronouncements of the central Catholic hierarchy to reappraise dominant narratives of both sexual and religious change. Historians and cultural commentators have identified sex and its apparent liberation in the decades after the Second World War as the root cause of Christian decline. Catholicism in particular has been viewed as the archetypal antagonist in a story of sixties ‘sexual revolution’. This indictment tends to be based on the Catholic hierarchy’s continued prohibition of artificial contraception. My research examines Catholic women’s everyday experience of negotiating spiritual and sexual demands at a moment when the two increasingly seemed to be at odds with one another. I argue here that the relationship between sex and religion did undergo an unprecedented shift in the post-war decades, but one that does not fit comfortably within the existing frameworks employed by historians. Rather than being simply about an emancipation from the confines of religious repression, the break between sex and Catholicism worked along deeper, ontological lines. As such, the thesis advances an alternative conceptual framework within which to understand post-war cultural change, introducing the dialectics of immanence and transcendence to the historiography of the period