‘I feel I am in control of my own little area’: agency and emotion in women’s household financial management c.1970-1995

This thesis explores women’s relationship with household money during a period of profound change in women’s lives and in money management practices. My use of Mass-Observation Project testimony offers an insight into women’s experiences and emotions around household money which challenges the trajectory of women’s declining financial agency suggested by mid-century oral histories and qualifies the pessimistic conclusions of contemporary sociological studies.

The research historicises women’s relationship with household money in late[1]twentieth-century Britain. Financial independence for all women was a key demand of the Women’s Liberation Movement, highlighting the financial dependency many married women faced, made more visible by rising divorce, despite their increasing engagement in paid work. Drawing on women’s print media and banks’ advertising I demonstrate that household money was an important site for tensions between the companionate ideal of marital sharing and women’s autonomy to play out.

By foregrounding the popularisation of high street banking and the revolution in technologies such as ATMs and credit cards, my thesis also disrupts conceptions of finance in the 1980s which dwell on the City. In contrast, I combine a focus on the material, spatial, temporal and embodied nature of everyday financial practices with an emphasis on their emotional resonance. This allows me to locate women’s feelings of agency in the complex web of change and continuity in practices and emotions which my analysis reveals.

My exploration of financial advice in women’s magazines identifies a rise in expectations of women’s agency and expertise. I use M-OP to show that women deployed reflexivity and creativity in negotiating the increasingly complex terrain of domestic finances. I challenge the view that women were marginalised by the popularisation of banking and financial technologies and argue instead that managing household finances in the late twentieth century could provide women with a source of satisfaction and self-actualisation.