“Our weapon is public opinion”

01 February 2018

One of the largest surviving collections of suffrage posters from the early twentieth century are housed in Cambridge University Library’s famous tower. 

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Dr Lucy Delap

Shipwrecked: women and children first?

20 January 2012

Romantic notions of heroism - the captain refusing to leave his sinking ship, women and children being ushered to safety - have been shattered by reports emerging from the Costa Concordia. Cambridge University academic Dr Lucy Delap sets last week’s tragic events within a historical context of shipwreck that encompasses changing perceptions of class and gender.

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Advertisement from Daily Mail Ideal Labour-Saving Home, 1920

Who mops the floor now? How domestic service shaped 20th-century Britain

28 July 2011

From the fictional Downton Abbey to the modest suburban semi, domestic service has had a prominent role in the story, whether real or imagined, of British society over the past 100 years. In Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain, Cambridge historian Dr Lucy Delap navigates the shifting drama played out in that most intimate and domestic workplace: the home.

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