From working mothers to modern retirees
Historian Helen McCarthy infuses her subjects with urgency and personality.
How do we make sense of the recent past?
Historian Helen McCarthy (Gonville & Caius 1998) encourages us to be nosey, in the best possible way.
“I’m curious to see how ordinary people live through massive changes,” Helen says. “To see their motives and desires. To know what people want and whether they get it.”
As Professor of Modern and Contemporary British History, Helen helps us tell our own stories. Her work situates us in time and lends a deeper resonance to our struggles in the here and now.
“I want to challenge the assumptions people have about the present – some things haven’t always been this way, while others aren’t as new as they seem.”
By foregrounding personal accounts from the past 2 centuries, Helen connects our lives to those of our ancestors. With Double Lives, she told the stories of working mothers over the last 150 years. Her next book focuses on the transition out of work: how retirement is a surprisingly new concept, and what it is evolving into.
Speak for yourself
Contemporary history is happening live. The interpretation of recent events is fluid – their meaning has not been set. What’s more, medieval subjects don’t talk back, or contradict what historians say. But when we have a record of someone’s first-hand experience, it adds a special spice to the historian’s recipe.
When dealing with personal testimonies, historians have to be careful of context, motivations and limitations. Everyone is an unreliable narrator.
Still, Helen privileges personal accounts most of all. Her work amplifies voices that are not always heard in traditional history.
Helen with her two children, dressed in historical clothes for the These Four Walls exhibition. By Leonora Saunders.
Helen with her two children, dressed in historical clothes for the These Four Walls exhibition. By Leonora Saunders.
One source Helen loves is the Mass Observation archive, based at the University of Sussex. This life-writing project commissions testimonies from the general public, who provide their thoughts on everything from the price of bread to the post office. Contributors can come from any walk of life or background.
“Reading their responses to my questions on retirement was like sitting down for a cup of tea with 200 people. I want to know everybody’s story.
“You think you understand a historical process, but then you’re confronted with people who lived through it. You realise that people’s lives never neatly track wider change. They are full of surprises and counter-narratives.”
Using this archive, Helen observes anonymous writers over time, to see how their opinions evolve.
“You hear people talk of their retirement plans in the 80s, then skip forward a few years to see if they make it. You see unexpected events throwing people off course, and how they react in the moment.”
If we travel only a little further back in time, sources like these dry up – especially for certain segments of the population.
In Double Lives, Helen charted the history of working motherhood – its challenges, eccentricities and how public perceptions shifted towards these women. What was seen by Victorian Britain as “a symbol of domestic and economic disorder”, has become “a social norm rooted in a more expansive set of needs, rights and preferences felt and asserted by mothers.”
Even in the early days of working motherhood, Helen found those who bucked the wider narrative. General consensus had mothers only working if they needed to, or if their husband failed to provide for them. But some women worked because they enjoyed it, finding value in the work or the camaraderie of colleagues.
Others saw working as a step toward independence and liberation, as suggested by one working woman in 1909: “A shilling of your own is worth two that he gives you.”
Helen tracked down rare fragments where working women were allowed to speak for themselves. The context in these sources was nearly always oppressive.
Take the example from 1907, of a poor, uneducated woman in court, who “stands before an audience of aristocratic men in a lushly ornate committee room in Westminster, answering the questions they put before her. We hear her voice through the written record, but it is muffled by the glaring imbalances of power which determined who got to speak for themselves.”
Only in the late 20th century, after democratising forces cleared the way, do these voices grow more common in our archives. Helen is polling some of them for opinions on the topic of her next book – the concept of retirement since 1945. She wants to know how people transition out of work, and remake their lives after work ends.
'Lucy' from the These Four Walls exhibition, by Leonora Saunders.
'Lucy' from the These Four Walls exhibition, by Leonora Saunders.
Golden years
Many people see retirement as an opportunity to do things they’ve never had time for. Others struggle to shift away from work, having identified with it for so long. More dramatically, some see their health decline very soon after retirement hits.
In pre-industrial times, what it meant to be ‘at work’ was blurry. Most people had to toil constantly to survive, while privileged classes never worked. The waged economy as separate from social life didn’t exist until the 19th century. With this era came time discipline, clocking on, and a sudden separation between home and the workplace.
The social role of ‘pensioner’ wasn’t rolled out to all at the same time. The civil service and railway workers saw pensions introduced as early as the 1890s: partly as a way to encourage older workers to move on, and partly as an incentive for younger workers to stay. The basic state pension only started in 1948.
“Before the 1950s, a lot of people needed to keep working for as long as possible. If they gave up wage-earning, they only had savings to rely on. Or if they became destitute, the Poor Law.”
If this sounds eerily familiar, Helen is with you. While pensions improved for full-time workers between the 50s and the present, our society might be heading back to an earlier stage.
“The political economy of retirement is shifting. The majority of people retiring in the next 20 years will probably be secure, with their pensions reflecting a time of better economic conditions. It’s the people after that I’m more worried about.”
We may already be feeling the rumble of social change. The pension age in the UK is going up to 67, with discussions underway to see it raised over 70. In that reality, most ordinary people would have to keep working for much longer, and see shorter (if any) retirement.
“Expectations of younger generations might have to shift back to a time when you’d have to keep working for as long as possible.”
Do we want to return to this model of working life?
“In the middle of the 20th century, it was seen as social progress that people shouldn’t have to work into their 70s. Our country’s trade unions, the Labour party, welfare reformers, philanthropists and business leaders all agreed that a long working life should be consigned to the past.”
This debate is happening in real time. The women against state pension inequality (WASPI) group hit the headlines last year for campaigning against the government’s handling of the raised state pension age. Some women were not properly notified of the changes, losing out on years of a state pension they’d planned for.
After diving into personal testimonies from the WASPIs, Helen found familiar diversity in their stories. Married WASPIs tended to fare better, being able to rely on their partners to make up for the reduced pension, whereas single or widowed WASPIs found it harder to cope. Once more, the narrative is complicated by individual circumstances.
Another wave of the debate arrived in 2024’s vote on the University’s forced retirement policy, which academics chose to keep in place.
Helen noticed “arguments on intergenerational justice from both sides: in the rights of older people to keep their jobs, versus the need for older people to move on so that younger generations can have more opportunities.”
“There were also differences between fields. Scientists seemed to be more in favour of dropping the policy. To keep doing their work, they need lab funding, team members and the ability to apply for grants. Perhaps for humanities scholars, it’s easier to continue our passion post-retirement – we can keep going to archives and writing our books.”
Debates like these reveal different models of how we sustain our intellectual lives and identities into old age. The challenge of holding onto the things we value points to another frontline battle currently being waged in the study of history.
The future of history
How should we tell the story of COVID-19? How should we preserve the parts of our lives that play out on social media (by using AI to talk to dead loved ones, perhaps)?
One grounding method of making sense of the world comes from Helen’s teaching. She asks her undergraduates how they would write the history of their own lifetime. In taking this perspective, we can put our family dramas into a broader social context.
Helen takes students to the Churchill Archives Centre, where she sits on the Archives Committee. Here, the Centre preserves collections from individuals prominent in recent British history.
“The archivists there are fantastic. When I took my students on a tour in January, they were astonished to see Margaret Thatcher’s handbag.”
Like all modern archives, the staff at Churchill have to grapple with collections arriving in hybrid forms. How best to preserve content submitted on computer hard drives, and make it available to researchers?
When it comes to social media and the web, it’s a problem of too much and too little. These channels change too quickly to be captured, and much of the interesting data is held by tech companies, not libraries or collections.
“We can’t easily archive social media, for practical and ethical reasons. Despite giving the impression of being abundant and enduring, the digital archive is fragile.”
Symptomatically, ‘one of the worst cyber incidents in British history’ has left the British Library’s web archive inaccessible for the past year.
Exhibitions are another way of helping us frame recent history. Helen has supported several at the University Library, most recently in helping visitors see the broader significance of Spitting Image.
Elsewhere, Helen worked with photographer Leonora Saunders for These Four Walls, a project highlighting home-based workers through time. Helen and Leonora photographed modern home-workers in settings based on historical accounts, dressing them in the outfits and domestic settings of the day.
“Translating research into new forms, and finding ways to engage more people with history, is great fun.”
It is also a great service to society. In connecting us with the hopes and challenges of past generations, Helen gives us agency in the present. By engaging with social history, we can choose to listen to past voices or be in dialogue with their ideas – what is essential is to keep them from falling silent.
Double Lives is available now.
Helen’s book on retirement will be published by Penguin (Allen Lane).
Published on 24 March 2025.
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