Feeling, women and work in the long 1950s

The emotional and occupational cultures of Britain underwent significant shifts during the long 1950s. This article explores the intersection between the two, using a range of social survey material – including Mass Observation sources - to explore feelings about paid work, the impact of paid employment on emotional well-being, and the management of feelings in the workplace. It article suggests that women workers were consistently constructed as both inherently emotional, and therefore unsuited for the higher occupational ranks, and as talented emotional workers able to perform unremunerated emotional labour. Whilst paid employment has often been presented as the antidote to domestic discontent, experiential evidence suggests that it also often involved the migration of private emotion work into the public domain.