Women, Mobility, and Education in Twentieth-century England and Wales: A New Analytical Approach

The twentieth century saw substantial changes in the educational and occupational opportunities available to women in Britain. These may have been supposed to foster new patterns of female mobility. Yet studies of women’s intergenerational mobility are rare and tend not to focus on education. This article develops a historically informed gauge of educational attainment—the Educational Cohort Code (ECC). Applying that gauge to the experiences of women in twentieth-century UK, we make two key claims: first, that despite the prevalence of narratives of progress and mobility in individual and collective accounts of women’s education, there were considerable intergenerational continuities in women’s educational status across the period. Second, that the expansion of educational opportunities across the twentieth century had a differential impact for women and for men and that this differentiation destabilizes categorizations of class solely based on male occupational hierarchies. By applying the ECC method to family data, rather than focusing only on individuals, the article identifies trends within families and the possible influence of family cultures of education and employment on intergenerational mobility.