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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Christina Foyle and Eva Reckitt, “formidable” women booksellers and political agents in 20th century Britain

Elen Cocaign

Résumé

When he wrote his memoirs in the 1950s, British publisher Fredric Warburg titled them An Occupation for Gentlemen. Indeed, for a long time, the book trade was a middle-class “boys’ club” that revolved around intense masculine sociability from which women were excluded, sometimes explicitly – for instance, they were barred from joining the Society of Bookmen, a key trade organisation, until 1972. While more and more women did enter this work field during and after the Second World War, they usually remained confined to minor roles until quite late in the century. Christina Foyle (1911-1997), owner of Foyle’s, the “largest bookshop in the world”, from the 1940s to her death, and creator of the Right Book Club and Eva Collet Reckitt (1890-1976), who founded and ran Collet’s, a left-wing bookselling chain, from the 1930s to the 1970s were noticeable exceptions. Using archival evidence and interviews from the Book Trade Lives collection held at the British Library, this paper recounts and compares their personal and professional trajectories. Indeed, their accomplishments have tended to be overlooked by historians, including their achievements as political agents on opposite sides of the political spectrum. How did their gender come into play with their role as bookshop owners and politically engaged mediators? This paper argues that the strategies they devised relied on a complex navigation of gender norms and stereotypes that alienated and fascinated their contemporaries, who labelled them “formidable women”.

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Dates et versions

hal-04380928 , version 1 (08-01-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04380928 , version 1

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Elen Cocaign. Christina Foyle and Eva Reckitt, “formidable” women booksellers and political agents in 20th century Britain. Social History Society Annual Conference 2023, Social History Society, Jul 2023, Colchester - Essex, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04380928⟩
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