Women and the wireless: British women’s developing roles and representations in the interwar electronics industry

Born out of wartime developments, Britain’s new electronics industry emerged in the interwar period as a successful and growing part of a then fragile national economy. The electronics industry was indeed one of few big growth areas in the British interwar economy, one which facilitated the sector taking on thousands of new female employees at a time when other sectors, such as telephone exchanges, had begun to mechanise and thus eliminate women’s employment. This growth facilitated the mass production of wireless sets, and their essential internal components such as electronic amplifying valves, that contributed to a developing consumer culture in Britain. In turn, the development of the electronics industry brought about a variety of complicated evolutions in the roles of women and the gendered representations of them in relation to both waged work and their consumption of, and relationship to, new technologies. I argue that within the newly-developed electronics industry it was in the years of peace between the two world wars that longer-lasting changes truly took hold regarding not only the cultural perceptions of women but also in the material conditions in which they lived and worked. In this thesis I analyse three major roles women had in the interwar electronics industry: as workers manufacturing wireless technology, as the public face of the electronics companies demonstrating the technology and finally as consumers of wireless radio sets. However, I argue that alongside these changes to women’s lives in relation to the electronics industry, more traditional representations of gender were still upheld even when these notions contradicted and challenged the economic, gender and social realities of the interwar years. The originality of this thesis stems from its focus on the lived realities and representations of women as manufacturers, demonstrators, and consumers of electronics. This phenomenon has hitherto received little direct scholarly attention, merely being mentioned in relation to women and interwar work as a whole. In this study I adopt a cultural history framework with a focus on visual culture to facilitate an analysis on representations using relevant visual sources as evidence in conjunction with statistics and textual sources, for my analysis. Such an approach has not previously been undertaken in relation to this specific area of study to any significant degree.