Dr Eve Worth (she/her)

I am a social and women’s historian of Britain since 1945. My first book The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 was published by Bloomsbury in their New Directions in Social and Cultural History series in 2022. The book uses an original life history methodology, and, by centring women’s experience, it reorients our understanding of major themes in recent history: including an updated periodisation of welfare state development; a new metanarrative of work and its relationship to feminism, and a reconceptualization of the causes of social mobility in post-war Britain.

Social mobility is a significant strand of my research and my work on this theme is part of the revival of social mobility as a valuable topic of historical study. In 2019, I co-edited a special issue of Cultural and Social History entitled ‘Rags to Riches? New Histories of Social Mobility in Modern Britain’. I have published an article on women’s social mobility in Twentieth Century British History which emerged from a small Wellcome Trust exploratory grant. My approach to social mobility challenges ideas of individual aspiration and instead shifts the focus to structural inequalities. I am in the early stages of a new project which aims to explore the influence of the financialisation and globalisation of the economy from the late twentieth century onwards on women's experience of the life course, ageing and mobility. 

My research is interdisciplinary, and I have collaborated with sociologists, anthropologists and social policy scholars. Prior to joining Exeter, I brought the historical and gendered perspective to an interdisciplinary team working on the major ERC funded project ‘Changing Elites in Britain since 1850’ in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, Oxford. Mixed methods research from the women’s elite schooling aspect of this project has recently appeared in The British Journal of the Sociology of Education, Contemporary British History and Gender & History, and was featured in national newspapers including The Times and The Daily Telegraph. My research in this area has recently won the prize for Paper of the Year 2023 for the British Journal of Sociology of Education. 

Biography:

I am a Lecturer in Modern British History and I also teach on the Liberal Arts core modules Being Human in the Modern World and Think Tank. Prior to joining the University of Exeter in September 2022, I held two postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Oxford. From 2017 to 2020 I was the inaugural Jenny Wormald JRF in Women’s History at St Hilda’s College, and from 2020 to 2022 I was a fellow in the History of Elites at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention. I have a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I am the History Admissions Officer for the Department of Archaeology and History.