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What Women Want: Women’s Voices, Social Research, and the Mainstreaming of Feminism in Contemporary Britain
Sarah Crook 
Routledge Handbook of Contemporary British History
Swansea University Author:
Sarah Crook
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Abstract
‘What do women want?’ was the defining question of 1990s Britain. Answers were posited by figures as diverse as Conservative MP Edwina Curry, the Spice Girls, feminist campaigners, Labour policy-makers, and social researchers. It was a cultural preoccupation: Hollywood, the BBC, and novelists addres...
| Published in: | Routledge Handbook of Contemporary British History |
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| Published: |
Routledge
2026
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa71665 |
| Abstract: |
‘What do women want?’ was the defining question of 1990s Britain. Answers were posited by figures as diverse as Conservative MP Edwina Curry, the Spice Girls, feminist campaigners, Labour policy-makers, and social researchers. It was a cultural preoccupation: Hollywood, the BBC, and novelists addressed it. By the close of the decade, politics, too, had newly oriented itself around the female voter, who was seen to have the power to sway the decisive election of 1997. It was not so long ago, however, that women’s desires were widely assumed rather than critically examined. From the 1950s onwards social research –and later feminist activism in the 1970s – fundamentally challenged the idea that women’s needs were being met, unsettling the idea that women’s dreams and desires rested solely within the confines of the home. This chapter considers how the question came to pre-eminence at the end of the century, examining the ways that its circulation through society reflects the mainstreaming of feminist ideas, and uses a range of material – from feminist to anti-feminist, from social surveys and poll materials – to establish what women did want in the nineties, and to reflect upon what the act of wanting – as opposed to demanding – tells historians about women’s desires, hopes, dreams, and about the place of activism as the twentieth century drew to a close. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |