Making sense of what families leave behind: a middle-class schoolgirl’s diaries in 1920s London

Abstract

The article is based on original, contemporaneous data in the form of personal diaries from the perspective of a middle-class secondary schoolgirl living in North London in the 1920s. It first considers the use of personal diaries in social science. The article’s particular contribution is to demonstrate the value of diaries to understanding everyday social practices in relation to family life, school and friends and to make sense of them through the intersecting lenses of gender, social class, time and place. The article’s overall argument is that a focus on a particular case enables the researcher to set everyday social practices within a particular social context.