Providing and Taking the Opportunity: Women Civil Servants and Feminist Periodical Culture in Interwar Britain

Abstract

Opportunity was the publication of the Federation of Women Civil Servants (later the National Association of Women Civil Servants), an organisation which campaigned for equal pay, equal opportunity and an end to the marriage bar in the British civil service. Opportunity tried to negotiate two purposes: to place the organisation at the centre of interwar feminism and debates on women in public life, and to be a space of community and education for its membership. In the 1930s, Opportunity was increasingly at odds with a significant segment of membership which saw less of a need for the publication in its current format, and the chapter discusses the ways in which editors and writers negotiated these discussions. Eventually, it was the evacuation of women civil servants to various locations around the country during the Second World War, rising wartime costs, and shortages of resources, which ended the publication of Opportunity.