‘We Have Never Employed Jewish People’: Young Jewish Women’s Experiences of Education and Employment in Glasgow from the 1920s to the 1950s

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the experience of education and employment of young Jewish women from the Gorbals district of Glasgow from the 1920s to the 1950s through the use of oral testimony. Its central concern is to highlight the particularity of the experience of this group of young women and bring out the significance of specific cultural pressures and anti-Semitism in their lives with a focus on the period when their formal education ended and they entered paid employment. The concept of ‘gendered ethclass trajectories of social mobility’ has been coined to denote this difference in experience.