The millennium has sharpened perspectives on the history of women in twentieth-century Britain. Many features of the contemporary gender order date only from the last decades of the century - the expectation of equal opportunities in education and the work-place, sexual autonomy for the individual and tolerance of a variety of family forms. The years dominated by the two World Wars saw real advances towards equal citizenship and legal rights, and a growing sense of the impact on women of 'modernity' in its various forms, including consumerism and the mass media. But values inherited from the...