The century girls - Tessa Dunlop

A celebration of the one-hundred years since British women got the vote, told, in their own voices, by six centenarians: Helena, Olive, Edna, Joyce, Ann and Phyllis - The Century Girls?

In 2018 Britain will celebrate the centenary of women getting the vote; during the intervening ten decades the lives of women in this country have been transformed. Told in their own voices, The Century Girls celebrates six centenarians who lived that change: what they saw, how they were treated, who they loved, what they did and where they are now. With stories that are intimately knitted into the history of these islands, The Century Girlsis a time-travel adventure featuring society's oldest, most precious national treasures.

In 1918 the Suffragettes famously blazed the trail for women, this book reveals what came next for girls growing up in twentieth century Great Britain, whether they resided in Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland; whether they were housewives, or in the workplace; and describing their surroundings of the city, the countryside, or coming to the British Isles from the one of the Commonwealth countries. The narrative will travel through the experiences of some key figures who are now themselves well over a hundred years old: Joyce from Cambridge; Ann from Richmond; Edna from Wroughton; Olive from Archway, London; Phyllis from Edinburgh; and finally, Helena from Brecon. Through the prism of their own experiences and memories, it will tell the human story of how women gradually began to build independent lives for themselves in the modern world of post-Great War Britain, by re-telling what their actual day-to-day reality was like, through the decades.