From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives, featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians. Speaking about her upcoming book on disability in Britain, Professor Lucy Delap will talk about the barriers to employment that have often faced women with disabilities. In particular we’ll be discussing a number of women who responded to job market discrimination by setting up businesses, working for themselves and becoming entrepreneurs.Dr Amy EdwardsAmy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s. Professor Lucy Delap Today we’re joined by Lucy Delap who is a professor at Cambridge University, where she researches the history of feminisms, spanning Britain, the United States and the British empire. In 2020 she published Feminisms: A Global History which expanded her scope even further. She’s been involved in a number of oral history projects too, helping to produce the The Business of Women’s Words collections at the British Library, which is all about the feminist publishing industry. She also has lots of experience in working with policy makers, to help use what we know about the past to help inform practice in the present. Perhaps most relevant for today, however, is Lucy’s current project on the history of employment and labour for disabled people in twentieth century Britain. See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice