all-island
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSF1
Category=JHBS
Category=NHTB
cinema
dancing
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fashion
Flappers
forthcoming
gender
intersectionality
interwar
Irish Countrywomen's Association
jazz
jazz age
leisure
lived experiences
magazines
material culture
modern girls
modernity
nation-building
New Woman: Women's Institutes
post-partition Ireland
recreation
space
student entertainment
swimming
women's agency
Product details
- ISBN 9781526181794
- Weight: 479g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book foregrounds the everyday lives and leisure practices of people in 1920s–30s Ireland, an area often overlooked in existing scholarship. It examines how identity, recreation, and culture took shape both North and South of the border, with particular attention to women’s lived experiences. Although leisure activities were frequently overshadowed by religious influence and post-partition nation-building projects, many alternative spaces flourished. People danced, sang, listened to music, shopped, embraced glamour, read magazines, swam, travelled, and went to the cinema, participating in trends that connected Ireland to wider international cultures. The book explores these activities through a feminist lens and an intersectional analysis of gender, class, religion, and rural–urban identities. Bringing together perspectives from cultural studies, architecture, geography, fashion, and musicology, it offers new insights and advances understanding of this under-researched dimension of Irish social and cultural history.
Eileen Hogan is Lecturer in Social Policy at the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland.
Louise Ryan is Senior Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University.
