Visible Histories

Book excerpt: While there has been growing interest in assimilating women's experience into the social record of human history, relatively few studies have examined the environments women have built and changed in creating history. Through an examination of the process of environmental change as an important part of gender relations and socio-economic activity, Suzanne Mackenzie shows how the environmental activity of women both increased the visibility of their historical creativity and altered existing environments in the resort city of Brighton, England. She documents the multitude of ways in which women changed not only themselves but also the city in which they lived during the decades between the end of the Second World War and the early 1980s.