Career Girls - Women at Work in Compact and The Rag Trade

Television representations of the British postwar working woman have been afforded little consideration in British historical television scholarship. In its exploration of two early 1960s female ensemble television series set in the workplace, Compact (1962-65) and The Rag Trade (1961-3), this article makes a significant feminist intervention in the reinstatement of this neglected figure into extant critical television histories. It also demonstrates that implicit media discourses around women balancing work and home life customarily situated in the latter part of the 20th century were already in circulation in the early 1960s.