Background

Selina Todd was born and grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom.

Education

Selina was educated at Heaton Manor Comprehensive School and the Universities of Warwick and Sussex.

Career

Selina Todd is currently a professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the history of the working-class, women and feminism in modern Britain. Her first book, Young Women, Work, and Family in England, 1918-1950, is about young working-class women’s lives at a time of enormous social upheaval.

Todd's second book, The People: the Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010, was published by John Murray in 2014 and was a Sunday Times bestseller. Based on the voices of working-class people themselves, it charted the history of ordinary workers, housewives, children and pensioners over the turbulent twentieth century. The history she writes is one of anger and defiance, but ultimately of hope for a better future - one that we can build by knowing more about our past. Her most recent book, Tastes of Honey, a biography of playwright Shelagh Delaney, was published by Chatto and Windus in August 2019. It reflects on the importance of working-class women to the development of feminism.

Achievements

• Selina Todd is a prolific writer. Her best-known work is Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918-1950, which won the Women's History Network Annual Book Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918-1950

    (This fascinating account of young women's lives challenge...)

    2005
  • Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution

    (Written by a nineteen-year-old bus driver’s daughter from...)

    2019
  • The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010

    (In 1910 three-quarters of the population were working cla...)

    2014

Views

Selina is a gender-critical feminist which means that she believes that sex and gender are different and that boys and girls should be able to do exactly what they want to do and do not have an innate gendered identity, based on her historical research which shows that as expectations of boys’ and girls’ behaviours change, so do their actions and ambitions. Her research leads her to believe that women are and have been treated as different and inferior to men on the basis of their biological sex and potential and actual role as mothers. As such, sex needs to be taken very seriously in understanding the discrimination women face. Todd also believes in the right to evidence-based debate about women’s rights.

Membership

Todd is the President of the Socialist Educational Association.