Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900–55. By Helen Glew (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016) 265 pp. $105.00

November 9, 2015, marked Britain’s “Equal Pay Day”—the day by which men’s average year-to-date earnings equaled those earned by women in a full calendar year. The persistence of a “gender pay gap” in British (and international) society means that British women, on average, earn 81 pence for every pound earned by men. Prejudice in promotion and hiring, inadequate family-leave policies, and other hidden barriers continue to keep wages down for today’s women workers, but working women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced even more explicit and invidious discrimination. Glew documents the history of this discrimination in the British civil service and in the London Council Council (lcc) in the years before the government’s decision to begin the gradual process of establishing equal pay for equal work in the civil service. Glew traces the history of women in government employ from the 1870s, when women first...