The Button Box: Lifting The Lid on Women's Lives

The story of women in the twentieth century told through the clothes they wore and the buttons they collected.
     I loved the rattle and whoosh of my grandma's buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin.
     A wooden chest the size of a shoe box, inlaid with geometric patterns, holds Lynn Knight's button collection. A collection that has been passed down through generations of women. Three tiny pearl buttons from her mother's first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a chunky 60s era toggle from a favourite coat, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning. Each button tells a story.
     The Button Box traces the story of women at home and in work from pre-First World War domesticity, through the first clerical girls in silk blouses, to the delights of beading and glamour in the thirties to short skirts and sexual emancipation in the sixties.

LYNN KNIGHT is the author of the family memoir, Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue: The Story of an Accidental Family (Atlantic Books 2011) and the biography, Clarice Cliff (Bloomsbury, 2005). She has also edited two collections of short stories, Dangerous Calm: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor and The Secret Woman: Classics Women's Short Stories. She is a writer, editor and independent lecturer and teaches Literature by Women Writers at London’s City Lit. Lynn lives in London, England.