Elite Hostesses as Disruptive Forces: The Country House Weekend in the Interwar Era: Power & Patriarchy Conference 2022 sponsored by Women's History Network and Bloomsbury Academic 

Recent scholarship on the role of the interwar country house has acknowledged the position of women as chatelaines and hostesses. Yet, this fails to consider wider research on the interwar era and how women made use of country houses to exert their influence and pursue their agendas. The interwar years present an exceptional opportunity for study, bookended by the two world wars, and thus possessing a comprehensible distinctiveness. Pugh has argued that there are few twenty-year periods of history that enjoy the same coherence.

In this paper, I address the rise of the country house weekend and argue that houses became extensions of London high society. Hostesses, with their monopoly over guest lists, acted as social engineers and thus set up some of the greatest friendships, animosities, and scandals of the era. The recent publication of Chips Channon’s unabridged interwar diaries gives a fresh view into country house society and his reminiscences will be drawn on as his unprecedented honesty provides an unrivalled viewpoint.

I go on to argue that women were crucial to disrupting the idyllic image of country houses. Nancy Astor’s frequent invitations to high powered figures in politics and the press came to comprise the members of the so-called Cliveden Set. The position of Thelma Furness, and later Wallis Simpson, as hostess at Fort Belvedere sparked the Abdication Crisis. The events at these houses would disrupt society and it is essential to note that the influence of élite women was at the heart of this.