The Button Box cover art

The Button Box

Lifting the Lid on Women's Lives

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About this listen

I used to love the rattle and whoosh of my grandma’s buttons as they scattered from their Quality Street tin.

An inlaid wooden chest the size of a shoe box holds Lynn Knight’s button collection. A collection that has been passed down through three generations of women: a chunky sixties-era toggle from a favourite coat, three tiny pearl buttons from her mother’s first dress after she was adopted as a baby, a jet button from a time of Victorian mourning. Each button tells a story.

‘They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us’ said Virginia Woolf of clothes. 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 liberation in the sixties.

 Art Gender Studies Historical Social Sciences Women

Critic reviews

A charming work of social history
Knight explores her own family’s history and, in parallel, the intimate history of women in the 20th century… The politics of being a modern woman are revealed through changing fashions… In Knight’s hands, buttons – the humblest of everyday objects – become portals into the past, charting our progress along that road. (Lucy Moore)
Charming book… Knight’s brilliant notion is to use the button box she inherited from her grandmother as a way of delving into the fabric, literal and metaphorical, of the women who wore them… A patchwork of memory, anecdote and deft quotation. (Daisy Goodwin)
Inspired by her own shimmering box of toggles, clasps and buckles, Knight takes us on an ingenious tour of domestic and social history over the last century… From this core of very personal material, Knight writes more generally of ordinary women’s lives and changing prospects over three generations, of clothes as self-expression, as defiance, as entertainment, as evidence of frugality and frivolity all rolled into one. (Claire Harman)
The drama of women’s lives from the 19th to the mid-20th century was hidden in plain sight among the brightly coloured buttons that rattled so enticingly in [Knight’s] grandmother’s Quality Street tin… Fascinating social history. (Jane Shilling)
An unusual and irresistibly delightful account of more than a century’s worth of women’s lives… This is a book to make you smile, a story luminous with nostalgia… Delicious gem of a book. (Juliet Nicolson)
[Knight] quotes like a dream, cherry-picking bon mots from sources far, wide and delightful... There are plenty of curious and quirky details. (Shahidha Bari)
A sweeping look at how women’s clothing has developed as our place in society has evolved… A delight. (Shirley Whiteside)
Broader social history is approached through the rich, vivid stories… These buttons…tell an intimate story of changing times. (Louise Carpenter)
Each trinket of the past comes to life, giving a nice nostalgic and informative look into the history of fashion, the Great War and even a few comical anecdotes on sex and relationships. (Phil Robinson)
All stars
Most relevant
Well read with an appropriate voice, but the writing & content aren't what I hoped for. It mixes women's social history with the author's personal family stories which is engaging in places... but unfortunately it quite often verges into a detailed list of "clothes I have owned, with information about where and when I brought them." These bits are still in the extreme, akin to listening to a stranger's shopping list. a good editor might have saved it, but alas!

A patchwork of pieces, some better than others

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As a Seamstress myself, whom also played with my grandmothers button tin & my mothers, & weighing them out on my tiny postoffice scales, or transporting them in the trucks of my brothers hornby trains, i absolutly loved this book.

Fabulous Read bringing back childhood Memories

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I shall be listening to this again it so much more than buttons. The history of women's lives across the generations is thought provoking, so much I'd not heard of but also reminders of things my mom and nan have told me. The outrageous expections that women through the years have had to put up with and yet much has not changed. Yes more women have top jobs but the idea of equality still has a long way to go.

Women's history

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I enjoyed this book. A historical count of women and fashion without being boring. The narrative takes you through the history of women who made and designed fashion and clothing. Taking you through the various decades.

A great book

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I absolutely loved this book and listened to every chapter three times. VERY much enjoyed how it spills over with memories of every woman’s childhood, and a richly told social history of women’s lives through the past couple of centuries.

A beautiful, entrancing gem of a book

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