Research
I have published on various aspects of the social history of the Second World War. My most recent research monograph is Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War, Manchester University Press, 1998. The book, based originally on ESRC-funded research, explores the interaction between cultural representations of men and women in the war and women’s narratives of their wartime lives. It argues that there is a tension in popular culture between two wartime feminine identities, that of the woman who contributed heroically to the war effort in a man’s job, and that of the woman far from combat, who stoically endured the pressures and privations of war. Women’s own narratives take up these cultural constructions, sometimes deploying them as a means to express their own experiences, sometimes moving between them and sometimes rejecting them.
Reconstructing opens with a chapter on ‘Gender, Memory and the Second World War’ which discusses recent developments in the theory and method of oral history, drawing particularly on popular memory theory and feminist oral history. The relationship between personal testimony and history continues to be a major interest. I have published an edited collection entitled Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, Routledge, 2000 With Tess Cosslett (Department of English, Lancaster University) and Celia Lury (Department of Sociology, Goldsmith’s College, London). It addresses autobiographical forms of many sorts, from published autobiographies, oral histories and other accounts of the self (like personal web pages!) on the one hand, to more externally enforced forms of autobiography, like the C.V. or medical interview on the other. It discusses them as genres, and in relation to intersubjectivity and memory. In addition to a jointly written introduction which sets out the centrality of autobiography to feminism historically, my particular contribution is a chapter called ‘Dis/composing the subject: intersubjectivities in oral history’.
Ongoing research
My ongoing research and writing relates to two projects, on home defence and on conscientious objection in Britain in the Second World War.
In August 00 I completed a Leverhulme-funded research project on the Gendering of Home Defence in Britain in the Second World War, working with Dr Corinna Peniston-Bird at Lancaster University.
This project explores wartime home defence in three ways. Firstly it traces the conceptualisation of the Home Guard in political discourse, in particular the roles permitted to men and women within it. Women’s limited involvement in the Home guard was the product of a lengthy campaign challenging gendered notions of wartime citizenship and including the formation of an independent armed force, Women’s Home Defence. Secondly the project examines cultural representations of home defence during and after the war, in wartime popular fiction, film, cartoons etc as well as in later renderings like the television series Dad’s Army (1968-1977). Thirdly we analyse women and men’s personal accounts of their experiences in home defence collected through oral history interviewing. In particular our analysis is alert to the problem for men of recalling membership of an organisation which was neither wholly military nor wholly civilian, with unsettling effects on the representation of masculinity within it. The analysis also addresses the problem for women of constructing an account of home defence experiences when women and home defence are represented as mutually exclusive in popular culture. A book based on the project is planned, provisionally entitled Contesting Home Defence: men, women and the Home Guard in Britain in the Second World War.
Other research includes a recently-completed pilot project undertaken with British Academy funding, on ‘The Culture of Conscientious Objection in Britain 1939-45’ (working with Rena Feld of Sussex University). This also uses oral histories, both those undertaken with women Conscientious Objectors by Ms Feld, and a selection of the large collection of interviews with male C.Os. in the Imperial War Museum. Provisional findings are that while the formation of pacifist beliefs and commitment to objection was not markedly gendered, the treatment of men and women C.Os by the authorities and in the community was very different.