Penny Summerfield

Tess Cosslett

Celia Lury

Featuring essays by leading feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines, this key text explores the latest developments in autobiographical studies. The collection is structured around the inter-linked concepts of genre, inter-subjectivity and memory. Whilst exemplifying the very different levels of autobiographical activity going on in feminist studies, the contributions chart a movement from autobiography as genre to autobiography as cultural practice, and from the analysis of autobiographical texts to a preoccupation with autobiography as method.

Texts, Theories, Methods

Feminism and Autobiography

Alison Easton

These sections are linked by the concepts of women, power and resistance: each section investigates how women have been defined by dominant social structures, and how they have resisted such definitions, both within and outside those structures. In the process, a range of different feminist perspectives and methodologies are explored. Theory is introduced through the in-depth study of specific topics and themes.

An Introduction to Women's Studies

Women, Power, and Resistance

The effects of World War II on women's sense of themselves forms the basis of this exploration of the interaction between cultural representations of men and women in World War II, and women's own narratives of their wartime lives.

Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War

Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives

Gender Instabilities in the Two World Wars : an Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the University of Lancaster on 30 April 1997

'My Dress for an Army Uniform'

Corinna Peniston-Bird

Contesting home defence is a new history of the Home Guard, a novel national defence force of the Second World War composed of civilians who served as part-time soldiers: it questions accounts of the force and the war, which have seen them as symbols of national unity. It scrutinises the Home Guard’s reputation and explores whether this ‘people’s army’ was a site of social cohesion or of dissension by assessing the competing claims made for it at the time. It then examines the way it was represented during the war and has been since, notably in Dad’s Army, and discusses the memories of men and women who served in it. The book makes a significant and original contribution to debates concerning the British home front and introduces fresh ways of understanding the Second World War.

Men, women and the Home Guard in the Second World War

Contesting home defence

Tess Coslett

Feminism & Autobiography

Gail Braybon

'Out of the Cage' brings vividly to life the experiences of working women from all social groups in the two World Wars. Telling a fascinating story, the authors emphasise what the women themselves have had to say, in diaries, memoirs, letters and recorded interviews about the call up and their personal reactions to war.

Women's Experiences in Two World Wars

Out of the Cage

Originally published in 1987, Out of the Cage brings vividly to life the experiences of working women from all social groups in the two World Wars. Telling a fascinating story, the authors emphasise what the women themselves have had to say, in diaries, memoirs, letters and recorded interviews about the call up, their personal reactions to war, their feelings about pay and the company at work, the effects of war on their health, their relations with men and their home lives; they speak too about how demobilisation affected them, and how they spent the years between two World Wars.

Women, Power and Resistance is an accessible introductory book on Women's Studies. It is divided into interdisciplinary sections covering key aspects and major debates, centering on four main areas: The Social Organization of Gender Relations The Cultural Representation of Women Gender and Social Identity

EBOOK: Women, Power and Resistance

The Second World War is often seen as a period of emancipation, because of the influx of women into paid work, and because the state took steps to relieve women of domestic work. This study challenges such a picture. The state approached the removal of women from the domestic sphere with extreme caution, in spite of the desperate need for women’s labour in war work. Women’s own preferences were frequently neglected or distorted in the search for a compromise between production and patriarchy. However, the enduring practices of paying women less and treating them as an inferior category of workers led to growth in the numbers and proportions of women employed after the war in many areas of work. Penny Summerfield concludes that the war accelerated the segregation of women in 'inferior' sectors of work, and inflated the expectation that working women would bear the double burden without a redistribution of responsibility for the domestic sphere between men, women and the state. First published in 1984, this is an important book for students of history, sociology and women’s studies at all levels.

Penny Summerfield

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