Women, Sexuality and War This Page Intentionally Left Blank Women, Sexuality and War

Women, Sexuality and War This page intentionally left blank Women, Sexuality and War

Philomena Goodman © Philomena Goodman 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-76086-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-349-41412-3 ISBN 978-1-4039-1413-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403914132 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goodman, Philomena, 1957– Women, sexuality, and war / Philomena Goodman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-349-41412-3 1. World War, 1939–1945—Women—Great Britain. 2. Sex role—Great Britain—History—20th century. D810.W7 G64 2001 305.42’0941—dc21 2001044717

109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 To my grandmother and mother, women who lived through the experience of the Second World War This page intentionally left blank Contents

Acknowledgements ix Foreword xi

Introduction 1 Using women's stories: narratives from oral history 5 The research process: finding women's voices 8 The research process: in the archives 10

1 For the Duration: Place, Space and Gender 15 Constructing patriotic femininity 15 Space, place and gender 18 State regulation of everyday life ± in loco parentis 20 Containing dangerous sexualities 22 Maintaining gendered places/spaces 25

2 Domestication of Industrial Employment 29 Women's pre-war patterns of employment 29 Early wartime employment policies and practices 31 Compulsion of woman-power: the debate and the policy 37 Women's experience of war work 45

3Women on the Factory Floor 53 Woman-power and employers' interests 53 Trade unions and woman-power 58 Woman-power and the sexual double standard 65 A process of containment 71

4 Women in the Services: Morals or Morale? 75 Woman-power and military spaces 75 Woman-power as auxiliary 82 Women on the front line 87 War, morality and femininity 90 Morals and morale 96

vii viii Contents

5 Patriotic Femininity on the Home Front 101 Women on the home front 101 Women in male spaces 104 Women in the male gaze: the pin-up 110 Advertising and the beauty myth 114 Romance, gallivanting and drifting 119

6 Sexuality in Wartime 127 Allies or occupiers? 127 Absent servicemen and compulsory billeting 137 Women's welfare 142 Venereal diseases and woman `the amateur' 147

7 War and Her-Stories ± A Different Kind of Heroism 157

Notes 165 Bibliography 171 Index 177 Acknowledgements

There are many people without whose help this book would not exist. My thanks are due above all to Jenny Ryan and Phil Mole whose support, advice and criticism have been invaluable. Jacq Goodman and Joan Unsworth gave support and encouragement, but I owe a special debt of gratitude to Julian Goodman. Joy Eldridge at the Mass Observation Archive, Mr Eddie Frow, Mrs Ruth Frow, Alain Kahan and Helen Bowyer at the Working Class Movement Library and Charlie Windmill from the Salford Quays Heritage project offered help and enthusiasm. I am indebted to the trustees of the Tom Harrisson Mass Observation Archive at The Uni- versity of Sussex for permission to use the Archive. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my debt to the women who lived through the Second World War and who willingly and gener- ously shared their memories with me.

ix This page intentionally left blank Foreword

Virginia Woolf noted that `For though many instincts are held more or less in common by both sexes, to fight has always been the man's habit, not the woman's' (Woolf 1977, p. 9). Philomena Goodman, however, reminds us that this is not the whole story. For while nearly all the public stories of war are the stories of men and their deeds and sufferings, the private reality involves women in all kinds of, often complex and contradictory, ways. This has become increasingly the case as we move into the total wars which characterised the twentieth century. Using a combination of oral histories, archival research and published material, Philomena Goodman explores the gendered complexities beneath the public rhetorics that accompanied, and continue to accompany, the so-called `People's War' of 1939±45. Whether we are talking about women being recruited to the war effort as members of the services or as workers on the land or in the factories, or whether we are talking about some of the new sexual freedoms that seemed to accompany the large-scale mobilisation of the population, such a major upheaval of everyday social life could not fail to impact upon traditional notions of femininity and masculinity. The problem, in numerous private spheres as well as in the public sphere, was to ensure, as far as possible, that the traditional gender order should not be disturbed. In this fascinating analysis, Philomena Goodman explores two mechanisms by which attempts were made to bring about these goals. The idea of `patriotic femininity' sought to marry the various ways in which women were mobilised into the war effort without undermining widespread understand- ings of the differences between women and men and the central value of heterosexuality. The idea of `for the duration' attempted to present the argument that any relaxation of existing standards of gendered conduct was a consequence of highly exceptional circum- stances and could not be expected to last beyond the conclusion of hostilities. Numerous themes, some well-known and some less familiar, are woven around these two core ideas. There are the boundaries be-

xi xii Foreword tween the public and the private, boundaries which are never fixed but which become even more fluid and complex in time of war. There is the notion of `gendered space' and the way in which this too becomes challenged and defended. There is the familiar double standard which becomes both more exaggerated in time of war when many men are away from their homes and families but also becomes challenged as women enter hitherto unfamiliar spaces whether these be the armed services or local pubs. The story of gender in time of war is rarely a straightforward one and the author is constantly alive to the complexities and contradictions in women's experiences of modern war. She writes: `In the discourses of war, images and notions of masculinity and femininity were constructed, mobilised and stretched where necessary to protect gender differences'. Part of the complexity, as Goodman reminds us, arises out of the fact that women are not an undifferentiated mass but have class (and other) identities as well as gender identities. Although, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, many of the issues associated with the Second World War seem to be increasingly remote from our current concerns, the interest of this study is not purely historical. In the debates about women (and gays and lesbians) in the armed services, we often hear strong echoes of the concerns which animated people in Britain during this period of conflict. And issues about gendered space and the drawing of lines between the public and the private are still matters of lively concern in debates about, say, the development of `family-friendly' working practices or attempts to reform the routines or assumptions of insti- tutions such as the House of Commons or the Church of England. Perhaps most important, as this study clearly demonstrates, it is important to continue to listen to the people most involved in and affected by the processes of change, that is the women (and the men) themselves.

David H. J. Morgan Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester